Have you heard the statement, “If you aren’t moving forward you are moving backwards?” One way to make sure you keep moving forward is by evaluating your own progress.

Only by looking at where we are, and comparing it to where we want to be, will we be confident that not only are we moving forward, but we are moving forward in the right direction.

So how do we do an effective self evaluation? Here are the seven rules of an effective self evaluation.

Rule 1.  maintain the Drucker ratio

Have you ever worked for someone who only commented on your performance when you screwed up?

Peter Drucker, the management guru, contends that generally people will perform well four times as much as they perform inadequately.  Therefore, he contends, a manager should praise the workers four times as often as he criticizes or corrects  them.

We need to maintain this ratio in our evaluations of our own work.

Rule 2.  use self praise

When you acknowledge your progress you increase your confidence in your competence – even if you are only making little progresses.

Rule 3.  be precise in your self praise

When you praise a behavior, be precise, so as to encourage the same behavior in the future.  It’s called reinforcement.

To provide this reinforcement:

• be specific
• emphasize behavior
• praise soon after the event

Rule 4.  correct your behavior, not yourself

You want to stifle the non productive behavior, not yourself.  Focus on behaviors, not on yourself.

When you need to criticize:

• Criticize as quickly as possible after the deficiency has occurred.
• Be specific.
• Look for solutions.

Rule 5.  identify the gap

The gap is the difference between what you wanted to happen and what did happen.

• Are you accomplishing your tasks?  If not, that is the gap.
• If you are accomplishing your tasks, are you moving toward the achievement of your goals.  If not, then that is your gap.
• If you are achieving your goals, is your desired change coming true?  If not, that’s your gap.

If you did good work, accomplished what you set out for yourself, give yourself a pat on your back and plan your next tasks.

Rule 6.  Bridging the gap

Once you have identified the gap, next figure out how to bridge the gap.  Use the model for self motivation to figure out what is going wrong, and how to fix it.

Focus on the future. Instead of asking why this happened, or how come it always happens to me, ask, “How do I make this work?”

Rule 7.  Evaluate the evaluation

If you are having trouble with the evaluation, examine how clear you made your goals and tasks.  Did you write them down? Clearly written down make evaluations easy.

We all want continuing improvement. With these seven rules, we can guarantee it will happen. And when we keep improving, our dreams can’t help but come true.

Your environment is so important in your motivation that it is recognized in the model for self motivation as one of the three factors that determine how motivated you are.

Your environment is made up of two parts: your physical environment, the place you do the work on your goals, and your social environment, the people and organizations that surround you and that are available to you.

Don’t get confused when you think about your social environment. It can refer to personal friends and social clubs, but it’s just as likely to refer to business entities and business associates. It all depends upon the goal you are trying to get motivated for.  But whatever your social environment is, it is extremely important to your motivation, and to your success in making your dreams come true.

This was brought home to me recently when I was reading an article about programs to assist start up companies.  These programs assist people who are considering starting a company, or who have recently started one. The sessions, which might run twice a week for four weeks or so, address a different business topic each night. Experts are brought in to provide the training, which might include ethics, how to get financing, marketing and getting a business team together.

One program was run out of the University of Central Florida (Go Knights!) for start ups that were going to go into several business incubators in the area.  A report by UCF on the results of their program said that 85% of the companies that participated in the training were still in business some ten years later. This compares incredibly well when you look at the national average for start ups, in which between 75 to 85 percent of the businesses have failed in that same period.

This is the power of the social environment. Ignore your social environment and you run the risk of not achieving your goals. Take advantage of it and your journey will be much easier and much more likely to be successful.

Do you ever feel your life is totally out of your control? Do you feel like you are on a runaway train with nobody in the engineer’s seat?

When this happens you are not likely to continue taking the steps you need to take to make your dreams come true.

The reason for this is that loss of control makes you lack confidence in your ability to achieve your dreams, and that lack of confidence robs you of your motivation.

Conversely, being in control makes you feel confident in your abilities, and that confidence will keep you motivated.

How confident you are in your ability to achieve your dream is so important that it is one of the three factors in the model for self motivation. The model tells us confidence is one of the three most important things impacting how motivated you are.

So how do you seize control when you are feeling out of control?  There is a simple way for you to regain control when you are feeling out of control. It’s simply focusing on what you can control. This simple way highlights the point that it isn’t what you control or what you don’t control that impacts your motivation. It’s your perception of how much control you have.

If you try to exercise control over those things you do not control, you will fail, and will feel like a failure who has no control. Your motivation will plummet. But if you try to exercise control over those things you do control, you will be successful, you will feel like a powerful winner, and you will be motivated to take all the steps you need to take to make your dreams come true.

Here’s an example of how this works.

This is from the book The Well-Fed Self-Publisher, which I am reading as I am getting ready to publish my book, iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams. (This is what is known as the shameless plug – fail to read it at great risk to your motivation.)

The author of the Well-Fed Self-Publisher, Peter Bowerman, writes about how he markets his books. When he cold calls people to get them to plug his book, if he sets the goal as “getting ten plugs” he is setting a goal over which he has no control. He simply does not control whether or not the person he is calling is going to be interested in plugging his book.

With such a goal, whether he is successful or not is determined by situations out of his control, and so he won’t feel in control. So what he does instead is he sets his goal as “make 50 cold calls a day.” This he does have absolute control over. Every time he sits down to make his 50 cold calls, he knows he successfully make all 50, and is therefore motivated to make every one of the calls. It’s all a matter of perception.

Are you setting goals for yourself that are simply out of your control? If so, why not take some time to figure out how to restate the goal, so you do exercise control over whether or not your are successful.

If you do, you will boost your motivation to continue working hard on your goals and will make your dreams come true.

Sometime it’s the little distractions in our lives that do more damage to our motivation than all the big problems we face.

Distractions can be found everywhere. They include video games, television, shopping, partying with friends.

The key quality of a distraction is that it temporarily seduces you off of your path. That’s the good news: the effect is just temporary; maybe your distraction will just keep you from working on your dreams for one evening. The bad news is that distractions are always flitting around, always tempting us, so the cumulative effect can be devastating on our ability to make our dreams come true.

Because of this they can be extremely damaging to our motivation if we don’t take control over them. Taking control over them means making sure they don’t do major damage, and we do this by becoming aware of our distractions, and become aware of the role we play with them.

So the first step to taking control of your distractions is to figure out what they are. In my case this first step wasn’t difficult. My distraction is the television. It always has been, always will be.

The second step is seeing how the distraction seduces you. Pay attention to what is going on with you when the distraction arises, so you can learn by your mistakes. When you find that you have been seduced by your distraction, think about what was going on before you succumbed. Notice it and write it down. What I noticed with my television watching it that I usually was seduced by the television while my wife was watching it. I seldom turned it on; I wasn’t seduced by a turned off television. But if I heard it, especially the canned laughter on the comedies, I always wanted to know what was so darned funny.

Once you know how it seduces you, the third step is figuring out how to defeat the distraction. When you have been tempted and successfully avoided the temptation, write that down, noting how you avoided it and what you told yourself to get back on track. Then give yourself a pat on the back. Overcoming distractions is achieved by becoming intentional man, keeping your dreams in the forefront of your mind.

Understanding how I was seduced by the television made it easy to defeat my distraction. I bought my wife a wireless headset. I didn’t hear the laugh tracks, and I wasn’t seduced. What I also did was make a conscious decision about what shows I wanted to see, and watched them with my wife. This made me feel better about intentionally “depriving” myself of the stuff that I don’t really enjoy, but watch only as a distraction.

What is your favorite distraction? Why not share with your fellow readers how you make sure this distraction doesn’t prevent you from making your dreams come true.

Is there some behavior you have that is totally non-productive, that robs you of your motivation, that drives you and others crazy! Have you tried to get rid of that behavior but find you just aren’t able to, try as you might? Have you quit it, finally you hope, only to find later it has sneaked back?

If so, you are probably making the same mistake behavioral scientists have discovered mess us so many of us. (This science is called change management.) These scientists have discovered the correct way to get rid of bad behaviors. The correct way is called “replace, don’t eliminate.” In other words, we don’t eliminate a non-desired behavior; we replace it with a desired behavior.

I’ll give you an example of how I used this scientific approach to make a healthy change in my life. My wife thought we were eating too much animal protein, so she told me she wanted to institute a policy of two meatless days, two days each week in which we would not eat animal protein. Though I agreed that it would probably be healthier to cut out some of the red meat I favor, it just seemed too drastic to me. “Go two days without my favorite food – inconceivable!”

I suggested that we instead institute two vegetarian days, two days in which we would eat vegetarian food. Once we looked at it that way, I immediately started thinking about what delicious vegetarian dishes I could make. For the first vegetarian day I cooked tofu curry with pineapple, a dish we frequently enjoyed when we ate out at our favorite Thai restaurant.

Though they seem like they have the same end result, meatless days and vegetarian days, the different way we perceive them makes all the difference to making good habits stick.

Replacing is more powerful than eliminating for three reasons:

1. Elimination feels like deprivation;
2. Nature abhors a vacuum – if you simply eliminate a behavior, who knows what will replace it;
3. Replacing opens you to exploring possibilities.

If your vision, that important change you want to make in your life, involves getting rid of a bad habit, like over eating, watching too much television, or smoking, rephrase it as something positive or as a desired behavior.

Suddenly you will feel more motivated to take the steps necessary to making it come true. And when you have motivation, you make your dreams come true.

In my last blog posting I showed why seeking your motivation from outside of yourself would generally be less than adequate in maintaining an effective level of motivation.

In today’s posting I present an alternative to getting your motivation from without. That alternative is taking charge of your own motivation.

How do you take charge of your own motivation? The way to do that is by creating your own motivation plan built upon your own personal motivators (those things which motivate you) and your own demotivators (those things that rob you of your motivation).

Then you use that plan to get your self motivated and to stay motivated, though the road blocks and the rough periods.

Your motivation plan is created by using the model for self motivation. This is the model:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

What the model is telling us is there are three things or factors that will impact your motivation to take the steps you need to take to make some important change in your life. The factors are your vision (that special change you want to make in your life), your successability (your confidence in your ability to make that change) and your environment, both your physical environment (where you do the work necessary to make the change) and your social environment (the people and organizations available to you).

If that were all the model told us it would be interesting to academics, but not of much help to us in the real world.  Thank heavens it tells us a lot more. It tells us that we can increase the motivational impact of any one of these three factors and automatically our motivation will increase.  Automatically!

And so we use the model for self motivation to make a motivational plan that will help us stay on track. In the motivational plan you plan exactly how you will increase your motivation by increasing the motivational impact of each of the three factors.

You can increase the motivational impact of your vision, the change you want to make, by making sure you are clear on exactly what your vision is, and by being aware of why it is important to you.

You can increase the motivational impact of your successability, your confidence that you have the ability to succeed in making the change, by strategies such as getting relevant training.

You can increase the motivational impact of your physical and social environment by strategies such as joining organizations of like minded people.

Learning how to create your own individualized motivational plan will take you far, as you take the steps you know you need to take to make your dreams come true.

It worked for me. I know it will work for you.

Those are strong words in that title. But strong words are called for if you are planning on getting your motivation from someone other than yourself. So long as you fail to motivate yourself, you may very well find that your goals are not being completed and your dreams aren’t coming true.

Why do I assert this so strongly? Because from my research on self motivation and my experience in talking to others and from my own life I see there are at least two very big problems with getting your motivation from someone else.

The first problem is what I refer to as the 24/7 problem. That person from whom you want to get motivated is not going to be with you 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You never know when you might need motivation.

Sometimes the need for motivation will arise because of a situation in your life. A plan you made didn’t work out and you are starting to question yourself. Someone else didn’t do what they were supposed to do and you wonder if you can ever count on other people to hold up their end of the deal. Sometimes the need for motivation will arise because you just aren’t in a good space. Whenever or why ever the need for motivation arises, you cannot guarantee that other person is going to be available to get you motivated and back on track.

That’s the first reason why getting your motivation from someone else isn’t the best tack.

The second reason is the uniqueness problem, the fact that each one of us is different. What motivates you is different from what motivates me. And what robs you of your motivation is different from what robs me of mine. And that’s a powerful reason why getting your motivation from someone else isn’t very effective. The only person who is going to take the time to figure out what motivates you, and what robs you of your motivation is you.

What someone else is going to give you is generic motivation, motivation that is focused on some perceived common ground for the average person. That’s like making a shirt for the average person. For some people it will fit perfectly, for others it will be baggy, and for others it will be a tight squeeze, maybe even too tight to fit over the shoulders.

So why put up with part time, ill fitting motivation, when you can create your own motivation. When you create your own plan of motivation, you know you will be able to implement it whenever the need arises; you are always available.  But just as important, you can be assured, because you made it, that it will fit you like a glove. It will take into account your likes and your dislikes, and yes, even your eccentricities. (We all have them.)

So if you want to make your dreams come true, make a promise to yourself to become motivated and stay motivated by learning how to motivate yourself. It’s all here on this webpage and in my soon to be released book, iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams. So why not sign up now for a free monthly newsletter that will start you on this path. Just put your email address in the box on the right of the screen.

It’s a step you won’t regret.

In my most recent posting I showed you how you can use your physical environment, one part of the third factor of the model for self motivation, to super charge your motivation. In today’s posting I will address the other part of your environment, your social environment.

Social environment means all the people who surround you and with whom you come in contact. It also means the people who are available to you, even if you aren’t in contact with them. Some examples of the people in your social environment are your spouse, your family, your friends, the people at work.

Organizations are groups of people, so we include organizations in the term social environment as well. Some examples of organizations in your social environment are professional organizations, service clubs, community colleges.  The list goes on and on.

As intentional people, which we need to be if we want to maximize our motivation, we intentionally use our social environment to enhance our motivation. Using myself as an example, my vision is me is an author and public speaker, teaching people how to motivate themselves so they can make their dreams come true. A large part of my social environment is Toastmasters, an organization that has given me experience, skill and camaraderie. If you are interested in public speaking, or just wish to get more comfortable speaking in public, check it out at www.Toastmasters.org.  I belong to two clubs, one is a regular club and the other one an advanced club, the members of which are all professional speakers.

I am also a member of a marketing group. This group, through its newsletter and by interactions with other members, teaches me the skills I need to market myself as a speaker and an author.  Having these two things, Toastmasters and my marketing group, in my social environment enhances my motivation.

I continually become more and more conscious of my social environment. My physical environment has pretty much stayed the same for the past two years, with the exception of the purchase of a new computer. Other than that, I use the same desk, in the same room, in the same house. My physical environment works well for me as it is, so changing it is not necessary, except for maybe once in a while cleaning up the mess.

My social environment, however, is continually in flux. I work with a publicist/expert/counselor. She is very experienced in book publishing and public speaking. She knows people who can do the things I need doing, like setting up an appropriate web page. She also is a source of encouragement.  This woman is an important part of my social environment, one that definitely enhances my motivation.

One important aspect of social environment are the organizations that can help you acquire new skills. If you want to make a change in your life, but feel you lack certain skills you need to make the change happen, investigate organizations that can provide you with those skills. Community colleges are an obvious source, but don’t forget on the job training, and training offered by professional associations.

No matter what your vision, there are ways for you to enhance your motivation by working on your social environment.