We all have things we want to accomplish. They may be simple, like losing some weight or doing our taxes. They may be complex, like getting physically fit, or starting a new career. Whatever they are, if you want to succeed it making them come true, you have to make sure your goals are motivating.

Here are the characteristics of a motivational goal:

1.  They Are Specific And Measurable: Goals should be specific; they should establish ”who, what, where, when, which, why”.  Each goal should be clearly stated, and easily understood.  If a goal is vague, it won’t motivate; if not measurable, you won’t know when you have achieved it.  Try to establish concrete criteria for measuring progress toward your goal.  With measurable goals, you can evaluate your progress.

2.  They Are Attainable And Realistic: Though a goal may be challenging, it must also be realistic.  If you don’t believe you can achieve a goal, you won’t be motivated to try.  An easy goal is perfectly appropriate, so long as it is valuable to you.  Each goal you attain increases your feeling of competence, which increases your motivation.

3.  They Must Have A Purpose:  Each goal must have a purpose that is valuable to you. A purposeful goal helps you sustain the day to day tasks that you must do to achieve the goal; they provide the necessary discipline.  Amotivation is what occurs in those who fail to see the purpose in what they are doing.

4.  They Are Prioritized: You must prioritize your goals.  Doing this focuses your energy.  You can be working on a couple of goals at the same time, but too many goals at the same time can cause you to become unfocused and distracted.

If your goals aren’t motivating, it is unlikely you will achieve them. But even if they don’t seem motivating, don’t give up on them. Instead, see if you can’t make them motivating. Sometimes it’s as simple as rephrasing them, expressing them in different words. Sometimes it’s a little more complicated, and will require some serious thought.

Whatever it takes, the time and energy you spend making sure your goals are motivating are well worth the effort.

David Brooks, the1990 World Champion of Public Speaking, sent me (and thousands others) an email in which he explained that when he made the decision to be the champion, he knew since he wasn’t the best speaker, he decided he would be the best prepared.

Because he didn’t have control over whether he was the best speaker, that is, the one with the best potential, the one most gifted, he instead focused on what he could control, how prepared he was.  By focusing on what he could control – how prepared he was – and letting go of what he couldn’t control – how gifted he was – he instinctively motivated himself.  Being in control increases your confidence in your competence immensely.

In the model for self motivation we refer to this confidence in your competence as your successability.

Richard DeCharms, in his book Enhancing Motivation, explains how this works.  He sets up the origin-pawn dichotomy.  An origin is someone who is in control of his life, feels that what is happening in his life is caused by himself.  In self motivational terms, an origin is someone who has a high degree of successability, and is, therefore, highly motivated.  A pawn on the other hand feels pushed around, totally affected by others, and powerless.  In self motivational terms, a pawn has very low successability, and therefore has very low motivation.

Some things in our life we just don’t have control over.  But focusing on the things we do have control over, like David Brooks did, increases our successability, our confidence in our competence, and increases our motivation.

In the words of Bill Harris, Director of the Centrepointe Research Institute, “Your job is to learn how to live your life consciously and intentionally, rather than unconsciously and automatically.” Focusing on what you do control, rather than what you don’t, is one way to live your life consciously and intentionally.

Do you have a favorite way of increasing your motivation?  If you do, share it with your fellow readers by leaving a comment below.

I think we need to give ourselves a break once in a while. Not necessary a break from being focused on our goals and dreams, but a break from expectations being laid on us.

We are all used to others laying their expectations on us. We’ve come to expect it (no irony intended) from others as part of living in a society. But what fascinates me is that so many of the expectations come from ourselves. We lay them on ourselves.

But it really doesn’t matter from where they come, from outside or from within; you need to carefully watch out for expectations. Of course it’s not the expectations that can cause harm and knock you off your path. It’s your response to the expectations that can get you into trouble.

In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Fankl writes about his time in a Nazi concentration camp. In the book he points out the difference between man and beast, beast referring to all animals except mankind.  Animals, he explains, go directly from stimulus to action.  That’s called instinct.

Instinct helps the animal survive.  Let’s say I’m a zebra. I smell a lion – that’s the stimulus.  I run – that’s the action. There’s no debating, no figuring out the odds that the lion will eat me, rather than the zebra next to me.  I just run.  Instinct works really well in the animal kingdom.

But as human beings we have the power to choose our response.  This makes us different than animals for whom response is automatic.  Frankl differentiates us from animals in this ability, this unique ability to receive a stimulus and decide how we want to respond. Frankl called this ability of ours reflection.  In twelve step programs you will hear this referred to as responsibility … the ability to respond … rather than react.

But just because we have this ability doesn’t mean we always reflect before we act.

Sometimes we just react.  We become automatic man.  We have many sayings as to what is going on with automatic man.  We say he is getting his buttons pushed or that someone else is pulling his strings, or someone is making him dance.

When we come under attack by expectations, we don’t want to be automatic man. When confronted with an expectation, automatic man reacts in one of two ways. Either he acts in accordance with the expectation, he acquiesces, regardless of whether it’s in his best interest, or he acts in opposition to the expectation, he rebels, regardless of whether it’s in his best interest. Neither may be the best action.

I’ve had experience in this, many times. My mother was a very smart woman, and she didn’t mind giving out advice to her wayward son. Unfortunately for me, I was most likely to do exactly the opposite, even when I knew her advice was good. Rebelling didn’t always serve me well!

When faced with an expectation, what we want to do instead is take time to reflect on the best response. We need to figure out what the best response would be. What would serve us best? And when we figure out what is best, for us, we go ahead and do it.

An expectation, whether it comes from outside or from within, may not equal what is best for you. Use your intent to reflect, and figure out the best answer, for you.

Working on my masters in instructional design got me started on my path to being an expert in self motivation. But it also helps me in my workshops in which I teach people how to motivate themselves. Building motivation into instruction is very important. If your learners aren’t motivated, they are not going to learn much, if anything.

There are four requirements you should work to establish in your teaching if you want your learners to be motivated. They are:

1. your information must be relevant to the learner or his situation
2. your learners must experience autonomy (self power)
3. your learners must have confidence that they can learn the material
4. learning the material must give the learners satisfaction

Each of the following strategies for increasing your learners’ motivation illustrates one or more of these four requirements.

1. Have learners choose their own paths. Give learners some say in what goes on in the learning. You set the objectives for the instruction, that is, what the learners will take away after the lesson, but give your learners leeway as to how they achieve the objectives. This provides both autonomy and relevance.

2.  Give your learners success experiences. Build into the instruction exercises in which the learners can see themselves as successfully learning the material. This will give the learners confidence as they learn further material.

3. Tell learners what is expected of them, and make sure your expectations are clear. This clarity inspires in your learners confidence in themselves. Confusion can destroy ones confidence, so be very clear.

4.  Create challenging, but not overwhelming, instruction. If your instruction is too easy, the successful completion of it will not bolster the confidence of a learner; nor will it give them the satisfaction of having achieved something worthwhile. On the other hand, if the instruction is too difficult, too challenging, it will demotivate the students, scaring them from even trying.

There are many other ways you can introduce the four requirements for motivated learning into your instruction. However you do it, make sure your instruction implements them, whether the learning takes place in a class room, a seminar, or a workshop. It will guarantee your learners will be motivated to achieve the objectives you have established.

The third factor in the model for self motivation is environment, the physical environment, the place where you do your work, and the social environment, the people and organizations that surround you.  The model for self motivation tells us that both parts of your environment have a direct impact on your motivation.

The impact can be positive but it may be negative. This means that your environment may be adversely impacting your motivation. When we use the model for self motivation we use our intention to make sure our environment has a positive impact on our motivation. This means enhancing the positive aspects of our environment and minimizing any adverse impact.

In this blog post I will focus on minimizing the adverse impact of an unhealthy social environment.

What do I mean when I say an adverse social environment? I am referring to an environment in which there are people who not only don’t support you in the achievement of your dreams, but may actually be, intentionally or otherwise, sabotaging you. Do you have someone in your life who is doing this?

That person may be a naysayer. A naysayer is a person with an aggressively negative attitude.   Nothing is ever right for a naysayer, and that includes your ideas, hopes and dreams. What a naysayer says is not directed personally at you. Nevertheless, naysayers may be a negative impact in your social environment.

Dealing with a naysayer isn’t too difficult. One strategy is to realize this is who the person is, or at least wants to appear to be. Nothing may be going right in the naysayer’s life, so by making life unfair, unkind, or whatever, they attempt to present themselves as victims of life, rather than taking responsibility for their misery. Nod your head at what the naysayer says, and just keep on your path, the path you know is the correct one. And who knows, maybe you will have a positive influence on the naysayer.

What is even worse than a naysayer however is someone whose comments are directed at you personally. I refer to these people as motivational vampires. These people suck other people’s motivation. There are many reasons a person would want to rob you of your motivation. For some vampires that you have dreams of bettering your life, threatens them, makes them feel inadequate. Others may be so miserable in their own lives that it bothers them when someone else actually feels positive and hopeful. Vampires see their job as keeping you down.

Whatever their driving force is, it is irrelevant to what you do in your life. Your job is not to make them feel better by being kept down; your job is to make the best of your life. And if your vision is going to improve your life, than your job is to make it come true. And to do that is going to require you to become and to stay motivated.

So you are going to have to deal with your motivation vampires. How do we deal with them?

The best thing may be to totally cut them out of your life. But don’t forget the main rule of life changes: to make a change, we don’t eliminate the bad habit, we replace it with a better habit. In this situation what this means is we replace the motivation vampire with a person who will share our dreams, support us when we are having difficulties, and will celebrate with us our successes. This person can be a peer partner, a mentor, an emotionally healthy family member or just a friend. Finding supportive, healthy people may feel a bit (or very) scary, but nothing helps build your motivation better than a friendly face.

Sometimes we cannot remove the motivation vampires in our lives. What if the vampire is a family member and we don’t want to be alienated from our family, or if your mom is the vampire and we don’t want to keep the grandkids from their grandmother?

The answer in that case depends upon the situation. Sometimes talking to the vampire can help. If someone is unconsciously undermining you, they may be receptive to a request for their support. It may be worth a try, and you may be surprised with the response.

Other times, the answer is acceptance. Accept who these people are, that what these people say is but a reflection of their own pictures, their own fears, their own lack of motivation, and their own jealousy. Accept also that you know who you are better than they know you, and accept that you don’t have to buy into what the vampire is saying.

Above all, don’t let a motivation vampire side track you from your worthwhile pursuit.

We are social creatures, so make sure your social environment enhances instead of undermines your motivation. You will be happier and more effective as you pursue your dreams.

In my last posting I shared with you the importance of your confidence in your competence. As one of the factors in the model for self motivation, your confidence in your abilities has a powerful impact on your motivation. If your confidence in your ability to achieve a dream is low you will not be motivated to pursue that dream.

Fortunately for those of us who struggle with self confidence, there are several strategies in my book, iMotivateMe, we can use to boost our self confidence.

One such strategy is called stories of achievement.

Research shows that you can increase your expectancy for success and therefore your motivation, by increasing experience with success. This is so powerful because the result of those positive expectancies is improved performance and success rates, which result in even higher expectancy of success and higher levels of motivation.

What we do, therefore, in this strategy is experience our successes.  We do this by taking some time to get in touch with our experience with success.  We do this by writing success stories, what I call “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, on your character, your skill, whatever.  Try to find one that relates to your vision, that change you want to make in your life. This will create a clear image of successfully manifesting your vision.  If you can’t find one that relates, don’t worry about it; think of one that doesn’t.

The situation that occurs to me when I think about stories of achievement in my life is a presentation I made on juvenile law relating to human sexuality.  It was my first public speaking experience, and it went amazingly well, standing room only, and being asked to present it a second time, as word had gotten around and more people wanted to experience it. It is probably the experience that made me aware of my vision, to be a professional speaker, given people information that will help them improve their lives.

When I find myself feeling insecure, I have this story all ready to go to improve my confidence in myself and my speaking abilities.

This is a strategy I strongly urge you to spend some time on, spend a 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 positively impact your successability and, as the model for self motivation teaches us, will super charge your motivation.

The second factor in the model for self motivation is successability, your confidence in your competence. The model for self motivation tells us that if we increase any of the three factors of self motivation, we automatically increase our motivation.

Successability is how strongly you feel that you will be able to achieve the change you want to make in your life, that change you have identified as your Vision.

The higher your confidence is, the stronger will be your motivation. If you already feel very confident about your abilities, good for you! Your motivation will already be high.

Why is confidence so important? There are many reasons, but I’m going to write about two important ones. The first is that it is human nature to not want to waste our time, at least not on things that are not a lot of fun or give us pleasure. Why would I want to forgo delicious desserts if I thought it wasn’t going to make a bit of difference on how much I weighed? Why would I spend a couple of hours drafting a new resume if I thought I wasn’t ever going to be able to find a job? I wouldn’t!

A second reason is that confident people keep going when the going gets rough. If the change you want to make is even a bit difficult, you will, at some point, stumble. It’s almost guaranteed. So how you respond to a stumble or to a roadblock, will determine whether you make your dreams come true.

Albert Bandura, one of the greatest living psychologists, pointed out the four major differences between people who are confident and those who are not:

1. Confident people approach difficult tasks as challenges and in fact look forward to accomplishing them, while non-confident people perceive difficult tasks as threats and shy away from them.
2. Confident people are able to maintain sustained effort in meeting challenges. Rather than seeing setbacks and failures as devastating, they quickly recover and proceed toward their objective. Non-confident people see themselves as incompetent when setbacks or failures occur, and they tend to give up.
3. Confident people have lower stress because of their confidence in their ability to deal with situations that may arise. Non-confident people easily become stressed and depressed because of their perceived lack of control over events.
4. Confident people set higher goals for themselves and are more committed to achieving them. On the other hand, non-confident people tend to do and be the opposite.

I don’t know about you, but being confident sure looks like the choice I would make every time. And that is what is so good about confidence: how confident we are is a choice. Maybe we don’t have a lot of confidence when we start on a project, but there are definitely steps we can take to increase our confidence.

In my next blog posting, I will share a couple of strategies you can use to increase your confidence. See you then!

I made a presentation earlier this week on the model for self motivation. After the presentation I was chatting with one of the audience members and he offered me some feedback on my model. He pointed out that vision, the second factor in the model, in his mind, represented sight, what you see. So when you write down your vision, he explained, you better be able to see it, see how your world will look after your vision comes true.

I like this concept. I like it a lot. The purpose of the model is to help you increase your motivation. You do this by doing things to each one of the factors, vision, successability and environment, to increase its motivational power. Any positive impact you have on any of the three factors automatically increases your motivation.

In my presentations I always explain that one of the most important things you can do to make your vision enhance your motivation is to make it clear. (The other one is to make sure it is valuable to you.) I then give examples of how we make it clear. I talk about a participant in a workshop who told me his vision was to slim down. I told him if he got some clarity on that desire he could make his vision more motivating. So he decided on losing 20 pounds.  That was clear.

This is a good example, but in the future I will point out what my audience member shared with me, that if you really want to super power your vision, express it in a way you can see, see in your mind today, exactly what you will see when you accomplish your goal.

Seeing it in your mind, visualizing it, will help motivate you to make it come true.

Thinking up a topic for a blog about motivation on New Year’s Day is sort of like shooting fish in a barrel. Is there really any choice other than resolutions? Everyone is talking about them on the talk shows. Every newspaper has at least one article about resolutions, and sometimes half the comics involve resolutions.

Resolutions can involve losing weight, eating healthy, starting an exercise program. Many resolutions involve becoming more financially responsible. All these people are trying to make changes in their lives, to make their lives better than they presently are. Sounds a lot like the first factor in the model for self motivation, the vision.

One thing that is mentioned in most of the articles, and is the punch line for many of the comics, is how most resolutions are not kept. We start January with great intentions, but come the time spring, New Years Day is a fading memory, so too are our resolutions. It’s almost an axiom, that resolutions are made to be broken.

So why are we unable to keep our resolutions? The problem is we are not motivated to keep them. And why aren’t we motivated to keep them? Because we don’t know how to motivate ourselves to keep them. And the reason we don’t know how to motivate ourselves is because no one has ever taught us how. No where did we learn how to motivate ourselves.

And because we don’t know how to motivate ourselves, we don’t know how to plan for our motivation. Without a plan for keeping ourselves motivated, a resolution is no more than a dream, something we wish will happen. Wishing won’t make an important change in our lives occur. Without motivation, there is no movement.

Motivation may magically occur in some people. We all know people like that, who jump out bed and can’t wait to get working on all their important changes. But if you are like me, you have to create your own motivation. You have to self motivate.

Luckily for us, self motivation is a skill, just like reading and writing, and adding and subtracting. And like those skills, self motivation can be learned. You can learn how to motivate yourself.

The model for self motivation is a good place to start. Peruse my prior blog postings to learn all about the model. Motivation is within your grasp. And with motivation, so are your dreams.