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This is the Successful Archi Student’s Podcast, Episode Five.

Hey guys, what’s going on today, I really want to talk about how to gain persistent motivation. So how to become motivated and how to sustain that motivation because a lot of students always message me on Instagram. And they send me emails saying how they’ll be really fired up. And they’ll know why they want to study architecture, and they know they want to be an architect, but they just can’t stay consistently motivated to do well. And I’m going to run through what I do to overcome this. And whenever I feel down, or I don’t feel like doing my work, or I just want to procrastinate, I will think about these four steps that I have here that helped me stay persistently motivated.

If you find yourself lacking motivation, the first thing you need to do is have a definite purpose, backed by desire. That’s the first step. You need to know what you want. What do you actually want from studying architecture? Do you want to run your own firm in 10 years do you want to work for a firm that is lively, where you get to work on the projects you like and build something that really showcases your personality and gives you pleasure out of working with other people who are like you? You need to conjure up this idea of the future for yourself and backed up by desire to always remind yourself of what your purpose is and what your end game goal is. Because that will fuel this desire that will also fuel your persistency and motivation.

Once you have a definite purpose and a goal to strive for. You need to back it up with a definite plan as well. What are the exact steps you’re going to do to achieve this goal? You can reverse engineer this. You can start with the goal and then work backwards. So if you want to work in your own firm, in 10 years’ time, how are you going to be able to 1) fund that, 2) how are you going to have the skills for that and this might involve investing in real estate so you can build up enough equity to buy a business, buy the overhead costs and all that. It might also involve working in a firm for five years and completing your studies so that you’ve got the knowledge to be able to go out on your own and start your own projects. It might also take gaining the knowledge of how to run your own business. It might take years of practice and learning and training and staying up late reading, but you need to have a definite plan for being able to achieve your goals. Otherwise, they are just pipe dreams.

Once you’ve got a definite goal in mind, and you’ve got a definite plan to achieve it, what’s the other things that are stopping you? The third thing that I have for being persistently motivated is to close off your mind to any discouragement or negative people or thoughts. And this isn’t just ignoring the people who are telling you negative things and saying you can’t do it and always talking about how the past was so much better, rather than how the future is going to be amazing. You also need to close off your own mind from this discouragement and the thoughts that you tell yourself because a lot of the time we tell ourselves negative things and we might realize it, but we might say we can’t do this because of an alibi we’ve made for ourselves. We’ve made these excuses saying we can’t do this. Because “I was born into a poor family”, “we don’t have the right facilities at university for me to be able to do what I want when I’m older.” But again, it’s just that idea of what I was talking about in the first episodes, how you need to ask the question of how can you make it possible rather than saying you can’t make it possible, because then you’ve got a definite purpose and a goal that you want. You’ve got a definite plan for achieving it. And you’re not listening to anyone who’s discouraging you.

The fourth step I have for you is having an open mind to encouragement and aligning yourself with people who are positive and going to encourage you and push you to success and this comes back to reading your goals and your purpose and your plan every single night and creating this encouragement through affirmation. If you say to yourself, I’m going to be a successful architect over and over and over every single night. Guess what you’re going to wake up one day and you’re going to be a successful architect.

If you want to be persistently motivated, you need to know what you actually want out of studying architecture, you need to back it with a definite plan for achieving it. And you need to close off your mind from negative thoughts and other negative people who are going to drag you down. And lastly, you need to encourage yourself with positive thoughts and affirmations that will keep you going and remind yourself of why you’re doing what you’re doing. Because a lot of the time, we are going through university just to get our degree and once you get your degree, then there’s nothing after that, or we haven’t planned for what comes after that. We’ll get sucked into a job we don’t like or we’ll start something we don’t want to be doing because we haven’t consciously thought about why we’re doing it.

So that was just a quick video. I’ve got to head off to work. But I hope that was really helpful for you guys. It’s a four step process to stay persistently motivated and stop yourself from getting sucked into the idea of saying “ I’m not too sure if I’m cut out to do architecture you know I’m not sure if I’m built for this”, because you are. You listen to this video, you’re following Successful Archi Student and you’re going to be a Successful Archi Student if you keep going, just remind yourself of why you’re doing it and you’re going to do really well.

Thank you guys so much for listening and watching if you’re on YouTube, I hope you have a great day and I’ll see in the next episode of the Successful Archi Student’s Podcast.