Imagine in detail how wonderful life will be when you succeed, how pleased you'll be. Do this every day. These beliefs lead to hard work and pride. However, high self-esteem does not lead to high achievement. Research suggests that optimally motivated persons have a balance between their positive selves and negative selves , i.e. their positive expectations and their frightening awful possible outcomes.
Some anxiety is helpful.
The idea is to make the pay offs and consequences so strong in your mind that you feel you must change immediately. Force yourself every few days to assess the progress you are making towards your major life goals. This is hard for some people, called certainty-oriented , who do not want to know how well or poorly they are doing, how able they are, what the outlook is for them, etc. Guard against burying your head in the sand. Indeed, if they will face facts, greater awareness of potential future failures may be quite motivating for these people.