Many years ago an associate of mine shared something with me that has stayed with me ever since.  What she shared was her meaning of the word responsible. She said you can break it down into its two parts, respond and able. When you are responsible you are able to respond.

The word react, she pointed out, can also be broken down into its two parts, re and act. The prefix re means again, or back, or backward, as in revert, to turn back. The root act means to do or to perform. The word react therefore means to take an action against or in opposition to that which has occurred or against that which was done to you. It also means doing something back to the person who did or said something to you. Someone says something mean to you, you react, you act back, you say something mean back to them. One child hits another child, the second child reacts, and strikes back at the first child.

React is what an animal does when it acts instinctively. There is no thought process in an instinctive action. Nor is there any thought process in a reaction. A reaction is what happens in a chemistry project; when I mix together two chemicals I get a reaction.

When we respond, however, we act responsibly, we consider our response to some action by another. There are so many things we can consider. We can consider the mental state of the doer, the truth of the words that may have been said about us, we can consider the relationship we have with this person, and we consider how important what occurred is.

Being able to make this extra step, this consideration, is what separates us from other animals. It is what gives us power over all the other animals on our planet.

To respond is powerful; to react is powerless.

Do you ever feel paralyzed by indecision? This is something most of us face at one time or other in our life. There are two possible paths. Which one should I take?

I’ve seen this occur two different ways. In the first scenario, we “sort of” choose one, but then, often immediately, we question our choice, and choose the other path. But then we question that choice as well, and revert to our earlier choice. If we don’t break out of the loop, we will never move forward; we’ll just keep circling around and around. If you constantly pick one path, move forward on it, and then back up to take another path, you will make no progress at all.

In the other scenario, we aren’t able to reach a decision. We keep weighing the evidence, the data, comparing the two alternatives. This scenario I have heard referred to as Paralysis of Analysis. We are so involved with analyzing that we never are able to move forward. We are unable to move beyond reviewing the two options. If we don’t make a decision, we never move. If you don’t walk down one path, or walk down the other your path, or you will make no progress.

I was reminded of this last week after talking to my son Jeremey. We moved to another state when he was 15 years old. In his old school Jeremey played both soccer and baseball. In his new school, the baseball coach insisted that he choose between the two sports. He would not let Jeremey play baseball if he wasn’t available off-season to work with the team.

Up to this point in his life, this was undoubtedly the most difficult decision my son ever had to face. He was an excellent soccer player, had been ever since he started playing when he was five years old. But he was also a very good baseball player, often a brilliant pitcher, though sometimes he had trouble controlling the ball. What made the choice especially problematic for Jeremey was that his mom and I had always been very supportive of his soccer playing. Every summer he went to soccer camp for a week, and in middle school he went on a soccer tour to Europe. It was no surprise that he was better at soccer. But how good would he be at baseball were he to get some good coaching?

Jeremey went back and forth, soccer or baseball. He considered the possibilities of getting college scholarships. He considered the likelihood that he could play pro soccer versus pro ball. He looked at which one he enjoyed better. It didn’t matter. After all the considering, he was no closer to a decision. He asked me if I would make the choice for him. I told him no one could make the choice for him; it had to be his. It was tearing him up. What I was able to do for him is give him the same advice I would give you when you are facing such a choice. If you have weighed all the pros and cons of both choices and still can’t make up your mind, then the problem is probably that you are trying to choose between two good options. If one hasn’t jumped out as the better decision, than either choice you make will be good for you. Count your blessings, there is no bad choice.

The only bad choice when this happens is not making a decision.

I try to follow the following advice I read somewhere: once you have gathered and understand the data, and have weighed the pros and cons of both choices, make a decision in seven seconds.

Make your decision, and then implement it.

In case you are curious, my son choose soccer, the choice I would have made for him. He got a scholarship to a very good university, and played professionally. What would have happened had he chosen baseball? We’ll never know, but we do know that soccer was an excellent choice.

Do you ever find yourself doing something that you aren’t really enjoying? Did you tell yourself, “I don’t want to do this, but I have to”?

Do you sometimes find yourself making excuses for not doing what someone has asked you to do by saying, I’d love to do it, but I have to do something else instead?

Wanting something immediately, not wanting to delay gratification, we usually think of as a trait of children. Maturity, on the other hand, involves not automatically seizing pleasure today. Maturity often times means planning for the future.

Maturity used this way is synonymous with being intentional, rather than automatically doing that which gives us pleasure now. Being able to delay gratification is frequently necessary for us to succeed in making our dreams come true. Making a commitment and sticking to it is also required.

So delaying gratification this way is a very good thing. It will go a long way toward making those important dreams come true. But let’s take it one step further.

Do you think you really ever do something you don’t want to do? Wouldn’t it be more honest to say in these situations, “I’m not particularly enjoying what I am doing right now, this is not giving me pleasure, but I want to do it because I know it is in my best interest to do it.” Maybe “it” involves giving something up in the short term, because you know in the long term it will pay off.  Maybe “it” involves doing something healthy, instead of something unhealthy.

Does being honest in this situation really make a difference? I think it does. When we say we have to do something, we are verbally giving up our power. We are like a little child who is being forced to put away his toys. The little child may not have any real choice, putting your toys away or being punished isn’t really a choice. And so the child isn’t going to do a really good job at it, and he will be an unpleasant bugger the whole time. But we, as adults do have a choice. We can automatically go with the short term, pleasurable gain, or we can be responsible adults and do that which we know gives us the maximum benefit, even if we don’t reap the benefits immediately.

But, if we truthfully say, “This is what I choose to do,” we are exercising our power, our power over our circumstances, and our power over our pleasure seeking self. Exercising our power is motivating.

Wanting to is motivating. Choosing to is motivating.  Having to is not motivating.  That’s the difference between wanting to and having to, being motivated to do the thing we choose to do.

The next time you find that you are forcing yourself to do some task that you know is in your best interests, but you’re not enjoying it, and you find yourself saying or thinking, “I hate having to do this,” stop yourself, look deep into your heart, accept that you are doing exactly what you want to be doing, and say, out loud, “I want to do this.” Once you accept that you are truly doing what you want to be doing, and that you are doing it freely, the resentment you are feeling will fade away to be replaced by a feeling of determination, a feeling of power, and a feeling of motivation.

Try it; you may be surprised.

A large factor in whether you are motivated is your support system. In the self motivation model we refer to this as your social environment. It means the people and the organizations you surround yourself with. As you can easily imagine, and may have experienced first hand, you can easily mess up your motivation by surrounding yourself with people who put you down or distract you.

There is no good reason for you to do that, when, with just a little more work, you can surround yourself with people who will encourage you and inspire you on your path to the wonderful changes you want to make.

In today’s blog I will write about two such persons you should consider adding to your support system, a role model and a mentor.

A role model is a person you identify who has some positive behavior or behaviors that you want to copy. This person can be in your life, in the media, or even in fiction. And it doesn’t matter whether you and the role model know each other.

Once you find your role model, you base your actions, and your responses to things that occur in your life, on how you believe your role model would respond. Whenever you need to make a decision in your life, you can ask yourself, “What would my role model do?” Practice acting out those attributes that you admire in your role model.

My role model is Wayne Dyer, who is successfully doing what I want to do. I don’t know him, but I enjoy his method of teaching and how he helps so many people become their highest selves.

A mentor is similar to a role model, with the added feature of input and feed back. Rather than just serving as a role model, the mentor actively interacts with you, giving you advice, encouragement and feedback. You have a personal, one on one relationship with this person.

As you can see, these two people play somewhat similar roles for your motivation. A major difference is that you have a personal relationship with your mentor (you know each other) which results in a much fuller relationship.

Why would you pick one over the other?

A mentor takes a little more work to get and maintain, but, as in so much of life, the more you put into a relationship, the more you get out. However, if you are on the reserved side (what I call myself when I am being shy), approaching someone to ask them to be your mentor can be scary as heck. This is why you want to keep your eyes open for someone who might be tentatively approaching you, respectfully offering to be your mentor.

This is why some many organizations have established a mentor program, in which every member gets assigned a mentor. We do this in Toastmasters; even the most experienced members get assigned a mentor to encourage and give feedback. It is much less of a struggle to ask someone to be your mentor when it is expected of you.

Whichever you pick (you can have both), building your social environment this way is a powerful way to boost your motivation.

Who do you know that can fulfill either of these roles? If you have had a mentor, please share your experiences with your fellow readers by leaving a comment.

Do you have a dream, some change you want to make that will make your life so much better? Maybe it’s starting your own business? Maybe it has to do with your health, like starting an exercise program, or getting rid of that weight you’ve put on since you got married? Whatever it is, do you find it just isn’t happening?

Do you ever fantasize that this change is just going to magically occur, that someone will come into your office and offer a great deal on an ongoing successful business, or that they will invent a pill that will melt off your excess pounds?

If you have these or similar fantasies about your desires, you are committing the number one mistake people make that causes them to not achieve their dreams. It’s called “wishful thinking.” Defined as the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence or rationality,” wishful thinking, my dad always told me, will get you nowhere fast.

Affirmations, meditations and prayer are a wonderful way to start getting the things we want out of life. I do all three and highly recommend them. But they are only the start. After the affirmations, after the meditations and after the prayers, comes the work. You’ve got to do the work. You have to take the steps to make the changes you want in your life.

Becoming motivated is no different. Expecting that you will magically become motivated is wishful thinking. Sure, maybe there are people who have been motivated since birth, like Oprah and Donald Trump, but look at yourself. Is that you? Or are you more like me; the motivation fairy doesn’t visit us and a unicorn isn’t going to suddenly appear and lead us to motivation land.

So if you find that you aren’t naturally motivated, don’t worry about. Instead face it, and take the steps necessary to become motivated. Learn how to motivate yourself with the model for self motivation. You may not be naturally motivated, but that’s not your fault. But if you refuse to accept that fact and do something about it, there’s no one to blame but yourself.

Look at my earlier postings here and at strategiestomotivate.blogspot.com to find out just how easy it is to take charge of your own motivation.

The self motivation model,

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT)

tells us that we can increase our motivation by making positive modifications to our physical environment. Our physical environment is the place where we do our work.

When I think about enhancing my physical environment to increase my motivation, I am reminded of the parable from the Bible of the sower. When the farmer casts his seed, some of it falls on weed covered places and is choked out by the weeds. Some of the seed falls on the road, where it is without water, so it never germinates. Only the seed that falls on the fertile soil grows tall and strong.

The lesson to be learned from this parable is your environment will have a large influence on whether and to what degree you will succeed in your endeavors.

One strategy to ensure that you are taking advantage of this lesson is to put yourself in a place where you can flourish. A positive physical environment can help us flourish in two ways:

1. you enjoy being in this place
2. this place supports your work

The first way means that a positive physical environment is one that it is a pleasant, encouraging place we enjoy working in, and look forward to working in. As a consequence of this we spend more time doing the work we need to do to accomplish the changes we want to make. The second way means a positive physical environment makes us more effective, by enhancing the results of the time and energy we expend there.

So there are two ways to use our physical environment to enhance our motivation, first, make it a place we want to go to, so that we do more work, but also make it so we work more efficiently.

As an author, my physical environment is my home office. I have a spare bed room in my house in which I have a large desk and file cabinet, and a bookcase above my desk. When I enter my home office, everything is ready for me to start working. I have posted above my desk my vision, and a list of the tasks I need to accomplish that week.

Above my desk I also have posted an ad for Smith Barney (a brokerage house) that I cut out of an investment magazine. It’s a picture of the front of a large, upper middle class home, it’s early morning, and a large American car, a Lincoln Town car, I think, is starting to back out of the drive way. The caption on top reads, “There’s blind luck, dumb luck, and then there’s get up every morning at 5:30 and sweat the details luck.” It impacts me every time I look at it, not that I am doing this work for a big American car or a larger house. Rather it reminds me that whatever it is that I want … I need to work hard to get it. I’m certainly not going to get what I want by sitting in front of the TV watching dvd’s on my blue-ray player.

My physical environment also includes technology. I have a 19 inch wide screen monitor which allows me to have two documents open at the same time, side by side, for editing. I have high speed internet for instant access to research. All this technology is part of my physical environment, which increases my successability, and increases my motivation.

I know that not everyone is lucky enough to have a place dedicated to their vision. But whatever your physical environment is, there are things you can do to make it enhance your motivation.

Take some time to consider what you can do to create a place you can flourish in.

As part of my job as the Non Motivational Speaker I like to surf the internet to see what other people are writing about self motivation. One thing I see pretty regularly are articles and blogs on self motivation that offer “helpful hints” or “rules” or “suggestions”, the purpose of which is to help you become motivated.

They might include advice such as:
* get out of bed early
* take one more step
* have a favorite quote and review it throughout the day
* get inspired
* decide to be a winner

I would never deny that these are all good suggestions or good things to aim for. My concern is that they don’t really gel into a program for becoming and remaining motivated. Nor do they take into account differences between individuals. This is what makes the self motivation model different, and more effective.

Rather than being a series of behaviors that are designed to motivate a “normal” person, and hopefully motivate you, the self motivation model presents a practical way for you to figure out behaviors that will motivate you. You are unique; what motivates you is different from what motivates me and everyone else. And there is only one person who cares enough to figure out what motivates you …. You!

The self motivation model takes you step by step through the process of setting up a plan of attack, your own plan, to guarantee you will become motivated and stay motivated. The end result of working the model is a list of tasks or behaviors, that, when you complete them, will result in you having accomplished that which you set out to accomplish. The model isn’t wishful thinking, it isn’t magical thinking. It’s based upon studies done by researchers at major universities in the fields of educational motivation, sports motivation and employment motivation.

The model breaks down self motivation into three factors, the vision (How worthwhile to you is the change you want to make?), your successability (How confident are you in your competence, your ability to make the change?) and your environment, both your physical environment (the place where you will do the work necessary to make the change) and your social environment (the people and organizations available to you).

By examining your life and your surroundings and your likes and dislikes, you use the model to make a plan for yourself that guarantees you will become motivated and stay motivated.

It’s a little more work to actually design a plan of motivation for yourself than it is to read a series of hints, but aren’t your dreams worth it? Aren’t they worth spending some time on making a plan?

There are three factors that determine how motivated you are:

1. A worthwhile pursuit – How valuable to you is the change you are trying to make in your life?
2. Confidence in your competence – How confident are you in your abilities?
3. Your environment – Does your environment enhance or detract from your motivation?

In this blog posting I discuss the second factor, your confidence in your competence, what is referred to in the Model for Self Motivation as successability.

Your successability refers to your confidence in two different realms. The first relates to how confident you are in general, how effective you see yourself in handling all that life deals you. The second realm is how confident you are that you can achieve the specific change you are trying to implement.

If you lack confidence in yourself in either realm, you may have difficulties in staying motivated as you move forward in making a desired change.

Luckily, there are ways to increase your confidence in yourself, and thereby increase your motivation. Here’s a great strategy to do just that, called stories of achievement.

This strategy increases your motivation because you can increase your expectancy for success and therefore your motivation, by increasing your experience with success.

What we do in this strategy is experience our successes. We get in touch with our experience with success by writing success stories or stories of achievement. A story of achievement is a recitation of a situation that occurred in your life of which you are proud, a situation that reflects positively on you. It could reflect positively on your character, or on your skill, or on some other characteristic. Try to find a story of achievement that relates to the change you are trying to make. If you can’t find one that relates, don’t worry about it; any story of achievement will work.

This is a strategy I strongly urge you to spend some time on, at least an hour or more, quietly, with a piece of paper or a turned on computer. Try to come up with at least three stories of achievement. We all have these stories; the more modest of us might have to work a little harder to dig them out.

Bask in these positive experiences. They will result in a positive impact on your confidence in your competence. Each positive experience will point to at least one of your positive attributes. Reliving these successes will boost your confidence in your competence and give a major boost to your motivativation.

Why not spend a little time right now and come up with at least one story of achievement.