I belong to a linkedin.com group focused on motivation. It’s called Motivation Nation. One of the tools in linkedin is the question, in which a member of a group poses a question and the fellow members answer it.

A recent question was, “Give me one motivational word to be engraved on stone.”  Answers included Love, Generosity, Intimacy, Candor, Accountability, all good answers.

I racked my brain for my answer. I thought of phrases, for example, know yourself, but I was having difficulty with a one word answer. Persistence was a possibility, but I thought it had more to do with success, rather than motivation.

Then it struck me. The one word was plan.

For some of us, we jump out of bed rearing to go. We are focused. We love what we do and our passion keeps us moving toward our goals.

Unfortunately, those people are rare. Most of us, and I count myself in this very large majority, need to work on our motivation; it doesn’t just magically appear. We need to give ourselves frequent encouragement and an occasional kick in the pants in order for our dreams to come true. If you are like me, and are in this second group, your best guarantee for becoming motivated and staying motivated is planning.

Planning means taking charge of your motivation, being intentional about it, creating and writing down a motivational plan in which you state exactly how you will motivate yourself and how you will stay motivated.

What does making a self motivation plan entail? There are two steps. The first step is taking a hard look at yourself and finding out who you are. The second step is writing down strategies.

You may find the model for self motivation very helpful for both parts, as it will help you create your plan in an organized, step by step, process.

The model for self motivation states:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

The model tells us that your motivation is related to your 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 (where you will do the work necessary to make the change) and your social environment (the people and organizations available to you).

Any positive steps you take to impact your vision, successability or environment will automatically positively impact your self motivation.

We take the model, factor by factor, to create our plan.

First, we look at our vision, the change we want to make. We make sure it is important to us, and we make sure we are clear on exactly what we want to do in this change.

For our successability, there are numerous strategies we can use to make sure our confidence in ourselves stays high. One strategy is so helpful we refer to as a super strategy. It is called called the Divide and Conquer Strategy. It involves breaking your vision into its component parts, the goals you need to achieve in order to make the change come true in your life. Then you break each of those goals into the myriad tasks you will need to complete in order to achieve each goal.

Enhancements to our environment are also an important part of our self motivation plan. Our physical environment, for example, can be improved in two ways. The first way is to make it more “attractive” to us so we will spend more time in it. The second is to make it so that we are more effective when we are in our physical environment, so that we will be more productive during the time we are in it.

The bottom line is, you need to plan your motivation. No one else is going to do it for you.

In my most recent blog posting I explained how I came to create the model for self motivation. I described the model as saying motivation is impacted by three factors, the vision, successability and environment, and promised to talk about each one of these three factors.  Before I start talking about the first one, vision, however, I wanted to respond to a question that was raised as to what I meant when I said I had created a model for self motivation. The person wanted to know what a model is and what a model would do for her.

When I use the term model I am referring to a representation of a process that explains how that process works. We use a model to understand how a process works so we can better use that process in our lives. In this case, the model for self motivation explains to us the process of how a person becomes motivated.  Once we understand how a person becomes motivated, we can implement the changes in our lives that will ensure that we become motivated and stay motivated. When we understand that our motivation is impacted by three different factors, we know that we can increase our motivation (a desired event) by modifying any or all of the three factors of motivation. This is the ultimate purpose of the model for self motivation, to create  and maintain a high level of motivation.

So let’s talk about the first factor of motivation, the vision. The vision is a change you want to make in your life. It can be a major change, like changing careers, or it can be a smaller change, such as learning Spanish. The model for self motivation can be used for all types of changes, large or small. It can help you lose weight, get more exercise, learn how to cook, create a warm loving relationship, whatever change you desire.

The most important thing a vision must be if it is to be motivating is that it be worthwhile to you, the person making the change. If the vision is important to you it will be motivating; you will be more likely to succeed in making the change. If it isn’t important to you, it will not be motivating and you will be less likely to succeed in making the change.

A strategy to making your vision more motivating is to understand why it is important to you. As an example, my friend Ben was talking to me about his difficulty in staying motivated in his weight loss program. I asked him why losing weight was important to him. His response explained to me why he was not motivated, “My wife thinks I am overweight.”

Clearly Ben losing weight was important to his wife, but that didn’t make it motivating to Ben. In order for Ben to be motivated to lose weight, Ben needed a reason losing weight was important to him. I asked him to tell me why it was important to him. At that time Ben didn’t have an answer. But over the next week Ben racked his brain and when I saw him again, he shared with me that his sons were getting older and playing sports, and he, a former athlete, was having trouble keeping up with them, due to his extra weight. He relished the thought of being able to out run his sons, and be an object of admiration to them, instead of slow, fat Dad.

Ben had found a reason that the desired change, weight loss, was valuable to him. Once it became valuable to him, Ben got motivated, stayed motivated and the pounds quickly vanished.

So don’t hesitate to use the model for self motivation for any change that is important to you. And, if necessary, figure out why it’s important to you. The more valuable the desired change is to you, the more likely you are to succeed in making it come true.

I grew up in the fifties. My father was a janitor and my mother was an orderly in a mental hospital. I was one of four kids, so, as you can imagine, we didn’t have money for anything other than the necessities. But I got something from my dad that was more valuable than anything more money could have bought me. That thing was a lesson.

I remember, I couldn’t have been more than five years old, my dad coming home from a hard day at work, mopping floors and cleaning toilet bowls, and after dinner my mom clearing the table and my dad setting up his correspondence course work. My dad had a dream, he wanted to learn a trade so that he could better support his family. He wanted to be an electrician.

My dad finished the course, became an apprentice electrician, and then later a journeyman electrician. He made his dream come true.

The lesson I learned from my dad was work hard and you will succeed. Work really hard and you will succeed even better. I found that lesson to be true in my life as well. Once I started working hard, I graduated from a prestigious university, and with more hard work, became a successful lawyer.

But I wasn’t happy. Even though I liked being a lawyer – the intellectual stimulation, the arguing – I wasn’t passionate about the law. Like my dad, I had a dream. My dream was to be a professional speaker, to stand in front of crowds of people, teaching them, giving them skills to make their lives better. But unlike my dad, I wasn’t making my dream come true. Even though I knew, in my heart, that if I worked hard I could make it come true, I didn’t work hard at it. I might start working hard, but then I would get distracted, something else would come up, and suddenly I was right back where I started, nowhere. Do you ever feel frustrated and sad because you aren’t doing the things you know you need to do to make your dream come true? I sure did!

Fortunately, while I was working on my masters in education we started studying motivation. It is very important for designers of education to build motivation into the study plans. So after studying motivation in education, I started, on my own, studying motivation in employment and sports. I saw some commonalities in the models of motivation in these three disciplines.  Based upon my studies I developed my own model of motivation. But I wasn’t happy yet. Because my model showed how one person could motivate another person, say a teacher motivating a student, a coach motivating an athlete, a manager motivating a worker. That isn’t what I wanted; I wanted a model in which a person motivates him or herself.

And so it was back to the drawing board. After a while I came up with a new model, a model focused on self motivation.

The model I came up with states that self motivation is influenced by three things, or factors. I labeled those three factors, the vision, successability, and environment. The model for self motivation states that when you positively impact any of the three factors, you will positively impact your motivation.

In other blog postings I explain what each of these factors means, and explain how you can positively impact each one so you can keep your motivation at a high level. Keeping your motivation at a high level means you will achieve your dreams.

It’s not hard. Just keep reading.

In my last blog posting I gave five strategies to help you reclaim your financial power. In this posting I will show how those five strategies were developed to motivate you to make this important change in your life. Even though many people want to make this major change in their lives, that is, taking charge of their finances, they need motivation to start making the change, and motivation to keep the change in place. The model for self motivation can help them make this financial dream come true.

This is the self motivation model:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

The model shows us that your motivation is impacted by your 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 (where you will do the work necessary to make the change) and your social environment (the people and organizations available to you).

Strategy One and Strategy Two are focused on the vision, the change we want in our life, regaining control of our finances. Step One, the why for this change, is focused on making us determine how this change we want to make in our life is worthwhile, or valuable to us. The more worthwhile a change is, the more motivated we will be to make it happen. To appreciate how worthwhile it is we write down all the positive reasons to make the change, and all the negative things that will happen if we don’t make the change.

Strategy Two is focused on getting clear on exactly what our vision means. The clearer we are in our pursuits, the more motivated we will be.

Strategy Three, describing in detail how we are going to make this dream come true, addresses the second factor of self motivation, successability. By breaking this large, overwhelming dream, financial control, into its component parts, we see that it is really a series of tasks that we feel confident we are perfectly capable of doing. The more confident we are, the more motivated we become.

Strategy Four, making a conscious decision to take charge of our financial life, is similarly motivating. It means we see ourselves as powerful and confident. When we don’t feel in control, when we aren’t making our own decisions, either because we are letting someone else make them for us or because no decisions are being made, we are listless and unmotivated.

Strategy Five, finding resources to assist us in making this dream come true, is addressing factor three, environment. The three resources suggested in the posting are but the tip of the iceberg. Taking a hard look at your social environment will reveal many more resources.

No matter what dream you are pursuing, whether it deals with your finances, your health, your relationships, whatever, the self motivation model can be used to make it come true.

What dreams could you make come true if you could use the model for self motivation?

Are you becoming frustrated and angry by your lack of power over your finances? Do you find yourself mired in more and more debt, feeling that your life’s blood is being sucked away? Do you want to take charge of your finances, instead of having your finances in charge of you?

In today’s posting I give five strategies to help you reclaim your financial power. In my next posting I will explain the science behind the five strategies, showing how they fit into the model for self motivation. Because they are derived from the model for self motivation, these strategies will not only help you reclaim your financial power, but will also motivate you to achieve this goal of financial power.

Strategy One: Write down why you want to regain control of your finances. What will you gain? reduced stress? the ability to buy things you need? a feeling of pride at how responsible you are?

Also write down what will happen if you fail to make this change. Will you have to file bankruptcy? Will you lose your house? Will you stay frustrated and angry?

Strategy Two: Determine exactly what reclaiming control of your finances means in your situation. How will you know when you have reclaimed control of your financial power? Does it mean reducing your debt? Does it mean living below your means so you can pay off your debt? Write down what will be occurring in your life when you have succeeded.

Strategy Three: Write down a clear description of how you are going to make this change happen. Make a plan. Write down all the steps you can think of that will help you make this change. Will you cut up your credit cards? Will you track your spending for a certain period of time? How long? Will you make a budget? Will you set aside a set percent of each pay check to paying off your debt? Will you take an additional, part time job for a while to catch up on your debt? Will you contact your creditors to try to work out a payment plan?

Strategy Four: Be in charge. Suze Orman says in The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, “True financial freedom is not only having money, but having power over that money as well.” Make a conscious decision that you control your financial life. You are the boss!

Strategy Five: Find resources that will help you make this change. The worse the economy gets, it seems, the more resources there are for those who need help getting back on their feet. Here are three resources you should make part of your social environment:

1. Credit counseling is a big resource, but make sure you do your research. Check out the Federal Trade Commission’s website for what you need to know before you retain a credit counseling company: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/credit/cre13.shtm

2. The federal government can be of assistance. Go to usa.gov and type into the search screen “debt relief” for information and direct assistance.

3. If you are facing foreclosure, contact your state’s bar association for the names of attorneys who have volunteered to assist people with your problem.

Reclaiming your financial power will be a challenge, but by applying these five strategies and working hard, it’s a challenge you can win.

The key to self motivation is being in control of the three factors of motivation from the model for self motivation: the vision, successability and environment. We do this by exercising our intent, that is, by acting intentionally, rather than acting automatically.

Animals other than humans act on instinct. There is a stimulus in the environment, which automatically triggers a reaction. It’s automatic, usually hardwired into the animal. Instinct works very well in the animal kingdom. The rabbit spots the fox (the stimulus) and immediately starts running in a zig zag motion (the reaction).  The rabbit doesn’t stop to reflect on how to respond to the stimulus, or consider whether he is in the mood for some exercise; the rabbit just runs, and lives to hop another day.

Humans all too commonly react this way as well. Some stimulus occurs, the waiter brings by the dessert tray, and the diner, without a care to his diet, or his blood sugar, reacts, he picks the cheese cake and starts to eat.  Unlike other creatures, however, humans have the capacity to act otherwise, to act with reflection. Reflection occurs in the space between stimulus and action. Rather than two steps, stimulus and action, there are three steps. In step one, there is a stimulus. In step two the person reflects on what action to take. It is not until step three that the person takes the action. It is in this middle step, the reflection step, that motivation occurs.

A person who acts without reflection, without that center step, I refer to as automatic man. He acts automatically, without reflection, without considering the wisdom of his action.

As self motivators, we want to avoid being automatic men. Being automatic men means we are being controlled by things and people outside ourselves; we are being controlled by our environment.  Instead we need to stay in touch with that middle step, and stay aware that we have the power to choose the action we take.

Being in control of our actions has two positive impacts on our motivation. One, it lets us takes steps to increase the positive impact of each of the three elements of self motivation, vision, successability, and environment. Two, exercising control or autonomy in our lives automatically increases our motivation.

Utilizing the model for self motivation means exercising your intent to increase the motivational impact of each of the three factors of self motivation. This is how you control your motivation, achieve your goals and make your dreams come true.

In order to achieve anything in life, you are going to need to be motivated. The best way to guarantee you are going to become motivated and stay motivated is to take charge of your self motivation. One of the ways we do that is to focus on the why.

Focusing on the why means being aware, and staying aware, of why we are taking some action, doing some activity. There are two reasons we need to focus on the why, both of which can be explained by the model for self motivation. This is the model:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

This means that your motivation (on the left of the equals sign) is directly related to the three factors on the right of the equals sign:

1. your vision (How worthwhile to you is the change you want to make?),

2. your successability (How confident are you in your competence, your ability to make the change?) and

3. your environment, both your physical environment (where you will do the work necessary to make the change) and your social environment (the people and organizations available to you).

Any positive steps you take to impact either your vision, your successability or your environment will automatically positively impact your self motivation.

Being clear on the why of any activity you are doing or contemplating doing will positively impact both your vision and your successability for two reasons:

Reason # 1. Knowing the why increases the power of your vision.  What will result from doing this activity? Will it result in something valuable to you? The more valuable that something is, the more motivating it is. Knowing why the activity is valuable to you will make you more motivated to do it.

Sometimes we do something that is pleasurable all by itself. It has no long term positive impact on us. For me, that something is watching an action DVD. It gives me pleasure but other than that fleeting pleasure, there is no value to it. For you it might be video games. There is nothing wrong with these pleasures, so long as we know the why of them is temporary pleasure, and don’t waste too much time on them.

Reason #2. Knowing the why increases your successability, your confidence in your competence.  If you are working on a task, and aren’t into it, take a minute to figure out why you are doing it. Will it bring you closer to an important goal? If you spend your time on activities, but don’t see any movement toward your dreams coming true, you are going to question your ability to achieve your dreams. You will lose confidence in your competence, your ability to achieve your dreams.  Once you start to question your dreams, your self motivation will go down the drain. Spend your time on activities that will make your dreams come true. As you see movement toward your dream, your motivation will soar.

Know the why of the actions you take. Make them count!

You will have noticed if you have been following my blogs over the past nine months, a change in what the vision is. When I first developed the model for self motivation, there was in the vision an element of authenticity; the vision was the “real you”, “the reason you were put here”, your “vocation.”

That has changed. I realized, with the help of my editor, (thanks, Juli) that the self motivation model would be useful for all types of changes, not just changes that brought you closer to who you truly are. The model would be helpful for someone trying to lose weight, for someone looking for a different job, even someone wanting to learn a foreign language. It didn’t need to be an existential change. The only requirement was that it be worthwhile to you, the person making the change.

This change in focus does not mean that authenticity is not a strong motivator. In fact it is an extremely powerful one. If you are looking at a change that takes you from a false self, for example, a job that isn’t in accord with who you really are, to a job that is truly you, once you wrap your head around what such a change means, you will be powerfully motivated to become the authentic you.

I see in my own life how the model can help me with major changes and minor changes. My vision, the change I am making in my life, could be called an existential change. I want to be a professional speaker, workshop leader and author. It is my authentic self. Once I started using the model for self motivation, I started taking the steps that I had known for years I needed to take in order for my dream to come true. On the other hand, I also use the model to keep me motivated as I learn how to use social media.

What the change in focus in vision represents is the reality that not all our changes are powerful, life altering changes. Many, perhaps most of them, are instead going to be smaller changes, changes that are, nevertheless, important to us, and life changing in their own smaller way.

So don’t hesitate to use the model for self motivation for any change that is important to you.