Motivation Monday - Twitter - uses and abuses: a motivational tool?

There are a great many things written about social media, its positives, its negatives, its intrusions and so forth. However, I have found in two walks of my life that pitched right Twitter at least can be used as a tool for motivation. That's right 'used' for 'motivation', I did put those words together. It is true to say that things can take over your time or your life if they become too important to you, and this is something oft thrown at many social media outlets. I 'use' twitter to get me fired up, I follow people (mostly sports people) that inspire or fire me into doing more.

I think you might know where I borrowed this image from - Twitter.com

"Easy follow a couple of TV health and fitness gurus" - well not quite, they are useful to follow but often they are busy promoting themselves and their TV / business products along with the wisdom - all fine if you don't mind skipping 60% of their output. I've found it more useful to follow sports people involved in what they do, and enjoy seeing how they get up to speed before and during events. Now this is only a window on activities, they aren't going to tweet their training programs for all to see!

Collage / 'rogues' gallery call it what you will of some of the sporting folk I follow on Twitter
- the likes of Lance Armstrong, Victoria Pendleton, Mark Hunter, Amy Williams,
Drew Ginn... and these aren't even half of my Twitter inspiration feed ;-)

The part that is perhaps most useful in following a sporting hero is that you often get the sense of how they fit life around sport and how passionate they are about what they are doing. By following you get an impression of a real person with the same real motivations and motivational issues anyone might face in taking on challenge. It is in some senses akin to reading a biography that gets you fired up, only in real time at 144 characters a time. There is something by the way more deeply satisfying about immersing in an amazing biography for inspiration.

So I try (though I admit I sometimes fail) to keep my twitter account sensible, to follow positive sports people, to delete feeds that annoy, and to use the media as something to motivate me. Give it a try and let me know if it works for you too. I use it as a newspaper... only with a bunch of good news rather than actual newspapers energy sapping snipping, harping and representations (though you do occasionally get a bit of that in Twitter too).

Oh, almost forgot, the other area I 'use' twitter for is work, I use it to keep in touch with the latest happenings and goings on in my work world. Following trade magazines and journal, superstars in the field, news outlets and so forth.