“She loved even the hard work – not only for the result it bought but for its own sake.” This is a quote from In the Woods, by Tana French, a wonderful, sort of mystery, set in Ireland.

I like this quote because it is an example of a theory of motivation developed for high performance athletes, called the Resonance Performance Model.  RPM was developed by Dr. Doug Newburg at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, after interviews with hundreds of high performing athletes.

There are three elements of RPM:

•          the dream,

•          extensive preparation,

•          a strategy to overcome obstacles.

It is the second element, extensive preparation, that is relevant to the quote.

Preparation involves all the activities you engage in to make your dream happen.  But for a high performing athlete this preparation is not drudgery; it is not something the athlete is compelled to do.  Instead it is something she wants to do, something that has real meaning to her, something that is indeed a integral part of her dream.  The incredible amounts of time the high performing athlete spends in preparation makes the dream a part of her every day existence.

Getting to the place where you love the hard work is possible for those of us who are not highly functioning athletes, and is even possible outside of sports. But if you want to be motivated by the hard work, you need to be doing what you love. And that may require you to put some work into finding out what you love. Authenticity is what motivates you to love the hard work, doing the work that you were meant to do.

I speak to so many people who want to love the hard work, but don’t love it. Instead they do the hard work for the results the work provides, money, prestige, power, whatever.

I used to be at that place, too. But I didn’t like it, so I put hard work into finding out what I could do professionally that would get me to that place, that place where I loved the hard work it would take to get successful in my profession.

The hard work I put in involved buying a book called What Color is Your Parachute, and not only reading it, but working it. After completing it, a process that took over six months, I found my ideal career. I have recommended the book to every person who has ever complained to me about their job.

If you are at a place where you are not loving the hard work you do, and wouldn’t mind working hard to find a place where you would love the hard work, I recommend the book to you.

But don’t just buy it, read it. And don’t just read it, work it.

I did it, and I am grateful every day.

I was chatting with someone recently at a charitable event and the discussion turned to what was going on in my life. I gave my “elevator speech” about how we all have dreams, but so few were making them come true, because we aren’t motivated. And the reason we aren’t motivated, I shared, is because we don’t know how to motivate ourselves; we were never taught how.

Before I had a chance to tell him that my book teaches people that skill, how to motivate themselves, he said the reason people don’t make their dreams come true is because they have no self –discipline.

I’ve thought about what he said, and I have to agree with him, in part.  I do think the converse is true, if you are self disciplined it makes it much easier to achieve your dreams. However, even self disciplined people will flounder if the factors of self motivation, the vision, successability and environment, are working against them.

A larger problem with his assertion is that saying your dreams aren’t coming true because you have no self discipline isn’t very helpful to you if you want to make the dreams come true. Self discipline is part of a person’s character. You can’t see a person’s self discipline. You may see evidence of it, by what the person does, what a person accomplishes, and how a person stays on track. But because self discipline is not a behavior, you don’t help a person just by pointing out they are not disciplined, because there isn’t much a person can do about it.

And excusing your failure to achieve your dreams on your lack of discipline becomes just that, an excuse. It just rationalizes your actions or lack of actions. Lack of self discipline is a result; it isn’t a cause. And to change results you need to change causes. It could take years of psychotherapy to figure out why you are not self disciplined.

It’s much easier to figure out the reasons why you aren’t motivated. And it’s much easier to take action to undo those reasons.

Those actions are learning and using the model for self motivation. If you are not motivated, the model for self motivation explains how come you aren’t motivated, and it tells you what you can do to become motivated.

The model for self motivation helps you motivate yourself. That’s why the model is so important, because it is practical, you can put it into practice in your life.

Is there some dream you have that you aren’t making come true? Learn all about the model for self motivation, and learn how to apply it to your dream.

Self motivation, like self discipline won’t just magically appear. But you can make yourself self motivated – by using the model for self motivation.

When I think about motivation the image in my head involves trains. I have always loved trains, perhaps because they remind me of my Dad. Every Christmas he would set up the Lionel trains, the big ones, with three rails, to circle around the Christmas tree and all over the living room. I’m sure it drove my Mom crazy, making her living room such a cluttered mess, but she was a good sport, since it only happened once a year.

In my image of motivation, I see a string of cars in a siding. There are box cars, tankers, refrigerator cars and flat cars. They are just sitting there, sitting there going nowhere. The goods inside the cars are stuck in the siding. Being stuck in the siding they aren’t doing anyone any good; they have no value so long as they stay in the siding.

Then the locomotive comes along, and backs into the siding. It hooks up to the cars, reverses its engines, and pulls those cars out of the siding. It pulls those cars into the city and into the markets in the city. Once the goods in the cars get into the market, they can be bought and sold; they have value.

This is the same thing that happens with motivation. The cars represent your dreams. As long as they are stuck in the sidings of your mind, they are without value; they are merely dreams, merely wishful thinking.

But hook those dreams up to motivation and bring them to the market place, and suddenly they have value. They become more than dreams, they become real!

Dreams can be wonderful in their own right; they can make life more fun, more tolerable. But how much better is a dream that is valuable, that is coming true.

Add motivation to your dreams, and make them real.

We all know we are supposed to get exercise. But, sometimes we don’t; we’re too busy, there are other more fun things to do, or we want to just relax. The bottom line is, we aren’t motivated enough to actually get going.

When you are feeling this way, here are five tips to boost up your self motivation so you can live the healthy life you want to live.

1. Know why being physically active is valuable to you. The why is important. Bring your heart in to play, instead of just your mind. Are you trying to lose weight? Are you trying to get heart healthy? Want to increase your social life? Want to live longer? Want to burn off calories so you can eat more?  Whatever your why, write it down.

2. Think of the consequences of NOT getting enough exercise. Weigh gain? Just don’t feel as good? Don’t look as good?

3. Find some type of workout that is fun for you. The more fun it is, the more likely you will do it. If it isn’t fun, every time you need to exercise you will be forcing yourself. This is not motivational! Taking the time to find a fun physical activity is well worth it.

4. Join an organization based upon your preferred exercise. We all have a need for society. Plus, a structured time for your exercise will make it less likely that exercise will just slip your mind. There are social organizations for just about any athletic endeavor you can think of. Local governments often have intramural activities for their residents.

5. Take a clinic or get coaching to gain skills in your sport. The better you are at your sport, the more likely you are to keep doing it.  Coaching will prevent you from stagnating. Stagnation is a motivation killer!

Exercise has many benefits. But you have to do it; thinking about exercise does nothing for you. Use these five tips to boost your self motivation to exercise, and make sure you are living a healthy lifestyle.

I am frequently asked whether a person can use the model for self motivation to achieve some particular dream. The dream I am being asked about might deal with health issues, like weight loss, or exercise. It might relate to a career, like starting a new business or finding a new job. Sometimes the dream will involve financial matters, like getting out of debt or saving for retirement.

My answer is always the same. No matter what your dream, if you are having trouble consistently doing the activities you need to do to make the dream come true, more than likely you aren’t motivated. And if you’ve lost your motivation, the best way to get it back is by using the model for self motivation.

You may have discovered that getting started on some new dream is easy. But keeping going after you hit a road block or when yet another new dream peeks out at you, is much more difficult. There is something about a new dream that creates its own motivation. You often find, however, that as time goes by, and the work needs doing, what was once a dream is now work. But this doesn’t have to mean you have lose your motivation and never make your dream come true.

Instead you can use the model for self motivation to get in touch with why you aren’t still motivated, and to help you regain the motivation you need to make your dream come true.

Don’t ever give up on your dream. Use the model for self motivation to keep your motivation at the high level you need to consistently do the steps you need to do to make your dream come true.

If taking control of your motivation sounds like something you want to learn, sign up for my free monthly news letter just to the right of this blog entry to learn more about this fabulous skill of self motivation.

The third factor in the model for self motivation is environment. This means that your environment has a large impact on how motivated you are. Your environment can have a negative impact on your motivation or it can have a positive impact on it.

Though there are two different environments, our social and our physical environments, today I will focus on the former, the social environment, the people and organizations that surround us. Some of us are lucky and exist in a social environment that enhances our motivation. A healthy social environment would include, for example, parents who taught us good work habits, or who provided good models for cultivating social relationships. Others of us, however, are not so lucky.

If you are the result of such a healthy upbringing, you may not need to spend a lot of time learning how to make your social environment a positive impact on your environment. Lucky you.

If, however, you haven’t been blessed with a level of comfort or the skill to enter into beneficial relationships, you will need to work on gaining the skills necessary to do this.

There are two concerns that are triggered when a person is less than comfortable being social.

The first is that being uncomfortable with social interactions means you are less likely to gain the benefits that your social environment can provide. This includes contacts to increase your business and access to persons from whom you can learn necessary skills.

The second issue is the negative impact the feelings of being socially inept can have on you. People who see themselves as socially inept are likely to isolate themselves. Isolating yourself perpetuates your feelings of social ineptitude and guarantees that you will not learn the skills necessary to break free from those feelings and from the ineptitude.

So you don’t want to stay stuck in a place where you see yourself as socially inept.

Bob Newhart played a famous radio self help psychologist on Saturday Night Live. His advice, no matter what maladaptive behavior was expressed by the caller was, “Stop it.” It was delivered in the deadpan manner that Bob Newhart was so good at. We all laughed at the absurdity of the same exact advice being given regardless of the complaint, but it really isn’t such bad advice in this situation. Maybe it wouldn’t work for a phobic, but for most people who just consider themselves as shy, it definitely works.

It takes bravery to “just stop” being shy; not a lot, but certainly some. You start with a risk, a gentle risk. You take small steps. You join some type of club that mirrors a like or passion you have. Do you like to read? Join a book club. Do you enjoy using computers? Join a user group. Want to become a comfortable speaker? Join a Toastmasters Club.  I play the ukulele, so a ukulele club would be perfect for me.

Promise yourself you only need to observe. If someone initiates contact with you, then interact. But if no one does, which is probably unlikely, that’s all right. Spend the time watching how the other people interact. Make it an educational experience, learning from other people’s interactions.

As you get more comfortable, at the second or third meeting perhaps, initiate a contact with someone else, maybe a person who initiated contact with you at an earlier meeting. As you gain the experience, it gets easier and easier, or for some of us, less and less stressful.

Discomfort with social interactions is not going to just go away. But social interactions are too important to just let the discomfort control your life. You need to take control of it. You do it by taking risks, these baby steps.

I’m having motivation problems. I need to set up the email from this web site, bob@bobAPrentiss, so I can read it on my Mac, with my Mail application. That way it will come right to my computer and I won’t have to mess around with the CPanel of my web page.

This has been on my “to do” list for two months. For two months I have been putting it off. Why have I not done it yet? Because I am not motivated to do it. Why am I not motivated to do it? Because I don’t know how to do it. I started doing it, hit a snag, and went and did something else.

Now I’ve decided to ask a techie friend of mine to guide me though it – i’m going to utilize my social environment.

Maybe not knowing how to do something wouldn’t have adversely impacted your motivation. Maybe the need to learn a new skill would have been motivating to you.

But it sure makes mine suffer.

The point of this is that each one of us is different. That’s why a list of motivational hints may not be real helpful at motivating you. Those of us who create such lists design them for the average person. That’s why at best they do an average job of motivating you.

So what’s the alternative? It’s creating a motivational plan, designed just for you with your unique likes and dislikes, and with your unique motivators and demotivators.

The model for self motivation will help you design such a plan, just for you. It will take a little bit of work, up front, but will save you a lot of wasted energy as you work on making your dream, whatever it is, come true.

You can learn more about this powerful, self motivation tool by signing up for my newsletter just to the right of this blog entry.

I have written about this before, but it is so important I want to remind everyone.

If you are motivated, you will consistently take the steps you need to take to make your dreams come true. If you are not motivated, you will not be consistently taking the steps you need to take to make your dreams come true. And if you are not consistently taking the steps you need to take, your dreams will not come true.

This is why we need clarity if we are going to be motivated. We need to know exactly what we need to do to make our special dream come true.

If we just have a vague idea of what we want to accomplish, or we just know where we want to get but aren’t clear as to how to get there, we aren’t going to motivated. When we try to get to our goal in this state, we flounder, we get frustrated and we quit.

I’ll give an example. I have a YouTube channel. I have had some traffic but not as much as I want. So I’ve studied video marketing, reading about it on the web and attending a bunch of webinars. I now understand it’s not enough to make and post our videos; we have to promote them as well.

So for the last four weeks I’ve been promising myself to promote my videos. But it hadn’t occurred. “Promoting my videos” was too vague an assignment; it didn’t tell me exactly what I was to do. It doesn’t tell me the tasks I need to do to. It’s a goal, which is great, but in order to be motivating, it needs to be broken down into the tasks that will make the goal happen.

So this week my assignment was no longer “promote my videos.” It was “make a list of the tasks I need to do to promote my videos.”

So first thing Saturday morning I sat down, went through my white papers and my reports and notes of webinars I have attended and compiled a list of all the things I want to do to promote my videos. The first things on my list were finding the most popular but less competitive keywords and phrases, putting my website’s URL into the description, and figuring out how to use channels and playlists.

I’m not going to do all the activities this week. In fact, promoting my videos is a continuing process. But I’ve made a great start, and am now motivated to achieve this goal.

What goal have you been promising yourself to complete, but haven’t? Try breaking it down into its parts, the tasks and activities you need to do to make the goal happen. And please share your experience with this strategy with your fellow readers by leaving a comment below.