Five Simple Ideas From Bestselling Books to Keep You Happier and More Motivated

Are you looking for some fresh (and refreshed) ideas to maintain your motivation and happiness? Are you overwhelmed with the dozens of bestsellers filled with advice on how to improve your life? Who has time to read all these books, especially when this week’s book is telling you to do the exact opposite of last week’s book? So to help you cut through the noise and save you some time, I compiled five simple ideas from bestselling books to make you happier and more motivated.

Please remember, while these five ideas are simple, following these ideas can be difficult. Happiness and motivation aren’t for the faint of heart. To become happier and more motivated, you’ll need to be consistent with your practice.

Alter Your Environment

The key to both happiness and motivation turns out to be your environment. Simply put a negative environment brings you down, a pleasant environment improves your mood, and a productive environment helps you get things done. If you want to improve your life, you need to change the people, places, and things around you.

For example, in Shawn Achor’s Big Potential, he says if you alter your environment to cut down media, you can improve your happiness. Research shows if you avoid all media — news, social media, and email — the hour after you wake up and the hour before you go to sleep your mood will be improved. Negative media can affect your mood for up to six to eight hours after viewing. Even good media can disturb your sleep for up to an hour — if you’re looking at a screen that’s emitting blue light.

Change Your Mind

Sometimes your own beliefs hold you back. Stanford Psychologist Carol Dweck revealed in her book Mindsets, we all have two mindsets: growth and fixed. Fixed mindsets are our limiting beliefs. When we express a fixed mindset we believe our talents, abilities, and even our happiness is fixed and can’t be changed. That is, you’re as intelligent, happy, or skilled as you’ll ever be.

On the other hand, we also have growth mindsets in which we believe we can change anything with effort, learning, and help. That is, you can become smarter, happier, or more skilled with effort and practice.

We all express both mindsets at one time or another. The key is to identify when you’re expressing fixed mindset thoughts and nudge yourself gently back to a growth mindset.

If you find yourself muttering things like, “I will never change” or “I suck at X, Y, or Z,” ask yourself these questions. How can I become better? What do I need to do to become better? Who can help me become better? The answers will ease you back to a growth mindset.

Use the 5-Second Rule

Sometimes it’s hard to improve because our fear gets in the way. That’s where bestselling author and TED talker Mel Robbins comes along. In her book, the 5-Second Rule, she showed how you can use a metacognitive trick to break out of thoughts that are holding you back.

When you feel yourself expressing the same old routine thoughts — I want to drink scotch, I must have that cookie, or I’m afraid to ask that person out–count down from five. Go five, four, three, two, one, and take a new action. By starting in a new direction, any direction, your body will take over where your thoughts previously put a blockade up.

The countdown breaks your train of thought so you can bring in new thoughts and get started on a different path. Robbins used this device to get herself out of bed when she was depressed and it’s helped thousands of others to improve their lives.

Practice this whenever you find yourself slipping back into your old comfortable patterns or feel afraid to do something.

Choose identity-based habits

If you want to have lasting change, you need to create identity-based habits. Outcome-based habits, such as “I want to lose five pounds,” or “I want to pay off my credit card debt” end when the goal is reached. Then all the exercise and saving habits you developed disappear, the pounds come back, and you need to pay off your credit cards again. This is why James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, suggests you choose identity-based habits.

Instead of making an outcome-based goal, such as I want to pay off my credit card debt, choose an identity-based goal, like I want to be a thrifty person. Once you have a new identity as a thrifty person, it’s easier to practice the habits of what a thrifty person would do. For example, a thrifty person would track spending, use coupons, and save for big-ticket items.

The result will be the same, no credit card debt, but you also will have ingrained habits that will keep you out of credit card debt for a lifetime.

Find an accountability partner

Accountability is key to maintaining your motivation. It’s hard to fail in front of people. That’s why so many people never try. But being watched is also an incentive to stay on track.

In Triggers, Marshall Goldsmith proposes you use a rating system for your effort and find a partner to keep yourself accountable.

Rate your effort by asking questions like, “Did I do my best to eat well today?” Or “Did I do my best to manage my money today?” and give your effort a score between 1–10? Give a high number if you feel you are doing a lot towards your goal, or a low number if you’ve done very little.

Then report your effort rating each night to an accountability partner (a friend, colleague, or family member). Having to do it publicly and rating your effort will keep you on track — and show where you need to concentrate your efforts.

Kyle Crocco is known widely as the Content Marketing Coordinator at BigSpeak Speakers Bureau and the lead singer of Duh Professors. He regularly publishes on Medium, Business 2 Community, and Born 2 Invest.