Lots of us have dreams that we aren’t making come true.  The reason for this is we simply are not motivated to consistently do the work that making our dreams come true requires. If you don’t do the work, the dream will not come true.

The most important reason for our lack of motivation is that people don’t understand that being motivated is their own responsibility. No one else is going to spend their time and energy in motivating you to make your dreams come true. They will spend their time and energy to motivate you to make their own dreams come true, but not your dreams. This should come as no surprise.

Nor is motivation just going to magically appear.  It is true that occasionally you will be motivated to do something without any work on your motivation. Usually this will happen when you are starting a new project or when you are doing something that you really enjoy doing, or when you are doing the fun or easy activities that are needed to make your dream come true.

Some activities have intrinsic motivation. Take advantage of it when it happens.  Don’t take it for granted, however, as a problem with your motivation may come when the activities you need to do are difficult or not quite as much fun.

So, to make sure your motivation stays high, so you will do those activities you need to do, you need to take responsibility for your motivation. You need to be aware of how motivated you are at any particular time, and you need to take steps to make sure it stays high.

So this is the number one lesson of self motivation: You are responsible for your own motivation. And that’s a good thing, because the second lesson of self motivation is: You have the power to become motivated and stay motivated.

In other words, the first lesson tells you no one else is going to keep you motivated, you have to rely on yourself.  But the second lesson tells you that you can carry out that responsibility, that you have the power to do that.

But in order to exercise that power to motivate yourself, you are going to have to learn how to motivate yourself. Thank heavens, that skill, self motivation, is not a difficult one to learn.

This is a new thing I am doing in my blog, pointing my readers to resources that I think they might find helpful in becoming and staying self motivated. Today’s resource is a book that I was introduced to in a change-management course I took while earning my Masters in Education. The book is Your Own Worst Enemy: Breaking the Habit of Adult Underachievement, by Ken Christian.

Many of the books I read in researching self motivation actually addressed motivating others, like a coach motivating the athlete, the teacher motivating the student, the manager motivating the worker. Dr. Christian’s book on the other hand is about a person motivating him or herself.

As its title states, the book focuses on the reasons people settle for less than their dreams and sometimes actually sabotage their own efforts in making their dreams come true. He then also provides us with strategies for overcoming these tendencies.

One important strategy is staying conscious, which means noticing when we are falling back into those unconscious, habitual behaviors that form the basis of our underachieving. Those of you familiar with my blog will see how this strategy has influenced my writings. I believe that becoming and staying motivated requires us to take control of our motivation, and that requires us to take control of ourselves and of our behaviors.

In Chapter 6, Dr. Christian sets out the Fifteen Tasks of his master plan for change. These are a series of steps or behaviors that build on each other and guide you toward any desired change. My favorite, #2, influenced me greatly in the creation of my Model for Self Motivation. It is Develop a Vision.  Vision became the first factor in my subsequently developed model for self motivation.

In his book Dr. Christian defines vision as a personal aspiration that you have toyed with or dreamed of secretly, but dismissed and never acted on. His vision is a little more existential than mine is. My vision can include a goal you have acted on, maybe even more than once, but just never acheived.  What ever definition you use for your vision, the same benefits exist when you have a powerful one – it keeps you going.

One very important point Dr. Christian makes is that your dream should be a stretch beyond where you currently are, but not so far away as to make it inconceivable. Your dream must be possible for you to achieve, or it will not be motivating.

All 15 of the Fifteen Tasks will be of immense help to anyone who has a dream they have been toying with, secretly considering, but who has never been able to maintain sustained effort to achieve that dream.

I highly recommend all fifteen of them, and the whole book to anyone looking for relief from their failure to achieve all they can.

Have you ever been motivated to start working on something important, been really motivated, but then, at the last minute you talk yourself out of it, and suddenly you are doing something totally different? If so, you were the victim of monkey mind.

An Eastern concept, monkey mind can be especially annoying when you are trying to meditate.  Eastern philosophy teaches us that the mind rightfully is a tool of the self; its purpose is to help us deal with the needs of our day to day existence. The problem that occurs for so many of us, however, is that the mind frequently becomes the boss and controls the self.

Your monkey mind is a saboteur. It can totally destroy your motivation, the force that moves us forward, the force that changes our dreams into reality.

In one of the many art museums in Sarasota, Florida, where I visited occasionally when I lived in Florida, there is large vase with hundreds of little ceramic monkeys climbing all over the outside. It’s a great visual representation of monkey mind.

It’s how my mind sometimes feels when I am getting started on a project. I’ve done my motivation work, so the project is part of my motivation plan that I developed with the model for self motivation. But each of those monkeys is chattering in my head. One is telling me about the wonderful fun things that I could be doing instead of this project. Another one is reminding me of things that need to be done right now, right this minute, and why they are more important than the project I need to be starting on. Yet another is reminding me about the new movie I’ve been wanting to see. Each monkey is working hard to stop me from doing what I know needs to be done now.

Monkey mind is a chronic problem, because it is unlikely you will ever totally put monkey mind in its place. Being a human being for most of us means we will be dealing with monkey mind continually, for the rest of our lives.

So you need to be able to deal with motivation saboteur, monkey mind.

There are two strategies for dealing with monkey mind. Both are habit forming, which is a good thing, as controlling monkey mind is something we want to happen, and we want to make as automatic as possible.

Strategy #1: Be aware of monkey mind. Like so much of motivation, action in dealing with the monkey mind takes place in that place between stimulus and response, the period known as reflection. The more conscious you are as to your behavior and how you generally respond to the chattering of your monkey mind, the better you will be able to control monkey mind rather than having it control you.

Strategy #2:  Ignore monkey mind. By ignoring it, I mean, don’t play with it. Do not respond to the chatter. Do not explain to it why the project you are getting ready to start is really the better choice. Do not argue with it about how you will regret it later if you choose the route monkey mind has laid out. Do none of these reactions; just shut your mind down, ignore the chatter, and get started on what you need to do. As Nike tells us, continually, just do it. Start on your work now.

Just because monkey mind is talking, doesn’t mean you have to listen. Talking seems to be the job of monkey mind. Your job is to do the things you know you need to do … to make those dreams into reality.

As you probably know, I just published my book, iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams. Now comes the hard work, promoting it. Part of promoting it includes getting it reviewed, by magazines, newspapers and online reviewers. To get it reviewed I need people to look at it, or at least respond to my request to have it reviewed.

There are hundreds (thousands?) of books being published every day, so getting the attention of the reviewers can be a struggle.

Earlier last week, I had sent out several emails to different reviewers and hadn’t heard back from any, so I knew I needed to do “follow up.”

I didn’t feel so good about myself.  ”Follow up” means you weren’t successful in your past attempts, so now you need to go to step two, or three or four. This type of follow up does not have its own motivational impact; I need to force myself to do it.

I sent a follow up email to one of the non-responding reviewers and within ten minutes was reading the reply, “Send it to me; I’d be happy to look at it.” I was pumped; self motivation was high.

But something else he said in the email got me thinking, “As you can imagine, I get lots of requests for reviews.”

It was nice of him to write that. What I heard him saying was that if I want to be successful in getting reviews, I need to follow up.  Persistent, consistent follow up is needed.

The second factor of self motivation, according to the model for self motivation, is successability, your confidence in your competence. Nothing builds your confidence quite like success.

That’s why it is so important for you to define success on your own terms. Here’s how:

First  THE MOST IMPORTANT THING, make success something that you control. I have no control over whether people actually review my book, but I do have control over whether and to whom I send a book for a review, how good my accompanying material is, and whether I do follow up on the non-responding reviewers. So the way I define success is that if I made a good list, mailed out books to the reviewers on the list, created good accompanying material, and followed up on the non-responding reviewers, I am successful.

Second, make sure what you define as success is doable. It makes no sense to aim so high it’s unlikely you will succeed. When you aim too high, even though you may have intentionally set the bar really high, failure will destroy your motivation. Instead, aim high enough that success really means something, but not so high it is unlikely that you will succeed.

Follow these two requirements when you define success, and you control whether you are successful.  And when you are successful, you guarantee your continued motivation.

Evaluations, time taken to see what you have accomplished and how that compares to what you wanted to accomplish are an integral part of self motivation. Sometimes what you have accomplished is better than what you planned on accomplishing, and, if so, you have cause to celebrate. But if the alternative is happening, that you are spinning your wheels, you want to know now. If the wheels aren’t even spinning, that is, if you have totally stopped working on your dream, you want to know that too, as soon as possible.

I’ve written a couple of blog posts on this recently.  You can read the postings of May 23, June 14 and June 18 to find out when to do an evaluation and how to do an evaluation that will maximize your self motivation.

What I am writing about today, however, is a different benefit of doing an evaluation. That extra benefit is a time for reflection. Taking the time to reflect can have wonderful results. I don’t do it enough, but every time I do, I find I am better organized and, as a result, am more motivated. Sometimes I come up with a new and better plan of attack.

When I take time to reflect I usually start with a bird’s eye view of what I really want to accomplish.  I then compare that to the results I am seeing from of all the work I am doing. Every once in a while I find that my efforts have been hitting the target, but the target isn’t what’s most important to me.

This happened recently. I wrote my book iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams, so people who aren’t able to come to my workshops will get the benefits of the model for self motivation and of being able to motivate themselves. But as helpful as the book will be, what I am most interested in, for myself, is the face to face contact I get in my workshops and coaching.

But I’ve been so busy working on finishing up the book and promoting it, I haven’t done a workshop in far too long.  That reality came to me in my most recent time for reflection. As a result of that realization, I am going to adjust my time so that what I enjoy takes precedence.

I urge you to take some time out of your busy schedule (I know it’s busy because those of us with big dreams always have busy schedules) and just reflect. I feel confident the time you spend will be most beneficial, especially if you haven’t done it before. And write down your reflections. No use letting them go to waste.

If you would like to see a sample of the written document I developed as a result of my recent reflection time, leave me a comment with an email address and I will get it to you. Or, if you would prefer, send me an email through the “contact me” page of my website, www.BobAPrentiss.com, and I will get it to you.

Whenever I am feeling unmotivated to take the next step in my work on promoting my new book, iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams I almost immediately know what the problem is, because it always seems to be the same problem.

The problem is I don’t know what the next step is. And if I don’t know what the next step is, there’s no way I can feel confident in my competence of achieving that unknown next step. The model for self motivation teaches us that if you lack confidence in your competence, your motivation will suffer.  So we need to get that confidence back, and the way to do that is to get clear on exactly what the next step is.

The best way I know to get clear on what the next step is, and regain my confidence, is with a plan of attack.

A plan of attack is a written document that tells the next steps you are going to take to move closer to achieving your goal. I say written because if it’s not written down, it doesn’t yet exist.

I usually find that my plan of attack includes more than one step, quite a bit more than one. This is so for two reasons:

Reason one: often the first step you think of will require one or more preliminary steps;

Reason two: once you get into the thinking place, your mind will automatically come up with more than one step. Let it. Just make sure to write down all the steps you have come up with. Writing it down is even more important when you have come up with multiple steps.

Here’s how it worked for me just last week:

On Monday I had mailed out 41 copies of my book to persons I want to review it for their magazines and webpages. It was a major project as I had to put together a list of media people I wanted to review it, I had to create the media package, hire a designer to design a logo for the letter head and mailing labels, figure out how to create the mailing labels on my printer, etc., etc.

So having completed this major project, I took a well earned break on Tuesday, but I wanted to start up again on Wednesday. But I didn’t get much accomplished on Wednesday, except for signing up for a stand up paddling clinic. So Thursday, when I sat down at my desk, and just sat, I knew I needed to create a plan of attack.

And that’s exactly what I did. The first item on my plan for attack was “make a plan of attack.”  It’s always the first item on my plans of attack, and I urge you to make it on yours as well. Having it as your first item gets you started. You already have the first item. Laugh if you must, but sometimes getting started is the hardest part. Because it’s always the first item, getting started is easy.

And then you just come up with a couple of activities you can accomplish that day, and add them to the plan.

It’s all about knowing exactly what you need to do. It gets back that confidence, and rebuilds that self motivation.

Wouldn’t it be great if all I needed to guarantee my self motivation was an intensely felt desire to want something really badly? Imagine a world where I could merely wish for my book to become a best seller, and that wishing made it come true, that the act of wishing for something, strong heart-felt wishing, resulted in all the motivation necessary for me to do all the work that was necessary for that thing to happen.

But that’s not our world, not the real world anyway. In the real world it takes more than just a strongly felt desire, or merely affirming the truth of my dream to make it come true. It’s going to take hard work, consistent hard work, to make my book a best seller. And that consistent hard work will require motivation.

As I related in my last blog, the change I am interested in making right now is becoming serious about content marketing. I believe it is one path to making my book a best seller. And though I really want my book to become a best seller, I want it with all my heart, that wanting is not enough to motivate me to consistently do the content marketing.

The obvious question, then, is “What else, beside a strongly felt desire, is necessary for my self motivation?” The answer is, there are two other things I need for my self motivation to occur. It’s the same two other things that you need for your self motivation to occur. The first is successability, which means my confidence in my competence. The second is me having a supportive environment, an environment that supports me as I pursue my dream.

This is what we learn from the model for self motivation. The model tells me that how motivated I am is determined by the three factors of self motivation:

1.  the vision: the major change I want in my life, becoming the author of a best selling book

2. successability: how I feel about the likelihood that I will be able to make this desire come true

3.  my environment, both my physical environment, the place I do my work on making my book a best seller, and my social environment, the people and organizations that surround me or that are available to me.

By using the model I take charge of my self motivation. I do this by making sure each of the three factors are maximized for my motivation.

One thing I do to increase the motivational impact of my vision is to make sure it is something I want really badly; it has to be important to me. I must be doing it for myself and not for someone else. This isn’t my issue; no one cares as much as I do that my book becomes a best seller. My friends and family think it would be cool, but I am doing this for myself.

My issue is with the second factor, my successability, especially as it relates to content marketing. I believe that deep down I don’t feel confident I can be successful as a content marketer. It’s exactly like how I feel about social media.

So what I am doing to deal with my lack of successability, my lack of confidence in my competence, is setting up small tasks, breaking down “successful content marketing” into its component parts. I’ve made a list and will attack it step by step.

Here’s the list so far:

1. Read Content Marketing for Dummies one half hour every day. If I want to read more, that is fine.

2. Take one task from the reading I did and implement it. If there are two tasks I would like to implement, I can do one and save the other for the next day, or I can implement both that one day.

In doing this I am using two strategies to increase my successability:

1.  Breaking down a complex task into its component parts. Each component part is less threatening than the whole. When I have the list of easier tasks, I just attack them one at a time.

2.  Getting education on activities about which I am ignorant. Not knowing how to do something robs me of my motivation to do it. Why would I even bother trying? Learning how to do it restores my motivation.

That’s what self motivation is all about. Learning how to take charge of your own motivation.

One of the phrases I like to use when I speak about why people need my new book iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams, is their apparent inability to “consistently take the steps they need to take to reach their goals and make their dreams come true.”

It’s easy to start on a new project. Heck, I’ve started on some of my projects several times.  I start, then stop, and then start again.  There’s something about a new project that brings its own motivation with it, the appeal of the new.

But starting a new project is only that- it’s a start. To complete the project we need to be persistent and we need to be consistent. I was reminded of this over the weekend when I was at the library and I just “happened” to come across the book Content Marketing for Dummies.   I started reading it last night and it seemed to click. I was motivated to start doing some content marketing. But I have started doing it before, several times. Each time usually starts with the discovery of a new book on online marketing that appeals to me.

Does this sound familiar?

So I don’t want it to happen again. I want my motivation to do online marketing to stay just as high as it is now.  Online marketing is something that I need to do. I know that. If people don’t know about my book, they aren’t going to buy it. And if they don’t buy it, there’s no way they are going to be helped by it, and I have pretty much wasted the last four years of my life.

I don’t want the last four years of my life to be a waste, but I know myself. I need help so that I stay motivated to be consistent and persistent in my online marketing. How do I do that? What can I do to make sure I don’t suddenly realize in a couple of months that once again I have stopped doing my online marketing?

This is what I am going to do to make sure that doesn’t happen.

My first step is make a decision – the decision to take charge of my motivation. I need to be intentional. What I mean by this is I have to remind myself that I need to take control of my motivation.  There’s no one else. If I don’t take control of it no one else will, and I won’t be motivated.

But I need help to do that. The intention is not enough. Good intentions by themselves are not going to cut it. Wanting something, even if you want it really badly, is not enough. A strong desire is but one of three things you need to make  sure you will continue to do the things you need to do.

These are the two takeaways from today’s blog:

1) you need to be in charge of your motivation, and

2) an intensely felt desire is not enough to keep you motivated.

In my next blog I will explain what the other things are that I need to keep in charge of my motivation.