In my most recent blog posting I shared with you a story of a jail program in which incarcerated young men are released once they gain their GRE. I shared with you that until these young men had a reason for getting their GRE, a reason by which getting their GRE was valuable to them, they had no interest in the work necessary to accomplish this important (to society, anyway) task.In today’s posting I would like to share how you can use that example in your life to maximize your motivation.

Many of us have something that we want to accomplish but we haven’t yet gotten around to it. If this sounds familiar to you, then probably you are just like those incarcerated young men, in that the change isn’t really valuable to you. You may think you have more sense than these young men, but the reality is, they are more similar you than dissimilar to you. We are all human, the incarcerated young men, you, the blog reader, and even me, the blog writer. This means we all suffer from human nature.

That may sound like a bad thing, but it’s also a good thing. Because if we understand human nature we can put it to work for us.

And so that is what we do in motivating ourselves.

The model for self motivation shows a process involving human nature, how people get motivated. And once we understand the process, we can use the model to implement the process to motivate ourselves and keep ourselves motivated.

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

This means that your motivation is related to your vision (that special change you want to make in your life), your successability (your confidence in your competence, that is, 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).

The model for self motivation tells us that any positive steps you take to impact your vision, successability or environment will automatically positively impact your self motivation.

As it relates to the incarcerated young men, this program increases their motivation by impacting more than just one factor.

First let’s look at the vision. Before and after the jail program, the vision for these young men would be attaining the GRE. One way to make a vision more motivating is to make it more valuable to you. This was discussed in my recent posting. But there were several other ways this program effectively used the model for self motivation. It changed the environment of these young men. Instead of trying to learn in a rowdy class room – more than likely their physical environment was hanging out with their friends – an easy opportunity was presented to them. This was a change in their physical environment. Further, they was surrounded by people exactly like them, people who suddenly became willing to put in the effort to achieve this now worthwhile goal. This was a positive change in their social environment.

What we can learn from these young men is that if we want to achieve a goal that is going to require some work, we better make sure it is valuable to us. If it isn’t at first blush, maybe we need to do some serious thinking about whether we really want to accomplish this. If we do, then we need to do some serious thinking about why is is valuable to us.

The second lesson we can learn is to harness the power of our social environment. Granted it might be easier having it forced on us by forces outside ourselves like it is with these young men, but I think most of us are grateful that a change in our social environment will not require us to be incarcerated. It will only take a bit of intention.

What’s stopping you from making your dreams come true? Maybe understanding and applying the model for self motivation is exactly what will make the difference.

I received a motivational quote by John Rennie by email this morning, courtesy of Don Yaeger. The quote goes,”Extraordinary accomplishments only happen when your passion produces extraordinary effort. If it doesn’t consume you, be ready to except mediocre results.”

Later in the day I was speaking to a fellow employee who shared with me some things his son, a high school teacher, had shared with him. His son does volunteer work at a local jail.  What he does is provide training to inmates who are working on their GRE’s. There is a program for these young men by which once they get their GRE, they are released from custody. (I assume they have been involved in non-violent crimes.)

My friend’s son said that he never has seen such motivated learners as the students he teaches in this program.

When I get two pieces of information in one day that make the same point, I sit up and take notice, and often write a blog about it.

Both the quote and the educational situation point out the same thing about what motivates people and provides further evidence for the model for self motivation. If the change you are working on is not valuable to you, your motivation will suffer. But, if they change you are working on is valuable to you, that you have passion about, in the words of John Rennie, then you will be motivated. It’s when you are motivated that you work hard, and put in the sustained effort so often needed for you to be successful.

For most of these young men in the jail program, school had been an annoyance, or at best a distraction, a place to hang out with their friends and to see young women. They had no interest in the learning that was to go on, because it simply wasn’t valuable to them. It may have been important to their parents. It may have been important to their teachers. But it wasn’t valuable to them.

The fact that a GRE results in expanded job opportunities may seem like a good reason to work hard and accomplish that goal, but it clearly wasn’t to a lot of these young men. Once someone made it valuable to them, they became motivated and achieved the goal of a GRE.

What we learn from this is that in order for us to become motivated and stay motivated to achieve any goal in our lives, we better make sure this goal is important to us.

Have you experienced or seen this in your life, where someone who was not particularly motivated suddenly experienced a 180 degree change? What was it that made that change in motivation level? Please share your experience with your fellow readers by leaving a comment below.

Have you ever heard of magical thinking? It’s hoping and wishing and thinking something positive is magically going to happen. As use in the phrase “magical thinking” the word magical means like fairies and goblins and wishing wells and unicorns. In other words, it isn’t real.  Without magical thinking, there would be no Las Vegas, no Atlantic City and no state would have a lottery.

Magical thinking is one of the most powerful motivation killers there is. It kills motivation like this:

1. When you engage in magical thinking, you think you don’t need to do anything; you think that positive things will just happen. Consequently, there is no movement, no motion.

2. If you merely wish for something and don’t do anything, nothing happens, you aren’t successful, you get depressed, so you aren’t motivated to try anything real.

The opposite of magical thinking is real knowing, knowing that you are responsible for what you accomplish; knowing that in order for anything to happen in your life, you are going to have to take action, knowing that when you take thought-out action, and are persistent, things are going to happen.

Magical thinking does not mean saying affirmations, unless saying affirmations is the only action you are taking. Affirmations do open the door, or, some would say, make you aware of doors that are opening, but you still need to step through the open door. If you don’t step through, the door will close once again, with you on the outside, and you will be no closer to making your dreams come true.

On my way home from work tonight (from my regular job as an attorney) I started thinking about watching Quantum of Solace, the latest James Bond movie, on my new Blu-ray player. Then I think, Bob, you really need to figure out how to make iMovie work, so you can make those marketing videos you’ve been planning for three months now and post them on YouTube.

And so the discussion goes. Do I have my fun now, or do I do my work and lay the ground work for fun in the future, the plans I have made for when my book raises to the top of the Amazon best seller list … my new motorcycle, my sail boat, my photo shoot in Morocco?  Sure I want those things, but I want some fun NOW!

And as I am thinking this, I am thinking about a friend of mine, let’s call him Joe, who is severely in debt, being hounded by debt collectors, but has season tickets not just to his city’s football team, but also their basketball team.

“Why live if you can’t live it up?” Joe asks me when I stick my nose into his business. “I work hard and I deserve to play.” He does work hard, but he does play hard. He is slowly paying down his debt, but not fast enough, in my opinion, to really be planning for his future.

And that is the struggle so many of us face. Do we take care of the now or the later?

We all read about people who live way below their means, scrimping and saving, clipping coupons, going without vacations, and usually, it seems, without children or pets. They are the ones totally focused on the future, so they can retire in their early 40’s. If you are interested in it, there are books written by them and about them, for example, Your Money or Your Life.

I am not suggesting such a life style is right for everyone; it sounds a bit drastic to me. But there is something to be learned from these people. Living such a life style is the result of a conscious decision. Contrast that to people who spend beyond their means, I doubt any of them made a conscious decision to do so; rather they are unconscious spenders, buying on impulse, without regard for the future.

And so when you face this decision, do I take care of my wants now, or do I put those wants aside and plan for the future, remain conscious. Do not go into automatic, because when you go on automatic, the present will always win. And if the present always wins, the future will always lose.

And quickly, all too quickly, the future becomes the present.

In an earlier blog entries I have recommended you focus on those things you can control in order to increase your motivation.  Generally I have used control to refer to my power over the instrumentalities I need to use to make my vision (my dreamed for change) come true in my life.

But today I want to write about a special kind of power, the power you have over yourself, the power referred to as autonomy.

Autonomy has been defined as personal independence, self-government, or the capacity to make an informed, uncoerced decision. It comes down to the question of whether we are operating freely.

In educational settings, the settings in which my formal training has occurred,  autonomy, given the students a measure of control over the learning, will foster goal orientation, increase the value in the student’s eye of the assigned goal, and increase self-efficacy, the student’s perception of his competency.

Translating this into the language of the model of self motivation, these findings show autonomy increases the motivational power of the first two of the three factors of self motivation.  The first factor is vision, the change the person is making (in this case learning a skill or a piece of information) and the second factor is successability, the person’s confidence in their competence to accomplish the change.

In the class room we give students autonomy by not micromanaging them. We let them choose what they are learning and how they are to learn it, within boundaries. When I think of autonomy I am reminded of my son’s preschool. It was a Montessori school. There were probably twenty learning stations or activities the child was free to choose from. He would go to a station of his choosing, take out an educational tool from that station and “play” with it for a while. When he felt like doing something else, he put the tool back, and went to another station, again of his own choosing.

As a humorous aside, before I signed up my son up to go to this school, I went to observe. The day I went, one of the student’s parents had left a baby goat at the school for a visit. The goat had earlier escaped and had been recovered just before I arrived. Needless to say, the kids were all running around excited, the owner/director was embarrassed by the mayhem and it didn’t take me long to decide that this was a place at which my son could thrive.

So how does this apply to you, as you work on your vision. You might think that simply because you don’t have a boss, you are autonomous. But you might be wrong in thinking that. And that’s why we need to be intentional about our motivation and not go on automatic. We need to exercise our intent, because being intentional means being autonomous. And being autonomous means being motivated, and we want to be motivated.

So how do we guarantee that we are autonomous? One way it to use the model for self motivation. We look to our vision, and see whether in deciding to make this change we were acting autonomously.  For those new to the model for self motivation, the vision is the change we want to make in our life.

We make sure our vision is what we want. Ask yourself, “Is this a change I truly want to make, or is this a change someone else wants me to make?”  If you can answer it is a change you want to make, then you are being autonomous and you will be motivated. If, however, it is a change someone else wants you to make, maybe a parent, a spouse, or some other family member,  you may not be acting autonomously, and you will probably be less motivated.

As you analyze the change we are contemplating making, please keep in mind two things. One, just because it is someone else’s idea, does not mean it’s not a good idea. Two, just because the idea of the change initiated with someone else does not mean it can’t be motivating. To make it motivating, however, you need to make it yours; the idea will need your buy-in. Don’t automatically reject someone else’s suggestion, or even direct request. Examine the request and see if you believe it is a worthwhile change. If the change is valuable to you, it will be motivating.

Giving autonomy to young children feels really risky. However, the risks are well worth the change in attitude towards learning that you see in the kids. Similarly autonomy can seem scary for us. “I am supposed to decide what I want to do?” If we just do what others tell us to do, if it goes bad we can always blame that other person’s terrible idea.

But how much better it is to choose your own path. When you choose your path, at least there is a possibility you will end up where you want to go.

“We are stronger together than we are alone.”

-Walter Payton

I am writing this blog posting in honor of Super Bowl Sunday.

I just recently received Walter Payton’s quote from Don Yaeger as his motivational quote of the day. (Check him out at www.DonYaeger.com.)

I love to receive motivational quotes and articles and see how they fit into the Model for Self Motivation. This one fits in extremely well.

Walter Payton was a Hall of Famer Chicago Bears running back.  His quote, I am sure, is especially true in football. The quarterback isn’t going to be able to do anything, other than get sacked, if the tackles, guards and the center don’t do their job of protecting him. And if the quarterback is sacked, the receivers are not going to be able to do their jobs either.  The team is definitely stronger than any one of the players.

But even if you never play football, this quote applies to your life as well. You are stronger with others than you can ever be alone.

As it applies to motivation, I would paraphrase what Walter Payton said as “We are more motivated together than we are alone.”  This relates to the third factor of the model for self motivation, environment, in particularly social environment.

Your social environment includes all the people and organizations that surround you or that are available to you. The model for self motivation tells us that any positive steps we take in our social environment will automatically positively impact our motivation.

Here are three ways you can make your social environment positively impact your motivation:

1) Get an partner: If the change you want to make in your life is starting an exercise program, enlisting another person to be your exercise partner will do wonders for your motivation, and your partner’s as well. You will encourage each other, and will make the exercise a fun social occasion.

2) Find a mentor: Not many things can improve your motivation to learn a new skill than an experienced mentor who can guide you through the learning process.

3) Join an organization of like minded people. Organizations of like minded people who are going through the same challenges as you will have a positive impact on your motivation. As a former overeater I am especially interested in what motivates people to stick with their goals related to weight loss. People I speak to more often than not mention Weight Watchers as the addition they made to their social environment that made them successful with their weight loss goals.

These are but three of the many additions you can make to your social environment to improve your motivation.  Can you think of other ways you can make your social environment positively impact your motivation, making you stronger than you would be alone? Please share them with other readers by leaving a comment.

When we expect certain things to happen we often guarantee they will happen. This is referred to as a self fulfilling prophecy.

A self fulfilling prophecy has been defined as “in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the originally false conception come true.” My favorite story relating a self fulfilling prophecy is about an American woman who is planning to adopt a baby from China, an infant. In preparation for the wonderful day when the child will arrive in this country, she decided to learn Chinese, so she can communicate with the child when it starts to talk. The baby arrives and the mother only speaks to the baby in Chinese …. so of course the baby grows up speaking Chinese. The mom was very happy she had the foresight to learn Chinese.

This is a silly story, but so too are many of the behaviors we do every day. How many of us think or even say the words, “if it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have any luck at all?” Or have started to examine a situation we were facing with the words, “with my luck …” and then we predict some horrendous outcome?

Self fulfilling prophecies are wonderful when they are positive. Unfortunately, they seldom are. Instead they are usually negative predictions, predictions of how we will fail, how we will not live up to our potential, how the people we deal with will let us down, how situations will turn against us.

These are motivation sappers, because they adversely impact our successability, our confidence in our competence, which the model for self motivation tells us automatically reduces our motivation.

So how do we resist them, these negative self fulfilling prophecies? We resist them with a strategy called, “An honest examination of our limitations and obstacles.”

In this strategy instead of automatically giving power to our feelings about our limitations and obstacles, we examine them, see how real they are and figure out what we can do about them.

I have a friend, Janie, who every time she is about two weeks into a new project, starts to question her ability to stick with it. Every time she does this she focuses on the same three projects which she didn’t complete sometime in the distant past, and sees herself as a person who can’t follow through.

After I shared with her this strategy, Janie undertook an honest examination of her limitations and obstacles. Her examination revealed that she was totally ignoring the many projects she did complete and did a great job on, and was also ignoring the extenuating circumstances that led her to not complete those three projects.

Janie was not a loser, and neither are you! Don’t let negative self fulfilling prophecies sap you of your motivation.  Look at yourself honestly, and understand you are capable of achieving your dreams.