In my most recent blog I wrote about the vision, the first factor in the model for self motivation.  In today’s blog I want to write about the second factor in the model for self motivation, successability.

Successability means your confidence in your competence. This means how you feel about the likelihood that you have the skills and ability to make your vision – the special change you want to make – come true.

If you are not confident you can make the vision come true, you won’t be motivated to put in the work making it come true takes. Why would you? You’d feel like you were wasting your time.

Confident people make changes. People without confidence do not. So we all better be confident that we can make our special change come true.

But what if we aren’t confident? What if we have doubts and fears that we will never make that special change come true? Are we stuck in the place we are at? Is the status quo going to remain static?

Luckily, we are not stuck with being unconfident. In my book, iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams, I share many strategies to help you increase your confidence in your competence, and thereby increase your motivation.

One great way – and there are many – to increase your confidence is through skills acquisition. Many of us don’t think we can achieve our vision – that special change – because we lack some essential skill.  For example, say your vision is the same as mine, you want to be a professional speaker. But you aren’t confident you can make it come true, because you don’t think you are a very good speaker.  If this is the case, you’d better seek out sources of skills acquisition – places where you can learn the skills you need to become a professional speaker. One great place is Toastmasters. But there is also the NSA, the National Speakers Association. Another resource to help you gain public speaking skills are professionals who coach people who want to be better speakers. See, for example, http:// http://3cspublicspeaking.com/

No matter what your dream, there are people and places to help you acquire the skills you need that will give you the confidence that you can make your dream come true. And when you find such a person or such a place, and you get the skills you are missing, your confidence in your competence will soar. As your confidence in your competence, your successability, grows, so will your motivation.

That’s factor number two, successability. So far we’ve covered the first two factors. Drop by Thursday and read all about factor number three, environment.

In my most recent blog I gave an overview of the model for self motivation. The model for self motivation tells us that there are three things or factors that impact our motivation. In today’s blog I write about the first factor, the vision.

The vision is that special change you want to make, that you want to be motivated about. It can be something in your personal life, like losing weight, or starting an exercise program. It can be in your professional life, like getting a new job or getting an advanced degree or certification. It can be in your financial life, like saving for retirement, or getting out of debt.

Whatever that special change you want to make, whatever that special goal you want to accomplish, that is your vision.

The reason the model for self motivation is important to us, is it gives us a way to motivate ourselves. We do this by making sure each one of the factors is motivating.

One way we make our vision motivating is by making sure it is important to us. The key in that sentence is the last two words, “to us.”  It doesn’t matter if this desire or change is important to your partner; it doesn’t matter if it is important to your parents. All that matters is whether it is important to you. If it isn’t important to you, you are not going to be motivated to make it come true.

Another way we make sure our vision is motivating is to be clear on exactly what our desire is. If we are vague about it, we will be less motivated. Clarity is motivating. The more clear on exactly what it is you are going after, the more likely you will be motivated to do the work making it happen will require.

If you have a special dream you want to make true, I urge you to take some time, maybe right now, grab a pen or pencil and write down two things. The first thing is why this dream is important to you. The second thing is exactly what this change will entail. Once you have completed that you are on your way to being a motivated person, a person who makes their dreams come true.

If you find you have dreams you want to come true, but that you don’t seem to be able to keep working on the dreams, the problem could very well be that you don’t know how to motivate yourself. If you can’t motivate yourself, you will not be motivated.

And if you aren’t motivated, you will not reach your goals. And if you can’t reach your goals, you will not make your wonderful dreams come true.

But don’t worry, because being able to motivate yourself is a skill that you can learn. Once you learn it, you can make sure you are motivated, which means you will continue to do the work you need to do to achieve your goals.

There are basically two steps to the skill of motivating yourself. The first step is understanding the model for self motivation, which sets out the three distinct parts involved in motivating yourself. The second step is learning how to implement this knowledge of self motivation into your life. That’s it!

The model for self motivation says there are three factors of self motivation, three things that determine how motivated you are. They are the vision, successability, and environment. The way you implement the model for self motivation is by doing things that favorably impact the motivational effect of any or all of the three factors of self motivation.

Every step you take to favorably impact the effect any one of the three factors has on your motivation, automatically makes your motivation increase.

In each of my next three blog entries I will explain one of the three factors of self motivation and give you strategies on how you can impact that factor to positively effect your motivation.

If being able to reach a goal you’ve never been able to before sounds like something worth while, I urge you to sign up for my free monthly newsletter by entering your email address in the space at the right of this blog. I promise you, you’ll be glad you did.

In my most recent blog I explained that an employer could use the model for self motivation to motivate an employee pretty much the same way an individual would use it to motivate herself.

According to the model for self motivation, there are three things (we call them factors) that determine how motivated you are, the vision, successability and environment. Anything you do to positively impact any of the three factors will automatically have a positive impact on your motivation.

So what an employer needs to do is positively impact any or all of the factors and his employees will become more motivated.

The vision is the change that someone (in this case the employer) wants to occur. In order for it to be motivating, it has to be important to the actor, the person who is supposed to make the change occur, in this case the employee. So the employer wants to make the task important to the employee.

The employer can make the change important to his employee by several different ways. The first is by letting the employee have some control over how the work gets done. By giving the employee input into how the job gets done, the employer gets the employee’s buy in. Another way is by making sure the employee understands why his task is important. If he doesn’t understand this, he is more likely to think he, and the task he is to complete, are unimportant and he will not be motivated to achieve that which the employer wants him to achieve.

The employer can impact the second factor of the model for self motivation, successability, by making sure the employee knows he can be successful. Successability means confidence in your competence. If the employee does not feel confident that he has the ability to do the job, he will not be motivated to do it.

One way the employer can guarantee his employees feel confident is to make sure they have the tools necessary to do the job well. Another is to provide them with training so they can acquire any skills they need to do the job.

Environment is the third factor in the model for self motivation. The employer can make sure the environment positively impacts his employees’ motivation by making it a great place to work. Working in an environment with favoritism and inappropriate behavior or even unnecessarily dangerous conditions will not motivate employees.

In summary, the model for self motivation can be used by anyone to motivate someone else.

But that’s not the best use for it. The best use for it is motivating yourself, using it to go after your own desires, rather than someone else’s. Why not go after your own desires?

If you are interested in going after your own desires, but have had trouble staying on track, why not sign up, right now, for a free subscription to the self motivation newsletter. It’s as easy as typing your email into the space at the right of the screen.

You’ll be glad you did.

In my very first webinar, in which I was being interviewed by the person in charge of the webinar, I was asked how an employer would use the model for self motivation to motivate his employees. I was thrown by his question, as I had thought in our several earlier conversations I had made it clear that the purpose of the Model for Self Motivation was to give people a tool by which they can motivate themselves. Power is very motivating, so it makes sense for each one of us to be in charge of our motivation. And the reality is, if someone in my life wants to motivate me, nine times out of ten they are trying to motivate me to do something they want me to do, which may not be something I particularly care about.

Being flummoxed as I was, I don’t think I gave a particularly coherent answer at the webinar.

But as I have thought about the question, I realize that sometimes people will want  to motivate other people. Parents will want to motivate their children and employers will want to motivate their workers. So the question wasn’t quite as odd as it seemed at the time.

The answer is, yes, the model for self motivation can be used by an employer to motivate her employees.

Here’s the model for self motivation.

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.

So how does an employer use the model? The same way as you would use it to motivate yourself. The employer takes affirmative steps to make sure each of the three factors positively impacts the motivation of her employees. Any time she successfully takes such a step, the motivation of the employee will automatically rise.

In my next blog I will take you through, factor by factor how my imaginary, yet imaginative, employer will successfully do this.

Meanwhile, here is an update on my book, iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams. Just last week I approved the second proof and set the gears into play for the printing to start. In less than five weeks, the book will be available online at Amazon and Barnes and Nobel, and fine book stores everywhere. Please sign up, to your right, for my free monthly self motivation newsletter. Signing up will guarantee you will know exactly when the book can be ordered, and will help you learn the important skill of motivating yourself, the skill that will help you make your dreams come true.

In my last two blogs I shared with you how risk and motivation interact. I pointed out that research shows that the optimal level of risk, the level chosen by successful people, is a moderate level, in between a surety of success and a high probability of failure.

In today’s blog I will give you two strategies for how you can make sure you are acting like a successful person, by setting your level of risk at the optimal level. These strategies will answer the question of, “What does it mean to set our risk at a moderate level?”

The first way we set our risk at a moderate level is in our determination of our goals.  Once we have decided on our vision, that major change we want to make in our life, we will generally find there are numerous ways to manifest that vision, many ways to skin the cat.  As we choose our way, we will have many opportunities to pick goals that are of moderate risk.  As you choose your goals, therefore, make sure you take into account the level of risk in each goal.  Make it one of the considerations.  Don’t necessarily reject an otherwise perfect goal, a goal that will greatly enhance your manifestation as your vision, just because it is risky.  Just be intentional; be aware!

A second way we set our risk at a moderate level is by breaking down our goals into manageable tasks, by seeing each goal as a series of moderate risk tasks.  Then we write down those tasks in  list. A goal that appears to be risky, and is, therefore, amotivating, will, when broken down into its component tasks, be much less scary. This list of less threatening tasks gives us opportunities to succeed under conditions of moderate risk.

There is an old Spanish mariner’s saying, “Unless you leave the safety of the harbor, you will never reach the distant shore.”  You need to take risk, but don’t do it in a leaky boat, and don’t do it during a hurricane.

Pay attention to the level of risk in all your goals and tasks.

After my most recent blog on how the level of risk impacts self motivation, I received an email asking how researchers determined this relationship. I am not a researcher; I am a teacher. I read the literature, study research by others, read their conclusions, and draw some of my own conclusions. I then present this information, this knowledge, in a manner in which my learners can understand the information and can implement it in their lives.

For most of the information, the experiments are, I believe, of much less importance than the information that the experiment yielded. Consequently, I just teach the information. Sometimes, however, the experiment serves as a great example of the information, and thereby helps people better understand the information and how to implement it. The experiment on the relationship of motivation and risk is such an experiment. This is the reason I use it in my self motivation workshop.

The experiment is described by Richard DeCharms, in his book Enhancing Motivation.  The experiment involves a game I refer to as the ball in the box game. Each player is given eight balls. They are instructed they are to get the balls into a box which is set on the floor. They decide how far away they are to stand from the box for their final four throws.  That decision is based upon four practice throws, during which they can move closer to or further from the box. After the four practice throws, they must decide upon the spot. The final four balls that count are thrown only from that spot.

The experimenters found there were three options chosen:

1. Close enough to never miss
2. Far away as to make success unlikely
3. A middle distance making getting in the box a challenge, but possible.

Subsequent surveys with participants revealed that those who were the most successful in their lives were those in the third group.

People who make choice one will succeed, but what have they achieved? Nothing.  These people, research shows, fear failure.  Their fear of failure makes them lose a sense of accomplishment.  They fear failure so much they never take any risk

People who choose very far away are also afraid of the appearance of failure.  So they go so far away that even if they miss, they haven’t really “failed”, because they were trying the impossible, shooting for the moon.  By doing this they avoid responsibility when they fail.

The people in the third group, the ones who take reasoned risks, pick the middle ground, in between a sureness of success and a high probability of failure.

What successful people do is set the bar high enough that they have to work to achieve success. Once they do achieve success, they will set the bar a bit higher.

In my next blog I will share with you a couple of strategies for how you can make sure you are doing the behaviors of a successful person, and setting your level of risk at the optimal level.

Risk and self motivation are interrelated. My training is in education, specifically in designing instruction. When we design instruction, we have to be very careful with the level of difficulty. The more difficult any given piece of the instruction is, the greater the risk of failure for the student.

The more difficult it is, the more riskier it is perceived by the student. If the student perceives it is too difficult, the learner will not feel confident about his ability to be successful. This is important because, as the model for self motivation teaches us, if one lacks confidence in her ability to achieve a goal, she will not be motivated to go after it.

On the other hand, if a student feels that a task is too simple, successfully completing it will not make the student’s confidence grow. It won’t make her feel more competent, and better able to face the challenge of further, more difficult lessons.

The designer of instruction needs to walk the middle line, not make the instruction too easy, but not make it too difficult.

The optimal level of risk is in this middle range, a moderate degree of risk. It must be easy enough so it can be accomplished, otherwise you destroy feelings of self worth, but difficult enough so that success really means something, gives the learner a sense of accomplishment and makes her feel powerful.

So it is with all of life, not just in education. If you choose tasks that are too difficult for you, you are setting yourself up for failure. The failure will be occasioned not just because you probably won’t accomplish this difficult task, but also because you will not even be motivated to attempt it. You will have destroyed your self motivation by setting the risk level too high.

But if you constantly choose tasks and goals that are too easy for you, you are also setting yourself up for failure. You will accomplish them, but so what? You won’t have any sense of accomplishment that could have kept you going when the next goal or task is a bit more difficult.

What you should take from this information is to be conscious of the amount of risk you are taking as you take each step in pursuit of your dreams. Being conscious is how you get motivated and stay motivated so you make your dreams become real.

Make sure your tasks and goals are moderately risky, in that sweet place between too risky and not risky enough.