In my last blog posting I wrote about detractors, those things that rob us of our motivation, and a great big detractor, the distraction, which I described as anything that temporarily bumps us off our path.

I pointed out how distractions often involve automatic activities, like over eating, shopping, watching TV and drinking.  What do we do to overcome these automatic activities?

The first strategy: Become conscious of these behaviors.

This strategy addresses these automatic behaviors. What we do to resist them is use our intent. We need to bring these behaviors into the light of day.  We need to look at them, and understand them.  When we do that, we increase the likelihood of overcoming them.

Become aware of your distractions, and become aware of the role you play with them.  Pay attention to what is going on with you when you get distracted. 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.  When you have been tempted and successfully avoided it, write that down, too, and how you avoided it,  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 vision at the forefront.

The second strategy: building the runway.

This second strategy is based upon an interesting discovery I made about distractions. Distractions are much more seductive when I am doing tasks that aren’t really fun, that are down right drudgery.  But we all know that success is frequently built on drudgery.  Without the tasks, the goals aren’t met.  If the goals aren’t met, the vision will not come to fruition.  If some of the tasks involve drudgery, we need to do the drudgery.

Building the runway is how we accomplish these task. An airplane can’t get off the ground unless it has a runway.  So if you want to soar, you need to “build the runway.”  Building the runway is the means by which we keep ourselves motivated to do this boring, tedious, work.  The key is to make it important to us, even if it isn’t intrinsically motivating.

This strategy is based on a process in the literature on employee motivation known as “promoting integration”. Studies show that the way to get employees to do uninteresting work is:

1. provide a rationale for the uninteresting activity; and
2. acknowledge that people might not want to do the activity

How we promote integration in ourselves in self motivation is the basically the same, except that the two steps are flip flopped.  First, we acknowledge that this particular task is boring; that it indeed meets the definition of drudgery, but then second we remind ourselves of the rationale of the task.  We call to mind why we are doing this particular piece of drudgery.

Instead of focusing on the drudgery, we intentionally focus on how what we need to do will bring us closer to achieving one of our goals.  Remember, every task must clearly relate to a specific goal.  If you can’t relate the drudgery to the achievement of one of your written down goals, then you need to ask yourself why you are doing it, and figure out if your time couldn’t be better spent pursuing a task that is related to one of your goals.

As I was writing the script for my workshop, I had a stack of research material, and notes to myself, much more than I needed and with a lot of repetition.  Once I had written out an outline, I needed to go through all of the material, delete the redundant and the non-important, and organize the remainder.

It seemed to take forever.  What I had to do was acknowledge the reality, that I was building a runway so that I could soar, as a professional speaker and workshop presenter.  I acknowledged that what I needed to do was drudgery, but for me the key was to reaffirm, make clear in my mind, the nexus between this task and my vision.  I had to remind myself that once I sorted through all the material I would be that much closer to completing my book as well, which would, in turn, bring me even closer to my vision.

Some distractions are unavoidable, and rightly so.  For example, maybe you have a family – this can be a distraction.  But maybe it’s a healthy distraction, or if not, we can make it a healthy distraction.  A two year old may require intense hands-on time.  But a five or six year old can play by herself.  You have to make this determination for yourself, draw the boundaries as you think are appropriate for the situation.  But it’s important that you make the effort to establish these boundaries, make intentional decisions, and not just go on automatic.

That’s what motivating yourself is about. It’s about being conscious, and about being intentional. And about using the model for self motivation.

In my workshop I teach people not only how to increase their motivation by using the model for self motivation, but also how to deal with detractors, those things in our lives that rob us of our motivation. Anything that reduces your motivation to achieve your dreams I refer to as a detractor.

A detractor can negatively impact any of the three factors in the model for self motivation, your vision, your successability or your environment.

Just as our motivators, those things that increase our motivation, are personal, so too are our detractors.  This is why when you make your motivation plan you include in it your detractors. Examining our detractors is part of being a conscious person, one who takes charge of his motivation.

The detractor that has the most powerful effect on me is the distraction. It may be your most powerful detractor as well. Most of have distractions, though they may differ from person to person.

A distraction is anything that temporarily seduces you from your path.

You may refer to your distractions as temptations, time wasters, or delaying tactics.   Distractions are frequently exciting situations, though they are just as likely to involve passivity on your part.

Distractions frequently confront us with the choice of immediate versus long term gratification, that is, the immediate gratification of the distraction versus the long term gratification of achieving a goal, and ultimately making your dream come true.

Distractions may involve the seeking of immediate pleasure or avoidance of pain, at the cost of long-term stress. Examples include such things as alcohol, drug and food abuse, watching television at the expense of exercising, practicing unsafe sex, or overspending to avoid feeling deprived.

When you examine your distractions you will often find they are part of your “automatic” self; they are your unthinking, habituated activities.

Though distractions by their definition are temporary, don’t think they aren’t deadly to your motivation. Because along with them being temporary, they are also ubiquitous, ever present. They will tempt you every day, without fail.

A good example of this is my main distraction, the DVD. I am especially distracted by an action movie, even if I have seen it a couple of times already. Like most distractions, it is temporary; most action movies only last a little under two hours. However, also like most distractions, action DVD’s are always present. I have at least 15 in my cabinet, and on my way home from work I pass not only a video store, but also a blue box.

Distractions can prevent you from making your dreams come true, one day at a time. But like all detractors, there are strategies you can use to minimize the effect of distractions. In my next posting I will share with you some of my favorites.

Sometimes we are so pleased with our activity that we don’t notice we aren’t moving forward. Sometimes it happens because we don’t know what to do, so we get busy, just to be doing something. Sometimes we think we are doing activities that are moving us forward, but we are just plain wrong.

Neither is an effective way to achieving your dreams. Nor are they particularly motivating.

Not knowing why we are doing something can only make our motivation suffer. If we don’t see that our actions are going to have a payoff, then we are not going to do them. Why would we?  Payoff can mean many things; it can vary greatly. Sometimes it means getting pleasure, it can mean having a good time. But a bigger payoff is when we see we are getting closer to making our dreams come true.

Without motivation, motion stops.  Without motion, we don’t achieve our dreams. But it has to be productive movement.

So how do we avoid unproductive movement?

There are two steps to making sure our movement is productive:

First, have a plan. Spend time planning your movement. First you need to think. Think about where you want to go, and what you need to do to get there. And then you need to write it down. If you write it down you won’t be confused about what actions you planned. Writing it down also means anytime you want to work on your dream, all you need to do is look at your plan. You will be confident that anything on the plan will be progress and not merely movement.

Second, regularly evaluate your progress. No matter how far you have come, no matter how much work you have done, if it hasn’t taken you in the right direction, stop! If you have written a plan, but you still aren’t making progress, the immediate next step is to revise your plan. If you haven’t written a plan, your  immediate next step is to write one.

Evaluation takes a whole chapter is my book, iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams, but since it isn’t back from the printer yet, search though my blogs, and learn how to maximize the power of your evaluations.

Taking these two simple steps will guarantee your movement will be progress, so you can be sure you are moving toward your dream.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is quoted as saying, “The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.”

This isn’t too surprising. I have always found that beginning is the easy part, sustaining is the hard part.

It isn’t difficult to understand.  It’s human nature. When we get a new idea we are excited. It is something different. Very often the energy and time we spend on the new project is what takes us away from an existing project, one that has lost the luster of newness. And when the new project has in turn lost its luster, we will abandon it in favor of yet another new, exciting project.

The problem with this, of course, is that nothing ever gets done. Nothing ever gets done, because accomplishing anything worthwhile is going to take sustained, consistent effort. It is sustained, consistent effort that makes our dreams come true. And it’s motivation that allows you to make that consistent effort.

If this has been a problem for you, there are two steps you can take to overcome this natural tendency to continually move on to new projects. They aren’t too difficult, but they require that you consciously take control of your motivation. Remaining conscious is the key.

The first step is to take control of your motivation. No one else is going to do it for you, and even if they would, they aren’t going to do as good a job as you could.

There are many ways to take control of your motivation, but the one I teach involves you learning and applying the model for self motivation.  Once you understand why you act the way you do, you can use that knowledge to maximize your motivation and make that consistent effort you need to make.

The second step is to make a plan, a written plan of motivation, how you are going to motivate yourself and keep yourself motivated. Until it’s written down, it isn’t a plan, it’s an idea. I believe the best and easiest way to make a plan is, once again, by using the model for self motivation. It’s a practical way to make a plan, that is, it is easy to put into practice.

If this sounds like something you would like to check out, then review my other blog entries, and sign up for my monthly news letter. They will help you understand the model for self motivation, and learn how to apply it in your life.

Consistently working on a dream and making that dream come true are what you have to gain. What do you have to lose?

If you have been following my blog you know that my book will be going to the printer really soon, and my marketing will be taking off.  You will also know that I am a bit overwhelmed with marketing.

It is such a massive undertaking. There is all the marketing on the web, writing  blogs, sharing blogs, making the web page more optimized for search engines, email marketing, building my list. That’s the web based marketing.

There is also marketing via print media, classified ads, press releases, articles in my local paper. Then there’s radio and TV. And for every type of marketing, there seem to be hundreds of experts, each one providing me with pages of free content. There is so much content I barely have time to print it out, let alone read it, and certainly not enough time, it seems, to implement any of it!

Just thinking about that stack of print outs makes me want to close down this blog and go play my new banjo-uke.

But I don’t. Instead I use the model for self motivation to stay on track toward making my dreams come true.

I realize that one reason I am losing my motivation is because my successability has been severely impacted by this over abundance of information. I know there is great information in the stack, but I don’t see how in its present state, a large stack of papers, I can access it.

So I need to get it organized. That’s the first step. And once I get the stack organized I need to get myself organized. That means figuring out a plan for marketing my book. And it means writing it down.

Once I get organized like this, breaking that amorphous mass of papers into topics, so that I can efficiently access the wealth of it, and breaking down marketing into its component parts, I feel once again in control.

That’s what successability is about, being in control of yourself and of your environment.

Once I get back in control, I know my motivation will soar.

This is the second in a series of postings showing how you can use the model for self motivation to achieve specific goals. In my last posting I showed how the model could be used for weight loss. In today’s posting I will show how the model can be used to give you motivation to get involved in an exercise program.

Once again, here is the model:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

The model explains that your motivation is related to your vision (that special change you want to make in your life, in this case, establishing an exercise program), your successability (your confidence in your competence, that is, how confident you are that you are able 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 any of the three factors, your vision, successability or environment, will automatically positively impact your motivation.

We’ve all heard that a healthy life style includes some form of exercise, at a minimum of a half hour three times a week. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but because we are all busy with the roles we play in our lives, many of us do not get even the minimum. We just aren’t motivated to make it happen.

So what can we do about it? We can apply the model for self motivation.

In order for our vision, the first factor, to be motivating, it needs to be valuable to us. It doesn’t matter if it is valuable to our mates, to our family or  to our friends. If it isn’t valuable to us, we aren’t going to be motivated to make it come true. So the first thing to do is to figure out why it is valuable to us, and write those reasons down. Writing it down is magical; it makes those reasons more powerful.

Perhaps the best way to make physical activity more valuable is to make it fun. You won’t need a heck of a lot of motivation if the physical activity you choose to do is fun. My main exercise is road biking. I really enjoy it, so I don’t need much motivation to climb on and go for a two hour ride every Sunday. Taking the time to find a physical activity that you find enjoyable is time well spent.

Successability is the second factor of self motivation. It tells us that the more confident we are that we can do that which we want to do, the more motivated we will be to go after it. So what happens if you aren’t particularly confident about your abilities? You may consider finding a different activity. I wanted to play tennis, but after six months of private lessons, with no discernible improvement, I found I wasn’t looking forward to playing tennis, understandably.  I found a different sport and re-found my motivation.

One way to make sure that a lack of skill doesn’t rob you of your motivation is to change your expectations. Notice, I did not say lower your expectations; I said change them.  If you like playing tennis, but don’t think you will ever be able to win a tournament, then you need to adjust your attitude. Go out and play for fun; don’t think you need to win. I don’t know if I will ever compete in a bike race, but I don’t really care. I am happy if I get a really good aerobic workout.

Environment is the third factor that determines whether you will be motivated. I encourage you especially to use your social environment to help you achieve your dreams. Your social environment would include organizations of like minded people involved in your activity. When you join such an organization, you get encouragement and companionship from the other members. You will also get training, so you improve, and thereby increase your confidence. There are organizations for just about any athletic activity you are interested in. Local government frequently sponsor inexpensive sports clinics or league competitions. The internet is a great source for finding them.

No matter what activity you choose, using the model for self motivation is a great way to increase your motivation to get active and to keep being active.

The model for self motivation can be used for any dream or goal you have, but one of the most popular uses is for weight loss.

Here’s how Ben, with some coaching from me, used the model for weight loss.

Here is the model:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

The model explains 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 that you are able 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.

Ben had come to me because he was trying to lose weight but wasn’t succeeding. It seems he would lose around 5 pounds but then he’d stopped losing and the weight would return. When he told me this I explained that even a little bit of motivation would get you started on most goals. After a while, however, after the initial excitement faded, and after you had hit a bump or two, that little bit of motivation was not enough to keep you consistently doing the things you needed to do to achieve your dream.

We needed to increase Ben’s motivation.

First we looked at Ben’s vision. I asked him why he wanted to lose the weight. Ben explained his wife was concerned because diabetes ran in his side of the family, and she didn’t want that to happen to him. I explained that in order for his vision, that change he wanted to make, to be motivational, it had to be important to him.

It didn’t matter that it was important to his wife. Ben needed a reason it was important to him. After thinking about it for a while, Ben shared with me that he used to be a pretty good athlete, 15 years and 30 pounds ago. He explained further that his two sons were getting to the age where they would be participating in organized sports. Ben wanted to be there, coaching his sons. And what he didn’t want was to be their “fat dad.”

Now we had a reason Ben’s vision was important to him. As a result Ben’s motivation to lose the weight got stronger.

Next we looked at Ben’s successability, his confidence in his ability to make the change. Ben just kept going on and on about how long he’d have to cut back on his food to drop 30 pounds. Looking at the goal as 30 pounds of weight overwhelmed Ben. I pointed out that 30 pounds was lost one pound at a time, by taking control of your eating one day at a time. Ben agreed one pound was no big deal. He also agreed restricting his diet for one day was not a big deal either.

That’s a great strategy to increasing your confidence – breaking your goal down into its component parts. Each little step will be a lot less overwhelming, so you won’t be as scared or as likely to give up. Breaking it down helped Ben to become motivated and stay motivated.

To increase the motivational impact of Ben’s social environment, I suggested Ben look to organizations made up of similar minded people, from whom he could get encouragement and strategies to help him lose the weight. After visiting a couple of meetings of Weight Watchers, Ben signed up.  He was using his social environment to help him achieve his goal.

No matter what change you want to make in your life, using  the model for self motivation will help you stay motivated to keep taking the steps you need to take to make that dream come true.

If there is a particular dream you have that you are having trouble achieving and you would like me to show you how the model can work for you, please post a comment below and I can write a posting explaining how it can work for you.

My First Guest Blog, by Mary Wilkes:

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”  Do you remember how you answered that question as a child?  I had lots of answers!  I wanted to be Davy Crockett, and then a race horse jockey, a veterinarian, a writer… There was one thing, though, that I never wanted to be – and that was a “grown-up.”  Too many of the grown-ups I knew seemed to have lost some kind of spark.  They worried a lot and they didn’t have much fun.  They had done all the interesting things they would ever do in life, and now they “worked hard” and had “responsibilities.”  When I thought about growing up to be like them, I got a bad feeling in my stomach.  I developed an enduring desire not to “become a grown-up.”  Fortunately, I also had a lot of teachers and role models who were full of life energy, and they showed me that feeling young and vibrant has nothing to do with years.  From them I learned four things in particular that I think are worth passing along.

The first is to do things that scare you.  Watch kids – they understand this.  Think of all the things we would never do or learn if we didn’t do it scared!  When my daughter Emily was 13 years old she went away to an adventure camp.  I was nervous, but I wasn’t going to say anything to put a damper on her fun.  When she came home from camp she grinned as she handed me a photograph.  “Look mom, this is me walking backward off the 90-foot cliff.”  Sure enough, there she was – tiny against an immense sky, holding onto a rope that looked like a string, leaning backward over the edge of a cliff.  Even the picture made my hands sweat!  Later she confided in me, “I was so scared – I was crying before I got up there, and a lot of people didn’t go at all, but I knew if I didn’t do it I would always wish I had tried.”

Emily and I both had a great role model in my mom – she completed her doctorate when she was 57 years old, and then in 1988, at the age of 62, she accepted a faculty appointment at Texas Women’s University – she told me later that the first semester she lay in bed every night and thought “oh, no, what have I done?”  She retired 10 years later as professor emerita, and she has been taking art classes for the ten years since she retired.

Second, do it before you are ready.  Trust me, you will never have enough time… or money… or energy… to pursue your dreams.  When I came out of college I fell into the “wait until you are ready” trap for nearly 20 years.  I had planned to go for an advanced degree right away, but I got married and I didn’t see a way to pursue graduate school and work at the same time.  Then I had children, and I REALLY didn’t have enough time OR energy OR money for school.  And if by some miracle I did finish, it was sure to take years!  Finally, my aunt said to me, “Mary, the next five years will go by whether or not you register for school.  And if you don’t register you surely won’t make any progress toward a degree!”  I thought about that, and I mustered up and registered for graduate school.  I paid for one semester at a time.  I never knew if I would be able to afford the next one, but somehow every time the money was there.  At the end of four years I had a Master’s Degree in Social Work, the credential I needed to pursue the counseling career I had dreamed of.

Third, risk failure!  SO WHAT if you make a mistake or look foolish!  The worst you can get is a chance to try again. If you do something perfectly the first time, you already knew how to do that thing – you haven’t learned anything new.  Your “failures” direct you about where to focus your attention, and they give you clues about what might work better.  One of the people I most admire logged failure after failure in his life.  He had failed in business twice by the age of 25.  Before he was 50 years old he had been defeated in six state and national elections, and had lost a bid to become a vice presidential candidate.  Then… at the age of 51, Abraham Lincoln became one of our most revered and respected Presidents.  What if he had given up after one of those failures?

Fourth – and this is essential – stay in touch with your authentic self, the part of you that dreams, that believes anything is possible, that knows how to play.  This is where your passion lies.  Too many of us have closed the door on our authentic selves for one reason or another, saying “I guess I can never do that now.”  When we do this, we lose our energy and our hope – life becomes flat.  The flame of our passion flickers and dies.  We may avoid our fears, but we become unable to live our dreams.  And there is always an element of fear involved in pursuing our dreams.  When Bob asked me to do a guest post for his blog, I was at first happy and excited, and then I started feeling a big charge of anxiety.  My inner critic had a field day – “it sounds sappy,” “I sound like an elementary school teacher” and so on…  After a little wallowing, I laughed out loud at myself, said “well of course,” and then went back to writing.  As I wrote, the energy of fear shifted into interest and excitement.  And I think this is how it happens – we say “oh, this is fear,” and if we don’t run away our experience changes.  Our soul catches fire.  In the words of Marie Louise Von Franz, “If a human being takes an action, the soul takes an action.  It does nothing if you do nothing; but if you build a fire, it gathers wood; if you make a boat, it becomes the ocean.”  In the end, it is up to you.  What do you want to be?  What do you want to do?    What are you waiting for?

Mary Wilkes has been with the Florida State University EAP since its inception in 1995, and stepped into the role of Director in September, 2008.  She has over 20 years of clinical experience, and has been providing Employee Assistance services since 1988.  Her work with FSU Office of Employee Assistance Services includes consultation with administrators and supervisors, training, resource development, and providing personal assistance to FSU faculty and staff and their family members.  She coordinates FSU Mediation services and is part of the campus Threat Assessment Team and other committees addressing campus safety and mental health concerns.  This year she is serving as President of the International Association of EAP’s in Education.

She has taught classes in the FSU College of Social Work; and has presented in a number of venues on topics such as Communication, Conflict Resolution, Team Dynamics, Addictions, Compassion Fatigue, and Managing Change and Transition.