Are you feeling like you’ve not been performing your best lately? Maybe it’s getting harder to wake up in the morning and turn your laptop on. There’s a high chance that you’re losing your motivation.
Getting demotivation is not a rare occasion as the majority of employees face it at some point in their career. The reasons can vary from person to person as each employee’s journey is different. But sometimes it can get difficult to understand if you are just tired or there’s an actual decrease in your motivation.
Getting lost in the abundance of daily tasks, not having personal time enough or feeling unsure about your future can heavily reduce your motivation. Add the effort and time you spend on your job and you might even forget that you’re becoming demotivated.
There’s nothing wrong with that though. Demotivation is a natural human reaction when everything doesn’t go the way we want them and can happen to anyone. You might even find yourself demotivated towards the guitar you’ve been playing for 15 years. The key factor here is being able to accept that you lost your motivation.
If you’re wondering if you lost your motivation or are at the edge of losing it, we listed five signs that might signal that you could be. See for yourself if you’re actually demotivated.
1. You Lose the Sense of Purpose
On a regular day, an employee is usually occupied with many day-to-day tasks, attending meetings and keeping track of important deadlines. Make it 8 hours in a day and you can easily lose sight of what you’ve been working for.
Naturally, every company has its purpose for operating and whatever position you’re filling, you are a part of that purpose. But under an overwhelming number of daily tasks, you can easily forget about that purpose and question why you’re doing the things that you’re doing.
So, if you feel like you lost the purpose in your job, it’s a very strong sign that you’ve become demotivated and you might consider rethinking about it with the bigger picture in mind.
2. Works Feel Like Tasks
We are all surrounded with numerous responsibilities for our job and we’re usually used to them as a part of our job. So, under normal conditions, we perceive what we do as our regular work to be done.
But there’s a fine line between perceiving something as a work or as a task. If you feel like you’re stepping over the task zone, it’s very likely that you’ve started to lose your motivation.
Task mentality can put you in the “getting through the day” mindset and you might start feeling like you cannot wait for the day to end. This mentality actually can be very destructive towards your career because your job is also the environment where you grow and progress.
Stepping into the task zone can prevent you from allowing yourself to grow by keeping you in survival mode, only to make it to the end of the day.
If you’ve started to see your jobs as a collection of tasks, you might find it helpful to talk with your manager and maybe ask for a repositioning.
3. You’re Getting Anxious Whenever There’s a Meeting
Meetings have never been stress-free and no one expects them to be. However, there are two types of stress, one is good and the other one is exhausting.
Good type of stress can help you focus, give you the drive to go further and light a fire to succeed. That type of stress turns into motivation and it’s great to have before attending a meeting. So that you can contribute and actually benefit from the meeting.
But the destructive stress can turn meetings into a nightmare. Do you find yourself turning your cam and mic off more frequently recently? Do you want to stay away from your coworkers as much as possible? Are you getting nervous if it ever comes down to you to speak? The odds are you lost your motivation.
4. You Stopped Making Plans
This is about both your short-term and long-term plans. Making plans is correlated with feeling hopeful and satisfied and if you ever tap into how you were feeling at the times you made plans, you will understand.
Unfortunately, the pandemic has impeded most of our plans in the last two years but there’s a difference between not making plans and can’t. If you feel like you’ve not been making any particular plans lately, you might be demotivated.
Making a plan could be anything, from organizing an after-office dinner with your colleagues to thinking about the position you would like to reach in 5 years. Someone with less to no motivation would stop making plans at some point because they would lose the meaning behind it.
So, if you stopped making plans lately, you’re probably demotivated.
5. You Lost Your Tolerance
Whether you’re working remotely or in the office, you will be having interactions with your colleagues, maybe on a regular basis. But if you feel like you can’t stand even hearing their voices or lose all of your tolerance towards their behaviors, there’s a chance that it’s because you’re demotivated.
It’s not shocking if you ever get annoyed by your work friends but losing your tolerance actually gives a hint about how you feel about your job as well. Maybe you’re losing tolerance for the people at your work because you lost your motivation for it?
These are the five signs that can show that you’re demotivated or on the verge of becoming. If that’s the case, then there comes the time that you need to reevaluate yourself, your job and your goals in life. Getting demotivated is nothing to be scared of and it’s human nature, but staying there for too long can lower the quality of your life in every aspect.
