The Praying Woman 
Personal motivation is key to maintaining almost all aspects of life. If we’re not motivated, we’re more likely to squander our time and neglect our personal and professional goals. Even the most determined people can lose steam sometimes.
In life, there may be times when negativity seems to surround you, suffocating your dreams and destroying your hope. When that happens, many go through their day being saturated with negativity and accepting it as a way of life.
While you can’t always control what happens to you, you can control how you respond to it. Seek to create a positive environment for yourself and you’ll begin to become more motivated to achieve your dreams and goals.
Here are 5 ways to stay motivated through hard times:
Pray
When faced with a difficult moment in your life, you need prayers for motivation and strength to see you through your hard times.
The Bible contains hundreds of verses that provide encouragement, motivation and positive reinforcement to lift you up and help you make it through adversity.
Plan Ahead
Keep a Journal. There is a very popular saying: “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” When you take time to plan, you allow yourself to think through the entire process from beginning to end.
This can spark ideas, improve productivity and ensure a great outcome. Once you have a written agenda, you are immediately going to be motivated to accomplish it. Without one, you have nothing to run with and end up feeling stuck.
Write out your to-do list. Identify the three most important things that you must accomplish in order to get closer to achieving your goal and start with those first.
Create a Vision Board. Use the board to pin your goals, things that make you happy, Places you would like to go, or affirmations that you can say daily and put it up somewhere that you are sure to see it every day.
Eliminate Your Distractions
One of the fundamental principles of productivity is that in order to get things done, you gotta focus.
And that necessary focus requires that you eliminate as many distractions as possible — not always an easy task with the Internet, coworkers and busy phones calling to you from every direction.
Identify anything that’s causing you to procrastinate. Then, get rid of it. You can’t become motivated if you’re squandering all of your time.
Track Your Progress
Everyone needs to see how they are keeping up with their goals if they want to stay motivated. If you see that you are on track or even excelling every time you check your progress, you will be motivated and happy that you are getting there. If you see that you are lagging on your goals, it may be the kick start you need to help get you back on track.
Everything you may be working on can be easily split into smaller parts and stages. For most goals, it is quite natural to split the process of accomplishing them into smaller tasks and milestones. There are a few reasons behind doing this, and one of them is tracking your progress.
Appreciate Your Accomplishments
We live in such a competitive society that we forget to stop and appreciate what we’ve already accomplished. Allow yourself to bask in the glow of your success. Even if no one else thinks you are successful.
Don’t be too hard on yourself. Everyone falls short sometimes. If you fail to meet your goal for the week, don’t get too emotional. Let yourself take it as a lesson. It’s not always how hard you hit, but how hard you can get hit and keep moving.
Keep in mind that motivation starts with a positive mindset. You can’t win the battle if you don’t believe in what you’re fighting for. Don’t allow yourself to become so emotionally entangled that it paralyzes your progress.
Things may not always work out perfectly, but the sooner you accept them, the quicker you can move beyond them… and remember you’re in it to win It!
