In my most recent blog entry I wrote of how you could use the first factor of the model for self motivation, the vision, to motivate yourself to take control of your finances. Today I am writing about how you can also use the third factor of self motivation, environment, to take control of your finances. Each factor of the model for self motivation can have two impacts, it can either help your motivation or it can inhibit your motivation. As it relates to financial matters, unfortunately the impact of social environment is all too frequently negative.

Pressures in our environment play a large part in the financial decisions we make every day of our lives. There’s the pressure from the media that tries to convince us our lives will be worthless without this or that item.  There’s the pressure from our families. There is even pressure from our neighbors, whether intentional or not, in that striving to keep up with the Joneses.

Unfortunately, there is not a lot in our social environment to positively influence us in taking control of our finances.  As Lee Eisenberg, author of The Number, asks, “Where’s the peer pressure to live small today so that we might live comfortably tomorrow?  Where’s the celebrity spokesperson to tell us how way cool it is to eschew the little luxuries of the moment in order to afford a long-term-care policy?  Where’s the slick marketing campaign that can convince us to forgo a year’s worth of hair, makeup, and Botox injections to the forehead in order to pay an accountant to tell us we spend too much money and we’d be advised to downsize?  And besides, none of our friends or neighbors are doing these things.  Without a comparative yardstick, or the peer pressure to keep up with the Joneses’ retirement planning, we are not motivated to save.  So we keep up with the Joneses in the usual way:  consumption.  An iPod for an iPod.”

The good news is we have the power to overcome this fiscally irresponsible assault and stay motivated. The way we do this is by being conscious. We don’t make knee jerk decisions, we make intentional decisions. I read two great suggestions for being conscious.  The first was to go grocery shopping with a list and to not buy what is not on the list. Being conscious means not being susceptible to the myriad ways grocery stores tempt you and try to entice you into buying groceries you don’t really need.

The second was to not make a purchasing decision until you had thought about it for at least 24 hours, in other words, no impulse shopping, the very opposite of intentional shopping.  If after 24 hours you still want to make the purchase, and thought it was important, you could buy it.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, one of my recent purchases was a wide screen tv. along with a Blu-ray player.  I spent considerable time shopping for the right tv, and before I purchased them, I carefully considered the following things: 1) I didn’t have a TV, 2) I needed occasional down time from my full time job, and work on my new career, and 3) so long as I limited myself to dvd’s – I was not going to install cable- I would be limiting my spending to the $43 monthly toward the principal, and 9.99 monthly to Netflix. This was conscious spending.

Staying conscious is the best way to resist the temptations in our environment. By resisting, we can stay motivated as we take back control of our finances.

A tip of the hat to www.debtspiration.com for inspiration on this blog.

Do you find yourself getting deeper and deeper in debt? Do you find that just covering the monthly minimum on your credit cards isn’t doing the trick in getting your finances under control? Do you wish you could make a plan to get into better financial shape and then stick to it?

If this sounds all too familiar you have come to the right place. Taking control of your finances is one of the many goals you can achieve with the Model for Self Motivation.

This is the model for self motivation:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

What the model means is 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, how confident you are in 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.

This is the first of a series of blogs on financial wellness. In this blog we will focus on vision, the first factor of the model.

To maximize the power of the vision, we get  clear on what is important to us. Note there are three key words here, clear, important and us. Let’s talk about the latter two first, important to us. We need to figure out what is important to us. Keeping us with the Jones is really focusing on the Jones, instead of focusing on us. And if the Jones are keeping up with us, it will be like the Americans and the Russians back in the Cold War days. The battle will never end until we or the Jones collapse under the strain of keeping up with the other.

So figure out what is important to you. What do you enjoy?

As Joe Dominguez writes in Your Money or Your Life, “We build our working lives on this myth of more.  Our expectation is to make more money as the years go on.  We will get more responsibility and more perks as we move up in our field.  Eventually, we hope, we will have more possessions, more prestige and more respect from our community.  We become habituated to expecting ever more of ourselves and ever more from the world, but rather than satisfaction, our experience is that the more we have, the more we want — and the less content we are with the status quo.”

Do you want to be constantly striving, constantly wanting more? Or do you want to be happy with what you’ve got? Sometimes the only way to get motivated is to take a very close look at what is important to us, and then make a decision to go after it. Sometimes all it takes is desiring a life free of the worry over our finances.

The second way to maximize the power of the vision is clarity. We need to get clear on our expectations and clear on our actions. Clarity means having a good understanding of what is going on in your financial life now. If you have debt, calculate exactly what you are paying servicing your debt every day. Add up how much you pay, principal and interest, on your mortgage, your auto loan, education loans and your credit cards (did I leave any out?) Alternatively, calculate what % of your pay check goes toward your debt. In my first draft of this blog I wrote “calculate how much interest you are paying each month.” But that only tells half the story. I suddenly remembered I just bought a 42” TV (120 hz, of course) interest free for 24 months. That makes it free, doesn’t it? Not at all. Every month for the next two years I will pay $43. For two whole years!

Knowing exactly where we are, and exactly where we want to go eliminates the confusion that robs us of our motivation. Knowledge is power, and power keeps us motivated.

Increasing the motivational impact of the first factor of self motivation, your desire, is the way to make it come true.

In my next blog I will explain how you can positively impact the second and third factors of motivation to boost your motivation to take control of your finances even higher.

Stay tuned.

I read a quote the other day in an article by Glazer-Kennedy rep, Steve Clark,  He wrote, “There is no growth in the comfort zone; there is no comfort in the growth zone.”

I really like this quote. I teach public speaking and it’s one I will use in my workshops.

In every workshop I have given, there have been several people who fall into the class, “scared to death of public speaking.” And “public” is being used very loosely. It includes speaking in front of your seven fellow class mates. The goal of my workshops is to make the participants competent, confident, and comfortable speakers. The best part of the workshops is seeing the looks on these people’s faces after they have actually “spoken in public.” If you want to see someone experiencing growth as a result of their extreme discomfort, come sit in on one of my workshops.

But I always get the same question from one of the more experienced speakers, the ones who are relatively comfortable speaking, about how to deal with the nervousness that always seem to arise before a public speaking appearance. I always tell them the only thing to do is accept it, accept it as part of the growth it is evidencing.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Always do what you are afraid to do.” I would paraphrase that as “Always do what is uncomfortable to do.”  In other words, don’t avoid discomfort. Know that the more uncomfortable you are, the closer you are approaching the boundary of your comfort zone. And the closer you come to the boundary of your comfort zone, the more you are growing.

In my most recent blog I explained why self motivation is always better than counting on motivation from someone else. I shared with you that there are basically two problems with getting your motivation from outside of you. The first problem I call the 24/7 problem, which is that the person from whom you are seeking your motivation cannot be with you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Only you are available to you 24/7. The second problem I refer to as the uniqueness problem, which recognizes that each one of us is unique, different from everyone else. What motivates you is not what motivates me, and what robs me of my motivation (demotivators) is not what robs you of yours. The only one who is going to take the time to figure out your motivators and demotivators is you.

So how do you motivate yourself? It’s a skill you need to learn. Some people seem to have tons of motivation. Nothing slows them down, nothing takes them off their path to achieving their dreams. You know the people I mean, the Oprah’s and the Donald Trumps.  I call them the super motivated. I envy those people, because I am not among the super motivated. I have to pay attention to stay motivated. It doesn’t just happen for me. So if you’re like me, join the majority. Don’t feel bad, and don’t feel guilty. It’s not your fault. You weren’t blessed with super motivation, and you were never taught how to motivate yourself.

You can’t do anything about the first, not being born super motivated. But you can learn to motivate yourself. It’s a skill that I discovered after two years of researching motivation. And I can teach you. It’s not a difficult skill to learn. Once you do, you will have the motivation to make all those wonderful changes you want to make in your life come true.

So read these blogs, sign up for my monthly newsletter (the sign up is on the home page) and learn this important skill.

Most of the academic research on motivation involves education, sports or employment. Because of this, most of it deals with one person motivating another person.  In education the instructor motivates the learner; in sports the trainer motivates the athlete; in employment the manager motivates the worker.  Motivating another person has its place, certainly, but my experience has shown that if a person can motivate him or herself, it will be so much more powerful.

I saw in my own life that getting my motivation from another person has at least two problems. The first problem is that this other person isn’t going to be with you 24/7. My vision was to become a professional speaker. I already had a job doing something else, so I had to do my work on my public speaking after a hard day at the office.  If it was a real hard day, I would much rather just eat my dinner, and watch an action DVD. I just wouldn’t be motivated to work on my dream.

On those occasions when I saw a motivational speaker I would be motivated for a couple of days, maybe even a week if the speaker was real good, working on vision every night. But two weeks later, or a month later, I would go back to my old ways, kicking back watching the tube. So the first problem with having someone else motivate you is that the other person won’t be there every time you need him; you simply can’t count on him

But there is another reason that the speaker is not going to be all that helpful in the long run. The reason is that each one of us is unique. We have different likes; we have different dislikes. And similarly, the things that motivate us are different as well. What motivates you is not what motivates me. And what robs you of your motivation is not what robs me. The reality is, no one is going to take the time to figure out what motivates each one of us to achieve our particular dream. That job is ours!

And that ‘s why we want to be our own motivational speaker, so that we can be there, every hour of every day, and so we can create a plan of motivation that is uniquely ours, not a generic speech aimed at the masses.

Taking responsibility for motivating yourself is empowering. Which just adds to the motivation.

Do you have a special dream? Maybe it involves a better paying, more stimulating job? Maybe it has to do with a healthier life style? Or maybe a healthy, loving, caring relationship?

Do you find that despite your best efforts, you just don’t seem to be able to get it together to make this dream real in your life?

Do you know you have the abilities you need to make it real, but for some reason, you don’t stick with it?

Do you wish you were motivated to start moving forward, and keep moving forward? Instead do you find you get started but then lose your way, and suddenly find you are no longer moving forward. Do you keep promising yourself that this time you will stick with it; that this time you will succeed?

Are you frustrated and annoyed with yourself, and maybe just a bit depressed about not being able to stay motivated?

You are not alone. I was exactly where you are right now. And it’s not your fault. And it wasn’t my fault either.

The reason we can’t stay motivated is easy: no one has ever taught us how to motivate ourselves. We are all taught how to dream; we learn that from our families, from our friends, and even from television. But no one teaches us how to motivate ourselves, the skill of self motivation.

I believe some people are born knowing how to motivate themselves, they do it automatically. But for the rest of us, for most of us, we don’t have a clue how to motivate ourselves. Not a clue. I didn’t have a clue. My parents never taught me how to motivate myself because they didn’t have a clue either. And probably your parents didn’t have a clue either.

But over the past three years I figured it out; I figured out how to motivate myself, and now I can teach you.

It’s not hard. It’s a skill you can learn.

Just keep reading.

As I doing the research prior to writing my book, iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams, I researched motivation in education, motivation in sports and motivation in the workplace.

One of my favorite models for motivation in the workplace was created by Thomas Quick. He referred to the model as the Quick Motivation Method in his book of the same name.

In this model the boss decides what the positive choice is, that is what he wants the worker to do. The boss then motivates the employee to view that choice as positive to the employee as well, by increasing the motivational value (MV) of that positive choice.  Quick has five pointers for increasing the MV of a choice.

If you are familiar with my model for self motivation, you can see why this is a favorite. It is in alignment with my model, serving to corroborate it. Let’s look at it pointer by pointer.

1.  People have reasons for what they do.

This is in line with the overriding emphasis in the model for self motivation – being intentional. We have reasons for what we do, and we better be in touch with those reasons. By being intentional, rather than acting automatically, we are in control of our motivation.

2.  The goal the employee chooses has to be attainable, in their perception.

This is in alignment with the second factor in the model for self motivation, successability. In order for you to be motivated to achieve your goal, you need to have confidence in your competence – you need to believe in yourself. if you don’t believe you can accomplish your mission, you won’t be motivated to go on it.

3.  Whatever people choose to do, they do it to gain something they believe is good for them, the achievement must be sufficiently important for them to choose it.

This pointer is part of what makes up the first factor in the model for self motivation, the vision. In order for the vision, that change you want to make in your life, motivational, it has to be valuable to you. It doesn’t matter if it is valuable to your spouse, your parents, your friends. If the change isn’t valuable to you, you won’t be motivated to make the change.

4. The conditions under which the job (activity) is done, the situation, can affect its value to the doer or his expectation of success.

The third factor in the model for self motivation is environment. In the model for self motivation, we speak of two types of environment, the physical environment, the place where you do the work to accomplish the important change, and the social environment, the people and organizations that surround you and that are available to you are you work on making your chosen change. As it applies to success on the job, things in your physical environment that can positively impact your motivation include the proper tools and a safe work place. Things in your social environment that can positively impact your motivation at work include training provided by your employer along with helpful and supportive fellow employees.

5. The manager can increase the value of the goal, the employee’s expectation of reaching it and enhance the situation surrounding the performance.

This pointer points out that that the employer can increase the motivation of the employee by impacting the elements in pointers 2, 3, and 4. It is in Pointer 5 that the Quick model all comes together, and shows how all five pointers interact. This pointer is applicable to self motivation as well, the only difference being that each one of us is both the person doing the motivating, and the person being motivated.

Nevertheless, the pointer holds true in the model for self motivation. We as motivators can increase the motivational impact on ourselves of any and all of the three factors of self motivation, the vision, successability and environment.

By doing this we can keep our motivation at a very high level and ensure our goals are accomplished and our dreams come true.

No matter how motivated we usually are, there will be times when our motivation is just not strong enough to accomplish the steps we need to be taking. Has this ever happened to you? Often times this will occur when there is something tempting us, calling us off the path, in other words, a very attractive distraction.

When this happens to us, we can often leverage the minimal amount of motivation we do have to resist that attractive distraction. Usually when we use the term leverage, we are talking about money, like buying a house with a small down payment.  For example, you put $10,000 down on a house that costs $100,000. You sell it ten years later for $120,000, making a profit of $20,000. Though the increase in selling price was only 20%, because you only put down $10,000, you actually increased the down payment by 100%. You leveraged your initial $10,000, earning more money with it than it would have otherwise earned.

You can do this with motivation as well.   When you leverage your motivation, you give your motivation power beyond what you would expect. An example will make this clear.

I use motivational leveraging to resist my most powerful distraction, the action DVD. Yes, I love action movies and I have a great TV and a Blu-Ray player which gives me lots of pleasure.  Now if I were totally addicted I would not have bought the TV and player in the first place, but even I need to kick back once in a while.   The key is once in a while. So I do have these distractions in my life. Usually I can control myself, but the problem arises when I have had a tiresome time at the office on a day when I need to post a blog or do some other time sensitive job. After a tiresome day, nothing pleases me more than an action DVD, and, lucky me, I drive right by a video store on my way home.

I know that if I have an action DVD at home on such a day, I will not have enough motivation to resist it all evening. That would take three hours of motivation.  I do however have enough motivation to drive past the video store without stopping. That only takes ten seconds of motivation – just keep the foot on the gas and look straight ahead. But, because I exercised that limited amount I did have, ten seconds worth, I don’t have a DVD at home. And since I don’t have an action DVD at home, I do not need the amount of motivation I would need to resist it all night. I leveraged that little bit of motivation I did have to do the job of a whole lot of motivation.

That’s the magic of leveraging your motivation. Sometimes you just don’t have enough to do the job, but if you use your brain you usually can figure out how to use the limited amount you do have to accomplish that big job.

So the next time you find yourself lacking in motivation, put on your thinking cap and leverage what you do have.

One particular part of my personality causes me the most problem in accomplishing my dreams; it’s that I am a curious, very curious person. For example, I went to a juggling festival, and it looks so cool to be able to keep all those balls in the air.

So I immediately run out and buy some balls, and buy a book and spend time practicing. The problem is, instead of juggling balls, I end up juggling my time. Instead of spending time developing my social networking community, I’m trying to keep balls suspended in the air. I want to get good at it. And the result is that I am suspending my dream, becoming the expert in my niche, self motivation, and marketing my book.

When I do this, my forward motion (in other words, my motivation) suffers.

Motivation is best when we have one intensely felt vision.  A person without such a vision is like a ship without a rudder.  He will not make any headway, he will waste his time going in circles.  The point is, you and I need to pick one dream to focus on.

Until I picked one special dream to focus on, I went nowhere.  I eventually realized I had to put aside writing screen plays, put aside doing digital video editing, put aside mastering my digital still camera and doing nature shots of Lake Piney Zee, a beautiful lake filled with hundreds of water birds.

Getting one path was hard for me, and it may be hard for you.  But you must pick one path and follow it, and reject the other paths.   How can you walk down two paths at once.  If you tell yourself, “I’m going to walk down this path for a while, and then that path for a while,” guess what?  You will never get down either one.

This doesn’t mean you are always doing the same thing, there can be variety in what you are doing, but each thing must take you further along the chosen path, bring you closer to your vision.  The vision becomes the destination; the purpose.

This may be obvious, but it can be very difficult.  Making a commitment to one vision is hard for so many of us who want to play and experiment and experience different things.

Occasionally someone’s difficulty in choosing one vision is a result of not knowing which vision to focus on.  Sometimes a person can narrow her dreams down to two, but can’t narrow any further. If this is your problem, maybe the following story will help you.

My son, Jeremey, faced a hard decision when he had to make a choice between two highly desirable choices. We had moved to Florida from California.  At his old high school in California Jeremey was able to play both baseball, in which he was a talented, albeit somewhat inconsistent pitcher, and soccer, in which he was a highly talented sweeper.  At his new school, the baseball coach told him he couldn’t play baseball if he wanted to play soccer; he wanted Jeremey to focus all his energy on baseball.  Both Jeremey and I thought having to make a choice was extremely unfair, but the coach was the coach.

Jeremey wracked his brains, trying to figure out which sport to choose.  He came to me and asked me to make the choice for him, but I told him it had to be his choice.  What I was able to give him, however, was a bit of advice based on my experience.  The advice was that there was no wrong choice; both choices were good.  The only wrong choice would be not making a choice.  He choose soccer, which provided him with free college, and a year of professional play.  He definitely made a good choice.

Staying power, and a laser like focus are usually necessary if we are going to make our dreams come true. Make a choice and stick with it and you will succeed.