Welcome back. Are you still feeling motivated or did Monday steal your motivation?

Isn't it amazing how your feelings can change? The one day you feel like you want to conquer the world. The next day you feel like the world has conquered you.

Perhaps as you start this day you are not feeling quite that motivated and maybe you are not feeling that much of a conqueror.

People Demotivate You

What is it that makes us lose our motivation? I will tell you what makes you lose your motivation 99 times out of 100. It is people. People make you lose your motivation.

Somebody said something that I have often quoted and I am going to mention it again. The key is not keeping motivated. The key is stopping other people from demotivating you.

How do you do that?

Solomon had something to say about this in Ecclesiastes 3:22. He said:

Therefore I can see that nothing is better for a man than for him to rejoice in his own business; for that is his lot.

This was a man who knew all about business. And he said there is nothing better than just to rejoice in your own business. Rejoice not in somebody else's business but in your own; not in how people respond to you, but in your own sense of accomplishment.

People Don't Care About Your Goals

Now let me break it to you. The bad news is that other people will not get excited about your goal. The people that you employ in your business are not excited about your business. They are only excited about their own business.

So if they are not part of your business and they don't own a part of it, they are interested in only one thing: the pay check at the end of the month.

Yes you can get people motivated and you can encourage them to feel part of the vision. That is another story.

But most of the time, whether you are in business or in ministry, you will always find that the people who work under you just don't share your zeal. And very often this can be very demotivating.

You are all excited. You want to shoot for the stars. You want to accomplish great things in your business or in your ministry, and it just seems like everybody else is dragging their feet.

Dealing With Acceptance and Recognition

Now this is the biggest mistake you can ever make in whatever you do. It is looking to people to meet your needs for acceptance and recognition.

Your Friends

Who is going to meet those needs? Your friends won't. Forget about that. Your friends are not going to meet your need for acceptance. Yes you may feel good when you are around them because they accept you the way you are.

But if you are needy all the time and continually needing their affirmation and acceptance, after a while they will start getting irritated with you. They are not going to be friends anymore and they won't want to hang around with you.

You see your friends cannot carry the load of meeting your need for acceptance. And if you have a need for recognition, your friends are going to see you as always bragging about what you are doing. And nobody wants to be around someone who is always bragging about their own accomplishments.

Do you know why? It is because they all want to brag about their accomplishments as well. It becomes a big competition with each person trying to outdo the other one by saying,

“I did something greater than you.”

That doesn't foster relationships does it?

Your Parents

Your parents also can't meet your need for acceptance and recognition. Well they should have when you were younger. And very often the reason you have a need for acceptance or recognition is because one or both parents failed.

But it is too late now. You are grown up and it is too late for them to meet that need. And if your mother didn't accept you as a child it is not going to change as an adult.

You may be striving to have your father finally recognize you and acknowledge that you have accomplished something in life. Let it go. He cannot meet that need.

Your Spouse

As for your relatives, well they are worse than your friends.

You think, “Well there is at least one person in this world who can meet my need for acceptance and recognition and that is my spouse.”

If you have that kind of need and you are depending on your spouse all the time to meet it, you could find yourself without a spouse. You could find your marriage coming to an end. It is one of the biggest ways to destroy a marriage relationship.

Let God Meet Those Needs

Here is the bottom line and something that you need to get firmly into your spirit and never forget it.

You must never need any person in this world. And you must never carry out any job or do any work in order to meet your need from people. You must never need anyone.

There is only one person in this world that will ever accept you, recognize you and meet your need. He is the only one who is capable of it, and that is God Himself.

Don't ever look to man, because man will let you down. People will disappoint you. They will break their promises. They will fail to live up to what you expected of them until you get discouraged and demotivated.

There is only one thing that will keep you going, and that is your own sense of accomplishment. It is your own work, your own business and your own tasks.

And when you complete the tasks that you set for yourself, you have a sense of achievement and accomplishment. That alone will satisfy that deep hunger within you.

So as you look at starting your own business or running your own ministry, don't ever think that this is a way to get people to accept and recognize you. Don't think,

“Hey this is wonderful. I will get to meet a lot of people. I will have lots of people around me and I will feel good about having them around me.”

There is nothing wrong with social interaction, but social interaction is not usually so that you can get your needs met. It is so that you can pour out to others from your own resources.

When you do that, people will automatically respond back again. But when you become like a leech that wants to grab hold of people all the time, they will run away from you.

Let Them Go

If you are planning to start a business with that inner motivation, your business will fail. If you are planning to start a ministry with that inner drive, your ministry will fail. So let it go right now.

I want you to sit down and think about every single person that you need. Think especially about those people who have the ability to demotivate you by not responding to you positively; by saying something negative to you.

You must come to the place where you let them go and you let that need go. You must give it to the Lord and then throw yourself into an activity, into a job or something in life that you can accomplish. Then at the end of the day you can sit back and say,

“It was hard work but I feel good. I accomplished everything that I set out to do.”

If you can keep that as your motivator, nobody in this world will ever be able to demotivate you. So go out and give it a try today.