Maintaining Motivation During Lockdown
Do you have difficulties in maintaining your motivation? Do you have observed a lack of motivation? If your answer to those questions is ‘yes!’, we totally understand you because most people experience the same trouble during these quarantine days. We are all struggling to focus on our chores, lessons, or even our daily habits. We have been living with the pandemics for almost one year and what is more; we have been in social isolation for a long time. Let us take a look at the scientific side of this; we should state that humans are part of a sociable group. Our sophisticated brains ensure to manage our social interactions. In short, considering that humans are social creatures, we have managed to achieve social isolation which made us hungry for interaction. “If we could not interact with people,” we thought “we need to fill this void and increase our motivation level for the things that we want to accomplish.” Therefore, we got used to living with pandemics and started to embrace it, even though it was very challenging at first. However, unfortunately trying to get used to it did not mean everything is right on track. As students, we were not able to concentrate on our lectures as before. And as KUGA, we had worries about keeping in touch with each other, continuing to carry out our projects which are based on social impact relating to finding sustainable solutions to global problems. Despite these concerns, we surely did not give up, worked hard and we tried to keep our motivation high by following some steps.
When pandemics started, we as students had no idea that things would get that out of hand. We kept our hope saying that “The next semester will not be online. We still have a chance to attend classes on campus.” When we finally accepted the fact that this condition may last a little longer than expected, we started to search for ways to keep us “alive”. When planning weekly schedules that were hard to adapt, trying to focus on the positive side of the pandemics, and even getting up earlier than usual did not turn out to be beneficial for morale; we decided to concentrate on the motivation part since we realized that motivation is one of the most crucial things that keeps us going. Doing what we love the most, helped us drastically. Reading a book that we love, watching movies with some friends over zoom, taking part in an organization that helps to keep our goals and values in order was such a blast considering the online classes that sometimes made us feel like a bird trapped in a cage.
When doing what we love that helped our motivation for freeing our stressed and worried mentality, we did not let go of our academic plans and moral aims. Our university came up with a system that comforted us and made us less anxious about our grades. The system was letting students have a choice to pass a grade if that grade affected the student’s overall GPA negatively. This system also helped our motivation since during pandemics it gets harder to focus on classes and keep motivated to study efficiently. Sometimes, we created zoom rooms with our friends to study together to fill the void of not being able to study in a library. As KUGA, we signed up for some programs and training such as design thinking training to learn more and bond as a team. We also organized a series of seminars called KUGA Talks that aims to bring together people with social entrepreneurship and social responsibility vision. Those programs helped us to socialize and get to know each other which made us support each other and feel less alone.
All in all, at the beginning of the former semester, we had worries about how to sustain the motivation that everyone said we had to do to be more productive in our school and also in our private life, how to ensure the continuity of our organization well. Whether we succeed or not, at least we have tried different ways such as our finding new hobbies and participating in several activities online as well as creating activities for others to get rid of those worries and to be more motivated. We can sincerely say that they actually worked! When we have done things with our friends, we felt much more confident, relieved, and ready to do more. There is almost no certainty in the world these days, but one thing we are sure of is that as KUGA we have done great work this semester and will do even better next semester by encouraging each other.
BY Beyza&Hanım
