In my last blog posting, I explained that your environment, the third factor in the model for self motivation, plays a big part in how motivated you are. I alluded to the fact that there are two types of environment, the physical environment, the place where you do your work on your dreams, and the social environment, the people and organizations that surround you and are available to you.  In today’s posting I will give you some hints on making your physical environment enhance your motivation.

Physical environment is usually what we think about when we hear the word environment. It’s a place.  It’s the place where you do the work that is required to make that special change you want to occur in your life. But it’s more than just the place; it also includes the things in that place. For many people the place will be an office, whether outside or inside their home.  For others it might be in their car, for example, a person who does outside sales. A library would be a physical environment for a researcher.

The place or places where you work on what you desire is your physical environment.

In order to help you achieve your goals, you want to make your physical environment enhance your motivation. That is how we use the model for self motivation. We do things, strategies, that enhance the motivational impact of one or more of the factors of self motivation.

There are several ways you can enhance your physical environment. The first way is to set up your physical environment so that you are more productive. This increases your successability, your confidence in your competence. The more confident you are, the more motivated you will be.

My physical environment, the place I do my work on becoming the foremost expert on self motivation, consists primarily of my office in my home. In my office I have a desk with a computer on it. I have a wide screen monitor which lets me have two documents open at the same time, next to each other on the monitor. This makes the constant editing I have to do so much easier. I have a built in book shelf next to my desk, on which I keep the books related to the work I do to manifest my vision. They are right at hand whenever I need to look up something. My physical environment, both the place and the things in it, make me more productive and thereby increase my motivation.

Another way to make your physical environment enhance your motivation is to make it inspiring. Posters are a great way to make your physical environment motivating. Many different inspirational posters are available at any mall. But inspiration can come from something as simple as an advertisement in a magazine. I have above my desk a Smith Barney advertisement I cut out of a magazine. It shows a new Town Car backing out of the drive way of a very nice, upper middle class home. In the back ground you can see the sun is just coming up. The ad reads, “Luck? There’s blind luck, dumb luck and then there’s get-up-every-morning-at-5:30-and-sweat-the-details-luck.”

I may not want a Town Car, but the beautiful house looks real attractive, and these words remind me that to achieve my dreams I need to work hard; luck is not going to do it.

Your physical environment may be the dining room table after the kids have been put to bed. It doesn’t matter.  Whatever your physical environment, there are steps you can take to make it more motivating for you. It’s well worth your while spending some time thinking seriously about the changes you can make in your physical environment to enhance your motivation.

How have you made your physical environment enhance your motivation?

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In the model for self motivation, the tool we use to make sure our motivation stays high, the third factor is environment.  Making it one of the factors recognizes that your environment plays a large part in how motivated you are. Your environment can increase your motivation, or it can decrease your motivation. It’s up to you, because ultimately you control your environment.

In my book, iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams, I tell about a wonderful speech my friend Mykassa Dixon made at a Toastmasters speech contest. (Mykassa won). Mykassa’s speech was about Mr. Bouncy Ball. Mykassa actually had a ball with him on the speaking platform and bounced it onto the floor which was about a foot lower.

Mykassa explained that in order for the ball to bounce back it had to bounce on the right environment. If he tried to bounce it on sand, for example, that would be the wrong environment; it would not bounce back. If he tried to bounce the ball on water, it would not bounce back. Water was not the right environment either. But if he bounced it on cement or wood, the right environments, it would bounce back.

Mykassa had shared with the audience a major disappointment he had experienced and was explaining that he was able to bounce back from that disappointment because he was in the proper environment, a loving family and supportive friends.

In my model for self motivation, I go one step further than Mykassa did. I believe in order to do anything, not just bounce back, we need to have the right environment.

When we deal with environment as we intentionally motivate ourselves, we are dealing with both our physical environment, the place where we pursue our vision, and our social environment, the people and organizations we surround ourselves with on our journey. Both types of environment can have a major impact on our motivation.

What’s interesting about Mykassa’s speech, as it relates to self motivation, is that the speech itself, on the surface, is talking about physical environment; the ball won’t bounce back on sand or on water, but it will bounce back on wood or cement.  The physical environment in his speech, however is actually a metaphor for his social environment, the people in his environment; the support, understanding and encouragement they gave him helped him bounce back from his major disappointment.

In my next blog posting I will share with you some strategies you can use so that you can be sure your environment has a positive impact on your motivation.

Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash. George S. Patton

In my earlier posting I shared the first of the two major factors that affected your confidence in your competence or what we refer to in the model for self motivation as your successability. That factor was clarity. Clarity is motivating; confusion is demotivating.

The second factor that impacts your confidence is the proper level of risk. In this posting I want to share with you what the proper level of risk means.

Motivation is at an optimal level, that is the highest level possible, with tasks of a moderate level of risk. Both high risk challenges and low risk challenges are related to a decrease in motivation. To optimize your motivation, you need to set your risk at a moderate level.
One way to do this is by carefully setting up what are called mastery experiences, experiences in which you are successful. But you need to be very conscious of the difficulty of what you are trying to do. You need to set the level of difficulty neither too high nor too low. This is what Patton referred to as a calculated risk.

If you only experience easy successes, you train yourself that success is easy, which can result in you being less able to handle difficult situations. When you experience more difficult successes, on the other hand, you build resilience, and train yourself that success is a result of sustained effort.

Hard work and struggle makes you stronger, but you want to avoid extremely difficult challenges if you can. By extremely difficult I mean a challenge you are likely to fail. Failure, though it can be a great learning experience, will rob you of your motivation if it occurs too often.

In my next posting I will share how we walk that line between easy successes and difficult successes, and an interesting game called the ball in the box game.

In my last posting I explained that one way to be sure you were confident in your ability to achieve your desire was to get clarity. Confidence in our ability is necessary if we are to be motivated to do the work necessary to make our desire come true.  Clarity is very important if we want to become motivated.

The best way I have found to achieve clarity is a strategy that is so powerful I call it the super strategy.  This super strategy is called the three step process for successability. You can use the three step process for any desire you have. Anything you want to achieve, you will more easily achieve it by using this three step process.

The three steps in the three step process for successability are:

1. the vision
2. the goals
3. the tasks

The first step is the vision, that change you want to make in your life, the thing you want to become motivated to make come true. You need to write your vision down.

Whether it is simple or whether it is complex, making it come true will require you to accomplish several goals. In the second step you figure out what those goals are.  You write down a list of all the goals you will need to complete to make your vision come true.

To achieve each of these goals requires a series of tasks, the steps that you need to take to achieve each of your goals. A task is a behavior, that is, an action taken by a person. You can observe someone performing a task. “Losing 15 pounds” is not a task; you cannot observe someone losing 15 pounds. “Writing down what I eat” is a task; you can observe someone writing down what they eat.

Each of our tasks may involve subtasks. In the third step you write down all the tasks and subtasks.

The benefit of doing the three step process is that it increases our clarity, because we write down the vision we want to manifest, we write down the goals that are necessary for us to manifest our vision, and we write down the tasks we need to complete to achieve each goal. When we write it down, we have clarity. What could be clearer than words on a piece of paper that you can hold in your hand, that you can see any time you want to? When ever you sit down to work on your dreams, you know exactly what you need to do. That’s clarity.

Doing the three step process for successability increases our clarity which in turn increases our motivation.

The process of motivating yourself is something you can learn. Learning it will help you make your dreams come true.

Three things will impact whether you are motivated to achieve a goal:

1. How you perceive the goal you are trying to achieve,
2. Successability, your confidence in your competence,
3. Your environment, both physical environment and social environment.

These three things make up the three factors in the model for self motivation.

In today’s blog posting I will be discussing the second factor, successability.

Successability relates to how certain you are that you have the ability to achieve your goal. The more confident you are in your ability, the more motivated you will be to pursue your goal. The lower your view of your competence, the less likely you will be to pursue it.

We all know it is the confident people who make changes in life, who make things happen. Lucky you if you are confident!

But even if you lack confidence, aren’t sure you can achieve your goal, there are things you can do to increase your confidence in yourself and thereby increase your motivation.

One thing that will increase your confidence that you can achieve a goal is clarity. The clearer you are as to exactly what it is you are trying to achieve, the more confident you will be. Confusion will rob you of your motivation.

Your goal needs to be clearly stated and it needs to be written down. Your mind might be a good place for you to think about your goals, but until you write them down, they are not definite. They are subject to your memory, your perceptions, and your biases.

So that is the first strategy for achieving clarity in your pursuits, writing everything down. Some people like to do this in a journal, a book they keep solely for their work on self motivation. Others like to do their work on a computer. It doesn’t matter which you choose, so long as it gets written down.

But clarity doesn’t just apply to my goals. It also applies to the work I need to do to achieve my goals. My overriding goal is to become a professional speaker, a teacher, leading workshops, making presentations, and writing books … helping other people achieve their dreams. One of the goals I set by which I am going to manifest this image of me was to write a book on self motivation. And so for three years I researched motivation, organized my thoughts and wrote them down.

Once the book was written I needed to market it. But at first I was a bit confused as to how to market it. Consequently, I found myself stumbling, being hesitant in my marketing. I knew I need to get clarity, to write out a detailed marketing plan. And so the next task I needed to complete was to write down a marketing plan, how I was going to market my book. Once that plan was written I was able to move forward toward my dreams.

So if you want to become motivated and stay motivated, make sure you are clear on exactly what it is you are striving for, and the steps you need to take to make it happen. The more clear you are, the more motivated you will be to make it come your dreams come true.

In earlier blog entries I have shared why evaluations are important, and when to do an evaluation. In today’s entry I share nine strategies to make sure your evaluations are motivational.

Strategy 1.  Maintain a positive attitude.

The odds are you do a lot more good work than bad work. Doesn’t it make sense, therefore, that when you evaluate yourself, there should be a lot more positive feedback (“you did this well”) than negative or corrective feedback (“you need to improve upon this”)? Keep your evaluations positive and upbeat.

Strategy 2.  Use self praise.

Acknowledge your progress.   By doing this, you increase your confidence in your competence.  It is important to acknowledge progress, especially when you are feeling like you are standing still … even if they are little progresses.

At end of each week or month review your work over the previous period to see what you have accomplished; and take time to appreciate your accomplishments and your attempts. If you are achieving everything you try with ease and with no failure, you might be aiming a little bit low.  Push your limits!

Strategy 3.  Correct the behavior, not yourself.

The Bible tells us, “Hate the sin, not the sinner.”  When you do an evaluation your goal it to stop any non productive behaviors. Focus on behavior or performance characteristics, specifics actions you have taken or need to take.

It’s been said that the inferior teacher tells you what’s wrong with you and tells you how to fix it; the superior teacher, on the other hand, tells you what’s you and tells you how to “bring it forth”.  You want to be a teacher, to yourself, who tells you what is right about you.

Strategy 4.  Be precise in your self praise.

Parents are always told that when you praise a child’s behavior, you need to be precise, specify exactly what the child did that is earning the praise.  When a parent does this, he or she encourages the same behavior in the future.  This is effective positive reinforcement.

Here are three ways to do this:

1.  Be specific in your praise (clarity is motivating)

2.  Emphasize behavior (reinforce more of the same)

3.  Praise soon after the event (increases the motivating power)

Strategy 5.  Identify the gap.

The gap is the discrepancy or difference between what you wanted to happen and what did happen. Look to what you expected to happen and compare it to what did happen.

Overcome any inclination you may feel to refuse to admit you are not getting any closer to your destination.  A wise Turk once remarked, “No matter how far you have gone on a wrong road, turn back.”

Strategy 6.  Determine how to bridge the gap.

What do you do if you have identified a gap?  You figure out how to bridge the gap.

Bridging the gap does NOT mean dumping on yourself.  It does mean learning from your mistakes, and looking for solutions.

Instead of asking why something went wrong, ask how you can make it work. Are you missing needed skills?  Do you need additional training?  You can’t expect to achieve new levels of accomplishment without providing the methods.

Strategy 7.  Evaluate the evaluation.

If you are having trouble with the evaluation, examine how clear you made your goals and tasks.  Clearly stated goals and tasks (clarity) make evaluations easy.  How clear did you make yours?

Strategy 8. Keep a record of the evaluation.

Clarity increases your confidence in your competence, and increases in your confidence increase your motivation.  You want to keep a written record of your evaluations, so you can refer back to them to see what changes worked and what changes didn’t work.

Evaluations can be time consuming, but they are a necessary part of being the most effective you can be. Effectiveness is what we want as we work toward making our dreams come true.