Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Rebecca Borison for Inc. magazine. In it, she suggests that, if you’re feeling less than inspired, you need to take matters into your own hands. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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Depending on where you work, it may be really difficult to find inspiration at the office. Perhaps your boss is just too hands-off or detached, and you’re just having a hard time feeling engaged.

The good news is that you can remedy the situation. You just need to find motivation from within. “Employees have more control than they realize over their ability to build and sustain motivation in the workplace,” motivational psychologist Heidi Grant Halvorson tells writer Julie Mosow in the Harvard Business Review article about motivating yourself at work when your boss just isn’t doing it.

[Here are the first three of six ways to motivate yourself at work.]

1. Figure out what drives you. Ask yourself when you last felt a sense of meaning and purpose at work and determine what the conditions were so that you can recreate them yourself.

2. Set goals. Take a step back and put together a long-term career plan. Figure out what you want to accomplish and how you can get there. These kinds of goals aren’t the day-to-day tasks that need to get done; they’re the big-picture things you’d like to tackle. Just make sure not to overwhelm yourself with unmanageable goals.

3. Put together “if/then” plans. Be prepared for challenges and setbacks by anticipating obstacles. For example, you might say, “If I don’t finish this project by the end of the week, I will come in early on Monday to finish it up.”

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Rebecca Borison is a staff writer at Inc. Previously she covered technology at Business Insider. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. To check out her other Inc. articles, please click here. Contact her @borisonr.