bythemethod.com blog

This is the last part of the self motivation posts (at least it is for now).  One of the great keys to being self motivated is knowing what you are trying to achieve and why you are doing it. In essence we find ourselves back at the beginning.

You have to be able to describe what you are trying to do and you have to do this in as few words as possible and yet make sure that the words are meaningful. If you don’t know what you are trying to do then you will never do it.

Do you have a clear idea of what you are going to do? If you don’t then set yourself some time to think this through.

Then you need to have a why. You can’t get motivated about something if you don’t know why you are doing it.

This is why teenagers often walk around dragging their feet – they fail to understand “why” and adults can’t usually be bothered to tell them. We all need to know why we are doing something and the usual parental response of “because I said so” fails to get the point across for many young people who are trying hard to find their place in the world.

Yet this applies to much of what we do. A good employer will spell out for you the why of a project if they want you to be motivated. Of course the less interesting the job is the more important the why becomes.

So make sure you know what you are doing and why you are doing it.

The next step in self motivation is to set some time for reviewing what you are doing. You cannot assume that what you initially set out to do is going to remain the same for ever. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What progress am I making towards my goal?
• Am I happy with the progress? – If you aren’t then you may need to review the way you are measuring your progress rather than how you are going about achieving your goals.
• Is my progress having an adverse reaction on my relationships? If yes, why and am I happy about this? – Sometimes people don’t take stock of who they are affecting as they seek to achieve something. Whilst it is right to work towards goals you want to achieve sometimes the cost is too great. Don’t underestimate the importance of relationships.
• How could I set better goals that will both inspire me and move me towards my aims.
• What have I found that motivates me?
• What things are demotivating me?

I’m sure you can come up with some more questions for yourself.

If you don’t keep reviewing two things will happen: 1) you will start to see your goals and objectives as laws you must keep (they are not meant to be laws) and 2) the power of your goals to motivate you will diminish. On top of this. of course, you will not be as effective as you could be.

An important element of motivation is feeling that you are making progress.  The only way to do this is to find some measure for your progress. This is really hard to do in a lot of cases because measuring progress in something that is not easily measured is going to be difficult. Without this measurement, though, you are going to struggle to stay motivated at a task.

Let’s take the losing weight example we have used before. Most people use weight as a measurement of how well they are doing on a diet. However weight is a bad measure of progress (or at least it can be). Most people lose weight on a diet on an ever decreasing scale – that is they lose weight fast to begin with and then it gets slower and slower to the point that they may feel they are making no progress at all. There are several ways around this. The first would be to recognise that this is going to be this way and then adjust your targets accordingly. This is a bad way to stay motivated though because you will still feel that your progress is slowing. Another way would be to increase the times between weighing yourself so that you can stay on track with weight loss but it will just take longer to lose the weight. Probably the best approaches though will include either measuring yourself or checking your body mass index.

However what about if you are trying to become more relaxed or happier. These are hard things to measure. Well in these cases you have to try and work out a scale for measuring and then set certain times to think through the scale. For instance you could have a stress scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is relaxed and 10 is breakdown and then every day before you go to bed you think about how stressed you are on that scale. It’s then a question of setting the appropriate targets.

Now without any target you will soon lose enthusiasm and your goals become a slog. You need to measure progress – not just at the end of a task but (probably more importantly) during the task. If you know you are making progress on a regular basis then you will feel enthusiastic about continuing.

So measure your progress and work out how you are going to do it before getting stuck into a task.

To get yourself motivated you need to have a clear picture of what success for you will look like. The clearer your picture the more motivated you will be. Without a picture you will find it hard to get motivated at all.

So take some time to think through what success will actually mean for you. The more detail you can put in the better. Think about the faces of the people that will be present. I don’t personally think that success is about possessions but if that is how you measure your success then get a good picture in your mind of the kinds of things that you will measure your success by.

Then start to think about the sounds and the smells and put them into your picture as well.

Some people have found it helpful to develop a scrapbook of pictures that illustrate the success they desire. Others have used a notice board and pinned images to it. You can even create a desktop picture for your computer (although if you are like me you seldom see your desktop picture).

The stronger the image, the better it will work.

You also need to spend time daydreaming about this picture. Make it a part of your everyday life.

If you are ever struggling with things then remember the picture and it will bring back lots of feelings of motivation.

There is a wise old saying (not sure where it came from) that goes “failing to plan is planning to fail”. There is a great deal of truth in this saying and not least when it comes to being motivated.

We misunderstand motivation if we see it as being pumped up for a task. I guess we’ve all seen the films and T.V. programmes where the sports coach or leader gives a very stirrying speach about winning and what it means and then all the players/followers/soldiers/etc are all “up for it” and they go charging out to overcome the opposition. This isn’t motivation in the real world. It’s nice to get pumped up and determined for a while but being motivated is also about slogging through when things seem to be going wrong.

This is when we keep our focus on the prize but even more so when the plan becomes very important. You know it is very easy to become distracted from the purpose of what you are trying to achieve. Without a plan you can so easily go down paths that will lead you to more disappointment and failure. So you must have a plan if you are going to manage to keep going and the trick is to make your plan when things seem reasonably easy so you can keep going when things get tough. Of course, if things never seem easy then you will have to plan anyway.

So remember your goal and think about how you are going to get there. What things will you need on the way? How will you get those things? What people can help you to succeed? How can you get them to support/help you?

Make your plan of action and write it down. Then keep referring to it so you know what you are supposed to be doing. You will discover that just having the plan will be a big boost when it comes to getting some motivation to keep going.

I’m always hearing people say that they have to do something for themselves or it will never work. This is not true. It is true that people often fail in a task because they are not committed to something and it is also true that most people are at least a little bit selfish and can only get motivated when they know they will get the reward. But it is not true that you can only get motivated when you are the one who will benefit.

Consider why you are doing something

To get motivated about something you need to understand why you are doing it. This why might well be to improve yourself in some way, or it might be to help someone you love, or it might be driven by a passion for a cause but whatever it is you must have a why. You can get motivated when the end result will benefit someone else but you have to know why you are doing it.

Why is more about an image or a story than about a bland statement

For instance, if you goal was to lost weight for your children’s sake then just saying it is for your children is not a good enough why. You need to be able to spell out why you think it is important that you do this for your children, e.g. because I don’t want my children going to my funeral before they are adults. It gets even better if you can then picture something in your mind of what that will be like.

For yourself means nothing without an image

Even putting the emphasis on your own desires is not enough if you don’t have a good image. Just saying that you want something is not enough it must come from something much more real to you. This might mean having an image of what you will be like when you achieved your goal or it might be a story you can tell of a situation you will be in when you have achieved what you are trying to get motivated for.

I watched Australia’s biggest loser the other day and they were applying this principal very well. They got each person to choose an outfit that they wanted to fit in. This gave then a purpose because they could picture themselves in the outfit but also a story because they could talk about why fitting into that outfit was so important to them. Good motivational technique.

Motivating others

If you want someone else to do something then you can motivate them with a “why” as well. They need to understand why something is important to be done.

Your why must fit with your values

It is also important that your “why” is something that you can feel is important. If someone said that I should get motivated to steal something then it wouldn’t work (obvious example I know but it is important to understand this). If the why of a project doesn’t fit in with what I value then it won’t motivate me.

Conclusion

So then make sure you have a why you can believe in and that you can see in your mind and feel in your heart. Don’t get into the rut of thinking things can only succeed if I do it for me but instead understand why something is important to you. No amount of “doing it for me” will work unless you believe in what you are doing and can picture that success in your mind.

Feelings matter more than we would probably like to admit and this is very true when it comes to motivation. Most athletes will tell you that they need to have the right mood if they are going to perform at their best. This mood is not one of anger or stress (as many people would have you believe) but is instead a feeling of readiness, of energy, of success.

How you feel is more down to how you think than your circumstances.

You see your brain is a wonderful thing and capable of some amazing achievements but when it comes to emotions it is usually pretty stupid. Any signal can trigger off a feeling – good or bad. For instance about a week ago I was stuck in a traffic jam with my family for over 5 hours (don’t get me started on the cause). We had to travel that same bit of road a few days later and although I thought I’d done pretty well in the jam all kinds of bad feelings started to bubble up when we reached the same spot we had sat at for so long. Simple things can trigger emotions.

Use this to your advantage

But this simple thing can be used to your advantage. To get motivated you need to feel right about what you are trying to achieve. By remembering other times you were very motivated for something and applying those same emotions to the new situation you can start to feel the motivation. There is a simple technique known as anchoring which you can use and is explained elsewhere on this site (anchoring). If you anchor the feeling then you can use that feeling to get you motivated to achieve your ends.

Feelings are very powerful

If you feel that you can’t be bothered guess what? That’s right you won’t be bothered. If you feel excited about something then guess what? That’s right you will work hard to achieve it. The problem is that so often we start excited and then go to can’t be bothered and so we give up. The trick is in keeping excited.

So to get motivated you need the right feelings.

To achieve anything you need to be motivated. At some point all of us has wanted to achieve something but few of us ever actually ever do. Self motivation comes from having a dream or a goal that is so tangible that you can see it and feel it. In this series of posts we are going to explore how you can reach the point where you can motivate yourself to achieve your dreams.

Know what you want

The first step in getting yourself motivated is to know what you want. You will often hear people say that you must do something for yourself (e.g. if you are going to lost weight or give up smoking then you have to do it for yourself and not for anyone else). This is only partly true. Some of us can be motivated by the thought of doing something for someone else. If you have a faith then you will be familiar with the idea of doing something for God. If you are deeply in love with someone then you may get motivated by doing something for them.

The important thing is that you know exactly what you want.

Imagination can help

Most of the things that you want do not actually exist. Even if you want something like a car or a big house the actual one that you are going to aim for is in your imagination. The better you can imagine something the more powerful the motivation. Take some time to build a picture of what you want in your mind so that you can almost feel it. If possible right those feelings down in as much detail as you can.

What do you want?

If someone were to ask you the question: “what do you want”, would you be able to answer them?

It is very hard to get motivated about something that you only vaguely appreciate. Many people say that they want happiness but happiness is such a vague idea that it is a very poor motivator. If you can describe what happiness looks like then you are more likely to be motived by that image.

Don’t be put off by thinking that if you imagine something that you don’t get you will be disappointed. It is better to have tried and been disappointed than not to have tried at all. If there is a chance you could gain what you have always wanted why do hold back on the chance you might not get it – that sounds like nonsense to me.

Get going

So right now set yourself a time when you are going to think about what you want. Then in that time develop a clear idea of what you actually want and get the idea so fixed in your mind that you find it hard to think about anything else.

To keep motivated for something it is important to spend some time thinking about the goal and not always about the task.

I’ve met a lot of people who seem to spend all their time on making sure that a task is going well. There will be lots of measurement and lots of planning but also there will be lots of times when it is hard to get motivated. Leaders who concentrate on the task and forget about the people who have to accomplish the task or the ultimate aim often find that their workers have lost interest. But this is also true for self motivation.

I think that how a task is to be done can be as important as the goal itself but a goal-less task soon turns into grind.

So take some time to think about why a task is necessary. Take some time to refresh the people who are working at the task. Give yourself a planned break to give your mind a chance to understand why something is necessary.

To motivate other people you have to start with yourself. This applies in any situation where you want to motivate others: parents, leaders, managers, supervisors, etc. I’m talking about long term motivation, of course, not just a quick fix. Here is a list of stuff you should get right first so you can then get others motivated.

• Have a clear vision for what you want to achieve – if you don’t really know what you are trying to do how can you expect others to get interested? Don’t just put it in terms of benefitting yourself or the organisation you represent either – most people find it really hard to get excited about working hard to line the pockets of somebody else.
• Work at least as hard as you want everyone else to work – if you seem to be having an easy time while everyone else is working hard they will hate you for it. Most of the time you will need to work harder than anyone else (see the next bit of advice).
• Work as smart as you want everyone else to work – if you want people to be organised then get more organised; if you want people to be more relaxed then be more relaxed; if you want people to be less stressed then make sure you are less stressed yourself. Good managers want the best from their workers and this means that they must show others how to work in the way they work. If you are working very long hours and getting very stressed out then your staff will end up the same.
• Be a leader not a follower – you must take the lead in everything. Don’t expect anyone else to be more motivated than you are.
• Get excited about your vision but not obsessive – people pick up on the excitement of others. You need to get excited about what you are trying to achieve if you hope to motivate others. However, no one likes to be around those who have a one tracked mind (it can get pretty exhausting and annoying). You need to show that you understand how important other things are as well – take an interest in what motivates the people you are trying to motivate.
• Get to know people – you need to know what it is that motivates your people. Each one of us is different and we get motivated by different things. Take some time to get to know the people you are trying to reach.
• Become a good communicator – you need to get your vision across to others and this involves good communication skills. Don’t rely on the inspirational words of others but instead find your own that are relevant to your vision. I’m all for the odd inspirational quote but they won’t inspire people to work hard at what you want them too unless you find good ways of getting your message across – often and in different ways.

Long term motivation is not about high powered speakers or shouting or being dynamic it’s about being a good leader.