How to Motivate Yourself to Do What You Really Want to Do

20 Jun 2010 1 Comment

by resultsmatter in Goal Setting, Motivation Tags: Goal Setting, Motivating strategies

The possibility of a future that is exciting, compelling, filled with enjoyment and accomplishment is what drives us as human beings forward in life. Unfortunately too many of us do not experience the daily motivation and joy of creating a more-fulfilling life because the future we desire is poorly defined, and lacks clarity in our minds. Most often we even do not know – although we believe we do – what really motivates us.

In terms of what motivate us to act, there are broadly two types of people in life: (1) some need very clear marker for the future – owning a million pound home, writing a book that becomes a best-seller, etc; (2) then there are others who would be always motivated by the need to avoid pain – ‘I do not want to be poor again’, ‘I don’t want to fail’. I have a daughter now doing her A-levels; it has been a pattern with her that while she is happy to stay away from her studies for eleven months of the year, and come the exam time, she is at her desk studying almost eighteen hours a day. Every time discussions about future or grades come up, her belief is that she is doing all she can so that her grades do not fall below x, y, z. She doesn’t want to fail. She is what we call, motivated by ‘away from’ (failure) pattern.

It is not that you need to be only one of the two types. Some people have blended both these motivating strategies into powerful success formula. A friend of mine I have known for nearly three decades moved from one top job to another in several multinational companies and became Chief Executive before he retired, making millions in the process. During all these years, he rarely took holidays. While he always wanted the top job, he was also driven by the thought that he would never like to see himself jobless, ever in his working life. In his childhood, he saw his father become jobless and spend the rest of his days in extreme poverty and social ridicule.

First, Identify your motivational pattern:

If you want to identify your motivational pattern, you may find the following exercise beneficial. Repeat this process 4 or 5 times over a week, each session lasting about fifteen minutes.

Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed by anyone or anything. Sit upright on a chair – or if you are used to doing yoga, sit on the floor – and relax. Take a deep breath in, making sure that as you breathe in, your diaphragm expands outside. To find out where your diaphragm is, place your right hand above your stomach just below the point where your chest bones end; then place your left hand just below your right hand; your diaphragm region is where your left hand is resting now, just above your naval. As you inhale, hold the breath for five seconds (with your diaphragm protruded outside) and then gently exhale – during this process the diaphragm will go back to its normal position. Repeat this process five times, and as you do this you will feel your body relaxing, your muscle tensions slowly reducing with each breathing cycle.

In this relaxed state, think of all the great things you have achieved in your life, all the successes you have had. Now of all the successes, choose three or four which you think were really big moments in your catalogue of achievements. It does not matter whether others will consider these ‘big’ or ‘great’, as long as these stand out in your mind, they are big. Try to ask yourself: what motivated me to achieve this? What was driving me at that point in my life? Stop this process after about 15-20 minutes in one sitting. If you have several ‘great’ moments to work through, it is best to do no more than 2-3 in one go. Repeat this for 4-5 sessions.

You now have a good awareness of what drives you – it could be something you aimed towards with a clarity of purpose, or something you wanted to avoid at all costs with a strong determination, or a combination of both. It is important that you are aware of how your mind’s operating system functions when it comes to sending out gush of energy and motivation for taking sustained action.

This is the first rule of self-motivation: be self-aware of what drives you – ‘towards’ a goal, or ‘away from’ something, or both?

Second, Know What You Really, Really Want:

Too often people set goals in negative terms: ‘I don’t want to be poor’; my daughter’s motto ‘I don’t want to fail’. Our brain does not understand a negative command; when it hears words like ‘no’, ‘don’t’, etc., it ignores the negative and works with the rest. So those who drive their life with the aim of ‘don’t want to be poor’ will end up being poor. There is also another problem: when I ask my daughter, ‘what grade do you want to attain’, her statement ‘I don’t want to fail’ only tells me the non-targets she wants to miss, rather than targets she wants to hit. After all you can’t hit what you can’t see; so this does not give the mind anything to work with. But stating a goal in positive terms gives your mind a more clearly defined target. It gives you access to a vast source of motivation towards that goal. My successful millionaire friend I talked about earlier had clear sights on jobs he wanted and worked towards that, and he used his ‘negative’ command (never to be jobless) to drive himself to work harder and harder (you and I may debate whether or not working without any holidays is a healthy strategy for anyone to pursue, but that’s a matter of value).

Define precisely what you really, really want; in other words, set measurable goals – if it is money/wealth, then state a definite amount. Just saying I want to be rich is a wish, not a desire which the mind recognizes. Stating a definite/ quantifiable amount gives the mind something to work on. It makes those goals more easily attainable. It helps you attract the goal. The power of the law of attraction is a reality we all experience from time to time. Visualizing a goal with positive expectancy sets in motion universal processes geared towards drawing that goal to you like a magnet. The more you think about your major goal(s), and how to achieve it, the more you activate the Law of Attraction in your life. You begin to attract to you people, opportunities, ideas and resources that help you to move more rapidly toward your goal, and move your goal more rapidly toward you. We all remember times when we seriously thought of doing something, buying a particular car, or going on a holiday to a particular country, and suddenly we ‘chance upon’ programmes on TV or rave reviews on radio or by friends on exactly the same experience that we were after, although we may not have heard anything about these before we took a decision to have these in our lives. We call these coincidences – but are they?

To know what you really, really want, do the following exercise:

Find a quiet place where you will not be disturbed by anyone or anything. Relax and do the same breathing exercise we talked about earlier for about 2-3 minutes. Pick one of the goals you intend to accomplish over any time frame. With your eyes closed, develop a picture in your head of you having achieved this goal. It will help if you look with your eyes to the right. Once you have a picture, turn it into a movie that depicts you in the act of having achieved the goal. See the movie in first person, as though from your own eyes when you are experiencing it. What can you see? What is happening? What are you wearing? What is the weather like? Work on making the image as detailed as possible. Is there anyone with you? What are they wearing? Try to get a really intricate movie rolling.

Next make the pictures of the movie very big and very close to you in your mind’s eye. Make the colours extremely bright and vibrant. Increase the picture’s borders out to include more detail. You should notice that the more detailed your picture gets, the more intensely you start to feel the feelings you associate with having achieved this goal.

Now focus on what can you hear as you are achieving this goal. How loud are the sounds? If your goal was to buy a nice car, hear the sound of the engine, or what your spouse says about how great it was that you finally had this awesome car. Make the sounds as detailed as possible too. Can you hear any noises in the background like birds chirping or a car driving past? Make the sounds louder and more clear, like you would hear them if you were actually there. We are trying to create the experience of what it will be like when (not if, WHEN) you are actually there.

Now feel what you will actually feel as you are experiencing achieving your goal. Is there a breeze blowing that you can feel on your face? Are you touching anything or anyone? Can you feel the warmth of the sun on your skin? Whatever it is, feel the feelings you would feel. Make them feel as real as possible in your mind.

Finally try to think what you would be thinking and feeling mentally as you achieve your goal? Maybe an excitement that it’s finally happened? Maybe a sense of accomplishment? Perhaps anticipation? Maybe you feel a sense of freedom or happiness or fulfilment? Whatever it is, let the ‘you’ in the movie think and feel those same feelings.

Do the above exercise every morning or at night before going to bed.

You should now be thinking, hearing, seeing, and touching everything as you would if you were actually there having it happen. This is as close as you can possibly be when you actually achieve your goal, and you should be starting to feel those same feelings while you sit and picture! You can have the feeling without even having the goal. This movie that you have created can be extremely motivating. Take some time each day to relive this experience and re-enact your goal. You will find it becomes clearer with each repeated visualization. Eventually it should feel so real to you that when you think about it while not visualizing, it will start to feel like it actually has happened. In other words, the visualized experience will start to seem like an ACTUAL experience. Remember everything in the world started as a figment of someone’s imagination, a visualization. The Wright brothers imagined man can fly and gave us aeroplane. Marconi imagined that sound can be transmitted long distance through ether without any wire, and gave the world wireless.

Third Step to Self-motivation: you choose whether you want success or failure

Try recreating the movie whenever you feel a lack of motivation toward that goal, or even first thing in the morning if you find that empowering.

Successful people visualize the kind of success they want to enjoy, in advance. Prior to every new experience, the successful person visualizes previous success experiences that are similar to an upcoming event. It is said that no Olympic medalist ever won a medal without visualizing the finish line. Sports psychologists say that the material difference in skills between the finalists is non-existent – in other words they all have the same speed or skill – however, what differentiates the gold winner from the rest is how he/she experiences the winning moment in his/her mind’s eye before the race begins. A successful salesperson will visualize and remember previous successful sales presentations. A successful speaker will visualize and remember the standing ovation he /she received for the last presentation made to a large gathering.

Remember, unsuccessful people also use visualization, but to their detriment. Unsuccessful people, prior to a new event, recall, imagine, and visualize their previous failures, real and imagined.

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