One of the most important lessons I learned while I was researching motivation is that authenticity is motivating.

Authenticity is the condition or quality of being authentic. The definition of authentic, according to the Oxford Dictionary, is of undisputed origin; genuine. The dictionary further informs us that the origin of the word is from the Greek word authentikos meaning ‘principal or genuine’.

Abraham Maslow was a psychologist who is considered the father of motivation. He created a hierarchy of needs or motivators. His hierarchy has five levels. At the bottom of the hierarchy are the physiological needs, such as food, water, and air. The next level up are the safety needs, the need to keep your body, resources, employment and property secure. In the third level up are the love or belonging needs, the need to have friends and family and the need for sexual intimacy. The fourth level up is esteem needs, confidence in yourself, the respect of others, and a sense of achievement. The fifth and final level is called self actualization. In describing this level, Maslow said, “What a man can be, he must be.”

Maslow asserted that you have to achieve the lower levels before moving up to the higher levels, for example, if you don’t have food to eat (level one) you would be motivated to find food, but would not be motivated by a need for friends (the third level).

Maslow saw being authentic, being the genuine you, as the ultimate motivator, that which would motivate you after all your other needs were met.

Given how motivating being authentic is, you would think that there could be nothing more motivating than working on becoming who you genuinely are, your authentic self. But this does not seem to be the case for most of us. Instead, many of us will work for years for someone else, living in roles assigned to us by someone else, rather than being or working toward being who we authentically are.

I’ve often asked myself why this is. I came up with several reasons. One major reason, I believe, is that some of us don’t have any clue who we authentically are. We have gone through life meeting other peoples’ expectations, starting with our family’s, then our friends’ (peer pressure) and then a spouse. Others of us may have a clue, or maybe a really strong idea, of who we genuinely are, but we don’t believe we have permission to be that person; no one has ever given us permission and we don’t realize or believe we can give permission to ourselves.

Maybe Maslow is right and the reason so many of us do not work toward becoming actualized is we haven’t yet achieved, in our minds anyway, the four lower levels in the hierarchy.

But it seems to me that we can be working on meeting those lower needs, and still be working on finding out who we are and becoming that person.

Discovering who you really are may be the most important discovery you ever make. When you are genuine, when you are doing the things that fulfill you, the things you love, you will have more energy, you will have greater persistence, you will have greater creativity and you will have more joy in your life.

I’m writing this on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. I have the day off from my 9 to 5 job, and I want to be productive today, as I did nothing yesterday, except clean, cook, eat and relax with family and friends. Tomorrow I will go out early and get some landscape photography done, so today is marketing day. No, I’m not going shopping; I have to work on marketing my soon to be printed book.

But as I plan to get started, I find I don’t have the energy, so I drive out to the local co-op and get a cup of coffee. I am in drastic need of motivation. As I drive back, it hits me, I need to look at the document I prepared while I was listening to the Tony Robbins recording on goal setting.

Robbins states on the recording that it’s wonderful to have goals, because without goals you won’t accomplish much.  Goals by themselves, however, are not enough.  You need to know why you want to accomplish these goals. The why provides the emotion. And it’s the emotion that gets us connected with the goals.  When we are connected with the goals they will motivate us. Absent the connection, there is a degree of separation between us and the goals, and they won’t have a motivating impact.

So as soon as I got home, I started writing this blog entry. I wanted to get it down before I lost it. I was already motivated, at least as far as writing this blog. Sometimes the hardest part of writing two blog entries a week is thinking about something to write on. Having a topic is a rush and is its own motivation.

But after it is written I will immediately look at what I had written down as to my why’s. I know it will get me motivated again, as it has done so many times before.

So there are three points you can take from what happened to me on Friday morning:

1.  Keep in the forefront your why for all your goals. Help those goals get you motivated.

2.  Take advantage of your social environment. Mine includes Tony Robbins, along with a bunch of other really helpful people. It doesn’t matter that I don’t know Tony and he doesn’t know me (not yet anyway).

3.  Don’t wait! When inspiration hits, get it down. Do it while it’s hot or it might disappear.

Happy motivating!

With the holidays coming, many people will be struggling to keep on their diets.

And it’s not just the delicious food, it’s also because of what happens in the holidays with our families. The holidays can be stressful. Some of us will be stressed because we are visiting family, others will be stressed because we don’t have family. Whatever the reason for the stress, many of us will respond by overeating.

So how do you stay motivated when all this delicious food stares you in the face, the crispy skin of the turkey, the sweet marshmallow brown sugar coating on the sweet potatoes. Especially when we have to deal with fussy kids, and the pompous brother, and the complaining mother who never appreciates all the effort you put into the meal.

It’s not going to be easy, keeping our eating under control, but it is very important. To help you with your battle, here are 7 hints to keep you on your diet during the holidays.

1. Remember the why. At some point you made a decision to diet; you decided that you needed to lose some excess weight. The reasoning that went into that decision still holds true.  So remember what motivated you to make that decision. Remind yourself of the positives of losing, and the negatives of not losing it. Write them down on a 3×5 card, and carry it with you so you can refresh your memory when ever you are feeling weak.

2. Don’t do it alone. We are much more powerful when we have like minded people encouraging us and cheering us on. Take a minute now to think of who those people are in your life. You can use these people, your social environment, to keep you motivated. In addition to a family member, do you know of someone in your Weight Watchers group who you can call to help get you through the holidays?

3. Structure your physical environment to enhance your motivation. Have healthy food available. It probably won’t tempt you as much as the “bad” food will, but it will help you control the mouth hunger.  Remember the mantra, “It’s better to replace than to eliminate.” If you’re the cook, you control the kitchen, which is a powerful place.  But even if you aren’t the cook, you can bring healthy treats for yourself. Think twice about counting on someone else to do it for you.

4. Look for opportunities to leverage your motivation. Leveraging our motivation means finding some simple way to exercise control, which simple way results in a greater control over ourself and our motivation. (In my next blog I will explain this concept in greater detail.)

5. Keep a good attitude about the holidays. Stress is in your head; it’s your response to the situation. Try to remember when holidays were fun, when your pompous brother was just a funny little kid, and all you did on the holidays was have fun.

6. Don’t give up the war just because you lose a battle. Don’t think that eating one cookie or one piece of pie means you are a total failure and you might as well face the fact you will never lose the weight, so you might as well keep eating.  You know better – climb back onto the wagon.

7. Stay conscious. Animals go from stimulus to action. Humans have the ability to take a middle step, contemplation. It is in this middle step where motivation lives. Make as nice a space for it as possible. You do not want to be on automatic pilot.

The holidays can be stressful, but with these seven hints, you can make sure they don’t defeat you.

I recently received an email about a free webinar addressing the use of YouTube. If you are like me you get several offers of free training webinars every week, if not daily. Usually I delete them as I would rather spend the time working than listening to someone else talk about working. But it was on a topic that I was interested in.

I have done several YouTube videos, and though I am pleased with how they came out, I know I can do better.  And I wasn’t pleased with the number of hits they are getting. Well, it turns out that even though a YouTube video is part of your marketing, it’s a part of your marketing that you need to market. You need to market your marketing videos. Metamarketing I’m calling it.

So, since I obviously needed to take my videos to the next step, I signed up for the free webinar. It was put on by topinternetconsulting.com They are a training company, and one of their products is a training program, which this webinar was advertising, But it was a good marketing webinar, in that it provided a lot of great material.

I was not disappointed. And the interesting thing is, the more I listened the more motivated I became. I can’t wait to apply everything I learned in the webinar. I was so motivated, in fact, that I signed up for the training. The price is quite reasonable, and of course, there was a discount for participants in the webinar.

So how come I was motivated? When I answer such a question, I always like to turn to the model for self motivation that I created. I gives me a context upon which I can answer the question, but it also provides the possibility that I will discover something new, some way I can improve the model I created.

Here’s the model:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

This means that your motivation is related to your vision (that special change you want to make in your life), your successability (your confidence in your competence, that is, your ability to make the change) and your environment, both your physical environment (where you will do the work necessary to make the change) and your social environment (the people and organizations available to you).

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

This webinar impacted two to the three factors of motivation, successability and environment. I am using my social environment to increase my successability.

By taking advantage of this webinar, by making it part of my social environment, I positively impacted my successability, my confidence in my ability. This what happens when we use our social environment to learn new skills.

With the information I learned in the webinar I feel much more confident in my ability to make effective videos, videos that will be viewed and will direct people to my webpage who potentially will purchase my book and other products and attend my workshops.

This is how the model works. The three factors are not independent. They are interdependent, each positively impacting the others. This was as great a lesson for me as what I learned about YouTube. As I write this blog, and reflect on the webinar I realize the presenters were very skillful users of both factors. Twice in the webinar they offered a survey in which participants were asked whether they felt confident they could create a good YouTube video.  And they let it be known they were available for questions and concerns, in effect inviting participants to join their social environment.

This was a great lesson in marketing, both in reaching prospective clients by videos, and by motivating them with the model for self motivation.

Executive functioning is a phrase that I have been reading about in the literature concerning children with learning disabilities. Executive functioning involves activating, orchestrating, monitoring, evaluating and adapting different strategies to accomplish different tasks, in other words, the ability to self regulate your behavior.

One article I read in the NY Times describes it as “the ability to think straight: to order your thoughts, to process information in a coherent way, to hold relevant details in your short-term memory, to avoid distractions and mental traps and focus on the task in front of you.” The article describes a school in which, as part of a study, kindergarten aged children are being taught executive functioning. Initial findings are that it takes a lot of work to teach this, and the best way for them to learn it is through structured, imaginative, play.

In the study, these young children were learning how to tolerate frustration, learning how to share toys, and learning how to wait for their slower class mates to finish up assignments before they could move, as a group, to newer and more fun experiences. They were learning how to control what they did, rather than letting their emotions make the decisions for them.

It made me thing about what I refer to as intentional man. In my writing about the model for self motivation, the opposite of intentional man is automatic man. Because executive functioning is the ability to regulate your thinking, to be in charge of your thoughts, implied in this is that by controlling your thoughts, you are able to control your actions.

Intentional man is not put off course by distractions, stays focused on his tasks, and processes information without being unduly influenced by his emotions.

The ability to control our actions is one thing that distinguishes humans from other animals. Animals automatically react to a stimulus; when they do this, it’s called instinct. Humans, on the other hand, have the ability to operate in that middle ground between stimulus and action. I emphasize the word ability, because we don’t always operate in it, and some of us operate in it less than others. Never the less, we do all have the ability. By being aware of that middle ground, and our ability to operate in that special place, we can be responsible, in other words, able to respond, instead of just reacting. When we do that we can do all the things we need to do to become motivated and stay motivated.

I wonder if these children who are learning executive functioning will grow up knowing how to motivate themselves. Hopefully they will be unlike so many of us who do not, and consequently are unable to achieve the things we dream about. I am hopeful.

As I was researching and writing my book, iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams, I read many wonderful theories on how to design instruction to motivate my learners.  One of my favorites, perhaps because it was designed by Dr. Keller, who was a professor at FSU where I got my Masters in Education, is the ARCS theory.  A-R-C-S is an acronym for the four elements Professor Keller determined were primarily responsible for how motivated a learner is.

A = Attention

R = Relevance

C = Confidence

S = Satisfaction

Attention means you capture and maintain your learner’s attention; you can do this by having concrete examples, and having the learners be involved in the training, rather than being passive participants.

Relevance means you show your learners the material they are learning is relevant to them, applicable to their lives; you can do this by telling them exactly how the material will benefit them.

Confidence means that you design the learning so that the learners have confidence in themselves, that they can learn the instruction. One way to do this is making sure your instruction is crystal clear.  Another way is to make sure that you have reasonable expectations of your learners, so they have opportunities to be successful.

Satisfaction means you provide opportunities for your learners to apply what you have taught them to their lives … application in the real world.  This was done in almost all my classes in my masters program.  Instead of taking final exams we had projects in which we applied the lessons we had learned in real life situations, thereby raising our self esteem and sense of achievement.

When an  instructional designer, who may or may not be the teacher, designs instruction, she uses this model to make sure her students are motivated to learn.

The ARCS model was one of the models upon which I based my model for self motivation. One element in particular applies to what you need to do when you want to motivate yourself. It’s the third element, confidence. If you want to motivate yourself, and keep yourself motivated, it is very important that you believe you have the ability to succeed at the task you are attempting. In the model for self motivation this concept has become successability, your confidence in your competence. My book, iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams, which will be published in time for Christmas, has several strategies by which you can make sure your confidence in your ability stays high.

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Get started today in making your dreams come true!

For much of my schooling I was an unmotivated student. I was smart enough to grasp just about anything my teachers would throw at me, but I really didn’t care about most of it. But because I was smart enough, and because, I can’t help but thinking, the teachers had pretty low expectations of us students, I did well enough in school.

I did well enough, in fact, that when I did really well on the PSAT (thinks to inheriting my Mom’s test taking genes) I was recruited by the engineering school at a prestigious mid-western university.

And that’s when the fun began. I didn’t know how to study, never having done it, and I sure didn’t know how to motivate myself to learn how. I am sure there were resources for students like me, but I wasn’t motivated to even find out. And so first quarter I got a 2.0 GPA, which was followed by a 1.75 the second quarter, and I finished up the year with a 1.5 GPA. I did not return for my second year.

After many years, I found a subject I loved, history, found the reward in working hard, and reversed my educational career. I received my  BA, and quickly followed it up with my JD. Later in my career I returned to school and received my masters in education. It was while working for that degree that I discovered motivation.

I consider myself lucky that I found something I loved. The funny thing is I hated history when I was in elementary, middle and high school. But I had a great teacher at my second college, who showed us how history is created, and why history was important. I found out that history is more than just a bunch of dates when unconnected things happened.  History is patterns. History is cause and effect. History is relationships. Suddenly history made sense to me. It wasn’t just memorization.

And that brings me to the first rule for getting and keeping a student motivated – make the learning relevant.

Relevance means you show your student learners the material they are learning is relevant to them, applicable to their lives; you can do this by telling them exactly how the material will benefit them. For me the benefit in finding out why history is important and how it is made, is that it made history much more interesting to me, and I was able to better understand the things that were going on in the present, what would eventually become history. When we have this connection, this understanding of the why, we are more motivated to following through with what we need to do to make sure learning occurs. In my case following through meant going to the library and doing the readings.

Other ways to make a subject matter relevant is by assigning the student a project in which she will apply the information she is learning. This works at the front end and at the back end. At the front end, as the material is being presented, she will be motivated to be receptive to learning it, as she knows there is a purpose for it, the application of it when she does the project. At the back end, as she is doing her project, she will be motivated to retain the information, as she experiences the benefits of having the knowledge.

In my case, I got both front end and back end benefits. I knew I would have to write an undergraduate thesis, so I knew I had better pay attention when I was reading and listening to my professors. And, as I was writing it, I saw how what I had learned about history, and how history is created, was relevant to the paper I was writing.

Relevance is only one of the four factors of motivation relating to learning. Stay tuned to learn about the other three.

If you have had a teacher who motivated you in school, why not share with your fellow readers how that special teacher accomplished that, by leaving a comment below.

For those of you who have been reading my blog, you know that I am having troubles with marketing. I loved writing my book, and I would love to start on my second.  I also love doing workshops, and doing presentations, but for me, marketing just isn’t as much fun. And, I have had to face the fact that working a full time job, as a lawyer, drains much of my energy and time.

So I haven’t been really pleased with my efforts in marketing. Consequently, I made a decision. I’ll be eligible for early retirement next June, so I told my boss that I am going to avail myself of that opportunity.

I know I am lucky to have such an opportunity. But I also know that I am taking a risk. I have a well paying pleasant job, and I work with a lot of good people whom I enjoy. I am cutting myself loose from that to pursue my dream of becoming a professional speaker, workshop presenter and author. But it’s not so risky that I am freaking out and worrying myself to death.

Now that I have set the deadline for this steady paycheck, I feel motivated like never before to learn all I can about marketing. I want the book to be at the printer yesterday. I will start sending out the premier issue of my monthly self motivation newsletter.  (If you want to get on the mailing list, it’s easy to sign up right here on this page.)

I am getting organized in my marketing, and writing it down. I purchased a zippered leather three ring binder for my marketing plan.  I got the fancy binder because I like having something that won’t get lost under a pile of papers. In the very front go my goals list which I review every day (thanks Tony R). The rest of the binder I broke up into five sections, one for each aspect of my marketing.

1. Marketing for me as a speaker and motivations workshop presenter
2. Marketing my book
3. Marketing for my public speaker training workshops
4. Products to sell
5. Products for marketing.

Because of these three actions, my motivation to market my book is at an all time high.

There are three lessons about motivation to be learned from this.

Lesson #1: Set your risk level at a moderate place to increase your motivation. Too low and you will never accomplish anything. Accomplishing stuff increases your confidence, and, as we know from the model for self motivation, confidence in your competence is motivating.

Lesson #2: Setting a deadline is motivating. The sense of urgency will stimulate you, but also it will serve as a check against procrastination. No longer will you be able to use the excuse, “What’s one more day?” My favorite marketing coaches, Bill Glazer and Dan Kennedy, always harp on taking action NOW. If you wait till it is perfect, you may miss the key opportunity and possibly you will never take action.

Lesson #3: Getting organized is motivating. Anytime I have time to do some work, all I need to do is look at the binder and I get focused. When I prepare my goals for the month, all I need to do is look at the binder, and they jump out at me. I always have something to do, and I know any task I take from my binder is furthering my goals.

When you are motivated life is so much more fun and you get so much more done. Use these three lessons to make your life more productive and fun.