How well do you understand what motivates you? Motivating yourself is hard in a vaccum Put yourself in situations that motivate you instead.
How can you motivate employees if you can't motivate yourself? The key question is: When are you really in flow, when you are so enjoying your work that you forget your surroundings and stop watching the clock? Is it doing a technical job, negotiating a deal with a customer, making a big sale, coaching someone, crunching the numbers, brainstorming with colleagues to develop a new product or what? Conversely, what types of work bore you the most? What tasks do you put off? When do you feel really down at work? You can push yourself to do unpleasant tasks but you can't expect to be at your best when you are doing them. You will never be excited at such times. Psyching yourself up, just telling yourself to get excited about something that turns you off just won't work. So, the key to motivating yourself is to find ways to spend most of your time doing what most turns you on. This is not selfish so long as this is what really adds value to the business. Generally, we will do our best when we are doing what we enjoy. You may also need to think about whether you go for intrinsic or extrinsic motivation or whether you need a bit of both. Intrinsic motivation comes from doing the things that you enjoy for their own sake. Extrinsic motivation is what you get by way of reward or recognition. If some form of recognition is more important to you than the sheer enjoyment of any task, then changing what you do won't help unless it generates bigger rewards for you. See my article on Employee Motivation for more on this topic: http://businessmanagement.suite101.com/article.cfm/motivating_employees
