First things first; the magic 4: Mental

Mental health and motivation is priority

If something is very important to keep you going, it is mental health! In this case, with mental health I mean general well-being, feeling good, and being motivated to reach your goals. It sound very obvious, but we are not always standing still by the fact that your well-being effects everything you do in life. For one moment, try to stand still what drives you in life. What makes you who you are, and what do you want to become in the future? What is your goal? When defining your goal, try to make your goal SMART: make it specific, make sure you can measure your progression, and specifically: make it realistic. Nothing is more demotivating that setting goals you will never be able to reach. In my case my goal is to participate in a body-fitness competition. Then the question remains how to complete the journey and reach the goal?

Start diggin'

This is my challenge. What is yours?

The first step is to find out what really motivates you to achieve your goals. Try to dig deep and reason solid, so that the reasons are very clear for you and you can fall back on these reasons during moments when you are less motivated. For example, if you goal is to loose weight there could be several reasons for this. The reason: 'because it is pretty', probably won't help to motivate you during hard times. Therefore you should try to find more deep motivators. For example, my reasons to participate in a fitness competition are to find out what my body is capable of and how disciplined I can work on myself. I am eager to find out the maximum results I can get with training and clean eating. My aim is to get as fit as possible in a natural way. I like to challenge myself. Find out what really motivates you. 

Motivators

Next to find internal motivation, there is so much motivation to find elsewhere. My main motivator is the mirror. I love te see changes in my body and the pay-off for all the hard work. Also, several persons around me can give me motivation to achieve my goal. Start sharing your goals with people around you and share updates about achievements helps a lot. Next to that, I personally get a lot of motivation from being in the gym and surround myself with people with similar goals. When looking around me and seeing how others are working and making process, I always try to learn and grow from them. Besides these motivators, I am always looking for new sources of information, motivation and inspiration on the Internet. I usually hit the 'follow' button for any FB sites or blogs that are interesting to follow for fitness of food related information. I try to get involved in online discussion about topics that interest me. Several of my fav's websites are FitnessRx for Women and Muscle and fitness. Also Youtube you can be overwhelmed with motivational video clips. This is one of my favourites: 

To sum up:

1. Set your goals
2. Start digging and find out your drivers of the goals
3. Find motivation inside yourself, and external motivators
4. Get it done, B*tch!