In my last blog I shared with you one strategy for boosting the motivational impact of your vision, the first of the three factors of self motivation. In today’s blog I will share with you a second strategy to have that impact.

It is so important for people who want to get motivated that they take action to increase the motivational impact of the three factors. This is really the only way you can have a lasting effect on your level of motivation. Wishing to be motivated will not by itself increase your motivation.

And if you aren’t motivated, you won’t accomplish your goals, and your dreams will not come true.

In my last blog I explained one thing that makes your vision – what you are trying to accomplish – more motivating, is that it is important to you.

Another thing that makes it more motivating is clarity.  The more clear you are, the more motivated you will be.

Clarity impacts the vision in two ways:

1. You must be clear in exactly what your goal is. “Losing weight” is not clear. “Losing 20 pounds” is clear. So is “weighing 135 pounds.” Without clarity, you will never be sure when you have achieved your goal. With clarity you will know exactly what is expected of you.
2. You must get clear on exactly how you will accomplish your goal.  Getting clear on how means creating a step by step plan for accomplishing it. Creating a plan includes writing it down. If it isn’t written down, either on paper or in a computer, you don’t have clarity.

Getting clarity is not difficult. But it will take thought and it will take writing it down.

Getting clarity is like taking a trip. You don’t need to plan your itenarary if you don’t really have a destination. But if you have somewhere you want to get to, you better plan out how you will get there.

And a written plan makes your life so much easier when you sit down to work, because you know exactly what the next step is.

The Model for Self Motivation tells us there are three things (factors) that determine how motivated you are.

They are:

1. Your vision
2. Your successability
3. Your environment.

This information is important for you as it tells you how you can keep your motivation high. All you need to do is make sure each of the factors has a positive impact, and you will automatically be motivated.

This is important, because without motivation you will not consistently do the tasks you need to do to accomplish your goals or make your dreams come true.

So to help you with keeping your motivation high, in today’s blog I will explain what the vision is and a strategy you can use to make sure your vision has a positive impact on your motivation.

What is your vision?

Your vision is the important change you want to make in your life. It may relate to your finances, like getting out of debt. It may relate to health issues, like starting a fitness program or losing weight. It might be building a healthier relationship or learning a foreign language.

Whatever change you feel passionate about, that you really want, that is an appropriate vision.

What makes a good motivating vision?

To be motivational, the vision must be important to you. That is really two separate things.

• It must be important. Something you are only curious about, so long as you remain merely curious or interested, will not provide you with the motivation you need to succeed in making it happen.
• It must be important to you. It doesn’t matter if it is important to your partner, your parents, your children, your friends, your boss. If it isn’t important to you, you will not have the strong motivation you need to make it come true.

But what if you don’t feel your vision is really important to you? Does that mean you are guaranteed to quit trying, to give up?

Not necessarily. But what it does mean is you will have to work that much harder, struggle in other words, to make it happen.

Doesn’t it make more sense to make your vision important, so it builds up your motivation and makes your work on your vision flow naturally?

You bet it does.

How do you make your vision more important to you, so it positively impacts your motivation?

Here is a strategy for making this happen:

Figure out why it’s important to you.

Research shows that you can be motivated by the desire for good things and by the avoidance of bad things. Take advantage of both these drives and write down all the great things that will occur when you accomplish this goal. Next, on the same sheet of paper, write down all the bad things that will occur (or that are already occurring) if you do not accomplish your goal.

Keep the list in view and review it on a regular basis.

You need to write it down so your are clear in your mind exactly why this vision is important. And you need to write it down so that you can look at it, on a regular basis, to ensure it becomes and stays important to you.

In my next blog I will share with you a second strategy for making your vision a powerful influence on your motivation.

When you learn the skill of self motivation, you will hear the term “detractor.”  Detractor means anything that robs you of your motivation. Because we are all different, our motivators (the things that motivate us) and our demotivators (the things that rob us of our motivation) are unique to us. That why it is important for you to take charge of your motivation. You will be much more effective in getting motivated and staying motivated if you are in charge of your motivation.

Keeping this in mind, I try to be constantly aware of how motivated I am, so when I am feeling unmotivated I pay attention and figure out how to get back on track.

This happened recently, as a consequence of which I developed a new strategy for upping my motivation. It’s called the 3×5 file card strategy.

You may thing this strategy helpful if you, like me, are demotivated by not knowing exactly what needs to be done next and/or you have trouble keeping track of all the goals you are trying to accomplish.

You buy a pack of 100 3×5 file cards. I bought the colored ones, though you could buy the white ones and color code them by putting a circle of colored ink on the upper left corner of each card.

Each color corresponds to one aspect of what I am going after in my life. My colors are as follows:

• Pink: my E-Book writing
• Yellow: My Promotional Work for my books
• Green: other business related goals
• Orange: non-business related goals

The pink cards have ideas for e-books I am interested in writing, or those in the process of being written. I also write on the card notes relating to the particular book; for example, tasks I need to complete, or tasks that have be delegated to another person and due dates.

The yellow cards have different subjects relating to the promotional work I need to do to get my author and career going big time.  One card relates to my building a backend, another to checking out a program at a local book store and another relates to the creation of a sign for an upcoming open house where I will have a table set up.

The green cards deal with the marketing of my screen play and the development of my speaker business.

The orange, non-business cards, relate everything else I am interested, my photography, tai chi, sculpting and learning Spanish.

Whenever I am feeling a little lost, like I don’t know what I want to do, or what I should be doing next, all I need to do is pull out my box of file cards, and I am back on track.

If you have a favorite strategy to build up your motivation, why not share it here as a comment and help out your fellow readers.

It’s all in the news now. The man who was considered by many to have been the greatest athlete ever, has come clean – no pun intended. I am talking of course about Lance Armstrong admitting he doped. That he doped I don’t think came as a shock to many people. That he admitted it was more of a shocker.

But that athletes use whatever advantages they can to succeed, even illegal ones, is no surprise. Baseball’s doping scandals prepared us for it, and there will undoubtedly be other sports in which doping and illicit drug use will come to light.

It’s all because athletics is big business. There is a lot of money to be made in athletics. But that it is a big business can have positive effects on us run of the mill athletes, athletes who will never make money on their sporting abilities.

One such effect is the research that is done on motivation and sports. Were this not a big business this research would not have been done. No one would have been interested and no one would have sponsored it. But it is a big business and the research was done.

There have been many models on athletics and motivation but my particular favorite is the Resonance Performance Model, or RPM. It had a large impact on the creation of the self motivation model I created and unveiled in my recently published book, iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams.

RPM focuses on the motivation of high performing athletes. Dr. Doug Newburg, at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, developed it after interviews with hundreds of these athletes.

Just as my model for self motivation has three elements or factors, Dr. Newburg’s model has three elements:

1) the dream,

2) extensive preparation,

3) a strategy to overcome obstacles.

The dream refers to one idea, one concept that captures the athlete so totally that he makes a commitment to making the expression of this one idea his life’s work. The person has a dream, and he wants to express that dream in his life. This is why the word resonance is in the model’s name. The athlete’s intent is to make his or her external reality (what’s actually going on in his athletics) be in conformance (in resonance) with that inner reality, the dream.

In RPM, the dream is not a goal you set. The dream is inside of you, something you live every day.

Extensive preparation is the second element in RPM. Preparation involves all the activities you engage in to make your dream happen. For a high performing athlete who is in resonance, however, this preparation is not drudgery. It is not something the athlete is compelled to do. Instead it is something he wants to do, something that has real meaning to him, something that is an integral part of the dream. The incredible amounts of time a high performing athlete spends preparing for competitions makes the dream a part of his or her every day existence. The preparation becomes part of the resonance, that merging of the internal with the external. Newburg asserts that striving for the goal may actually be more resonating than achieving the goal.

The third element of RPM is the strategy to overcome obstacles used by the athlete in resonance. Newburg uses the term “obstacles” very broadly. There are external obstacles, such as rejection, losses, and injuries, and internal obstacles, such as fear and self-doubt. They sound like the detractors we all have in reaching for our dreams, so the way the high performing athletes deal with these obstacles is instructive to all of us. Newburg found the way the high performing athlete deals with obstacles is different than how lesser performing athletes deal with them. Instead of taking the obvious step of just returning to the preparation stage and increasing the duration or intensity of the practice, or modifying it in some other way, the high performing athlete first revisits the dream.

Instead of going back to the second element, the preparation, the high performing athlete returns to the first element, the dream. The high performing athletes interviewed by Newburg explained that when they revisit their dream, they are reconnecting with the feelings that motivate them to do the activities they do. Revisiting the dream can include watching videos of performances, reading journals the athlete had kept, or just thinking about what is important to them. It may also include redefining the dream.

This contemplative, internal activity allows the high performing athlete to reconnect to the dream, his inner world, which allows him or her to integrate that inner world with the physical or outer world, the performance.

This model may have come from high performing athletes, but there is nothing to stop you from using it as well. And not just in your sports – you can use it in everything that is important to you.

I was reading about the new Patti Smith autobiography, Just Kids, and was amazed at all the things this woman did in her life, not just the quantity of things, but even  more so the variety of things. For those of you who weren’t around when Patti Smith was popular in the media, she is most famous, certainly to me anyway, as a musician. Her album Horses is on many of the “100 top rock albums” lists. But, in addition, she was a painter, performance artist, an actress, and writer, even co-writing a play, Cowboy Mouth, with playwright Sam Shepard.

When I read about someone like this, I wonder about my quiet little life. Do you ever have similar feelings, sort of amazement at what some people accomplish in their lives, and more than a twinge of jealousy? If so, you are not alone.

It usually makes me wonder why I am not like that. My first wife was certainly like that. At 21, after earning her bachelors degree, she started a drug rehab program with a group of nuns. After she got her MPH (Masters of Public Health), she started a home day care program for out-of-work women (welfare moms). I was always amazed, watching her, experiencing her passion and creativity, and, once again, feeling more than a little jealous.

I was recently reading an article about persons who do extreme sports, BASE jumping (parachuting off bridges and skyscrapers), hang gliding, rock climbing. Such people, according to the study, frequently have deficiencies of dopamine. This deficiency means they need more excitement than a “normal” person just to feel alive. The author labels such people as Type T personalities.

But just because you don’t have a top rock album, or don’t BASE jump off of bridges, doesn’t mean you don’t have urgings, urgings to create something big, to do something special, to give your life more meaning.

You don’t need to have been born rebellious, like Patti Smith, and you don’t need to have an inadequate amount of endorphins like extreme athletes, to have a more meaningful, fuller life.

Living with passion doesn’t mean you have to do many different things. One is enough for most of us.

You just need to discover your passion.  Most of us just need to dig a little bit deeper to discover our passion. We have to work at it. Investigate. We need to force ourselves to try new things, to have new experiences. There is no need for us mere mortals to settle for “just getting by.”

Because once we discover our passion, something we love, our life gains so much more meaning. We are filled with energy.

But until we know what that purpose is, there is no way for us to fulfill it.

If you don’t know what it is, what passion you are here to pursue, why not make it your mission to find your passion. Try something you have always secretly (maybe even secretly to yourself) wanted to explore.

Some of your investigations will not pan out, like my adventure with sailing. Two hours into the class the instructor returned to the harbor to give my nausea a chance to subside.

But maybe one will result in you finding a life time passion like I did when I took a sculpting workshop. You can read all about it on my blog www.bobprentisssculpting.com.

Life is too short to not have passion in it. Why not get started today?

New Year’s Day is quickly approaching. This signals for many of us a new beginning, a new opportunity, a different way of living our lives.

This year, we promise ourselves, we are going to do it differently. We are going to lose those extra pounds, we are going to find a new job, going to start going to church, start going to the gym. These promises I am talking about are, of course, New Year’s Resolutions.

Promises are great, especially promises that are healthy for us, whether financially, physically, emotionally or spiritually.

The problem, however, for most of us, and for most of our resolutions, is that, come February, those resolutions have been long forgotten.

So how do we do it differently this year? How do we ensure that we will keep these promises we make to ourselves? Here’s four strategies to help you keep your promises.

Strategy 1. Make sure you want to make the resolution, that is, that it serves your goals. In order for you to follow a course of action, it has to be important to you. It doesn’t matter if it’s important to your partner, your parents, your family of your friends. If it isn’t important to you, you won’t be motivated to follow through on the resolution.

Strategy 2. Get clarity on what you want to accomplish and how you will accomplish it.

That’s two separate things:

• Clarity on the resolution: Research on motivation shows that the clearer we are, the more motivated we will be.  So you want to make sure that you write your resolution down, because if you don’t write it down, it is subject to your memory and your emotions. And make it clear enough so that you will know at any moment whether or not you are keeping the resolution. If you leave wiggle room, you may very well wiggle right out of this important resolution.
• Clarity on how to achieve it. Write down how you are going to keep your resolution. Failure to plan means planning to fail.

Strategy 3. Make sure the resolution is achievable. If you don’t honestly think you can achieve it, you will not be motivated to do the necessary work to keep the resolution.

Strategy 4. Don’t overcommit.  You may have noticed I have written about the resolution (singular), rather than the resolutions (plural). We often read about making a list of resolutions, all these changes we are going to make. The sad truth is, the only thing more resolutions do is give you more reasons not to keep any of them.

Instead of having a list of resolutions, figure out the one change that will be the most important to you, that will make the biggest positive impact on your life. The more important, the more worthwhile the change is to you, the more motivated you will be to keep the resolution.

With these four strategies you can make a resolution that has going to have a major positive impact on your life, for the rest of your life.

Self motivation works two different ways. The first way is by doing things that increase our motivation. The model for self motivation is helpful for this way. We increase our motivation by tweaking the factors of self motivation:

1. our vision,
2. our successability and
3. our environment.

The second way to have a positive impact on our motivation is to minimize things that rob us of our motivation. These situations and activities that rob us of our motivation are called detractors.

Today’ blog posting is about these detractors, these things that are amotivating.

Just as our motivators are unique and personal to us, so too are our detractors. Some of the detractors I describe in my book and in future blog postings will have absolutely no power over you, yet others will truly be forces for you to reckon with.

Being intentional, being in control of your self motivation, means finding out what your detractors are, asking yourself what things are stopping you from achieving your dreams.

People say knowledge is power, and when it comes to detractors, that saying is very true. Once we become aware of our detractors, we can take steps to overcome them. We apply strategies that nullify their power over us.

For every detractor in your life, there is a strategy you can use to overcome that detractor, or, at a minimum, to lessen its impact on your motivation and on your life.

In my next posting I will talk about the detractor that I have found to be the most overwhelming for me. I call it the distractor. I refer to it as the mild mannered detractor, because it is hard for me to believe that things that appear to be so unimportant have so often knocked me right off of my path to manifesting my vision.

In the comment space, why not share a detractor or two with your fellow readers?

Earlier this week I was rereading an article by Eknath Easwaran in the Blue Mountain Journal (for information, go to www.easwaran.org). The article, Will and Desire, compares a person’s desire to a river. If the person has many desires, it is like the trickling of many little creeks, flowing all over the place with no direction. Easwaran contrasts this with a person with one all consuming desire who can be compared to a mighty river like the Colorado. Just like the Colorado River which carved the Grand Canyon out of solid rock, so too can a person with a focused desire do miraculous things.

In order for a person to be motivated, he or she needs a worthwhile pursuit. In the self motivational model that worthwhile pursuit is referred to as the vision, the first factor of self motivation. The more important that pursuit is to us, the more motivated we will be to do the work necessary to make it come true. We all have lots of things that are important to us, but to maximize your self motivation you need to choose, choose what will be your all consuming desire.

Some of us won’t have to choose. We know exactly what that pursuit is. Lucky them. For most of us we need to exercise our intent, take control of our self motivation by making a decision, by making a choice.

Self motivation is so important. Anything that is worthwhile is going to take work. And to do that work we need to be motivated. And who better to motivate us, than ourselves.

Many people, myself included, have to fight the fear that committing to one path means we have to give up our freedom.  But what is the freedom we are giving up by refusing to commit? It’s the freedom to be a whole bunch of little creeks, wandering all over the land, and feeling frustrated because nothing ever gets accomplished.

So let’s commit, make that choice, and instead become a roaring river.

Having strong self motivation means you will accomplish your goals and make your dreams come true. But sometimes your self motivation needs a boost. Use these five boosters to get it back where it needs to be.

1. Always know where you are headed.
   As Steven Covey, and many others before him said, “Keep the end in mind.” The best way to do that is to write down your goals. Unless they are written down, they will remain dreams. Writing them down is the first step toward making them come true.
2. Build good habits.
   Although it is generally wise to be conscious, we all need sometimes to operate on automatic. And the reality is, many things don’t require our constant attention. This is lucky for us, because when we get busy or overwhelmed, there is no way we can be conscious about everything we are doing or need to be doing.
   You probably do this already with many things in your life. Like brushing your teeth before you go to bed. Like putting on your sox before you put on your shoes. You don’t need to think about them.
So expand habit making into other parts of your life. Make it a habit to start every day reviewing your goals (see Motivation Booster #1), and writing down the things you need to get done that day. Make it a habit to end each day reviewing that day.  Ask yourself, “What did I do today that moved me closer to achieving my goals?”
3. Expand your social environment.
   Your social environment is the people and organizations that surround you and are available to you as you work toward achieving your goals. Anything in your social environment that has a positive impact is a resource; all the positive things together are your support system. Make sure your social environment is having a positive impact on you.
4. Make sure what you want to be motivated about is important to you.
   This is so important if you want to be motivated to achieve any goal, or make any dream come true. It has to be important for you, or you aren’t going to be motivated to do the work necessary to make it happen. It doesn’t matter if it’s important to your mate, your boss, your family or your friends. It’s got to be important to you. You can be doing it for someone else, that’s fine, so long as it’s important to you.
5. Take control of your motivation.
   No one else knows you well enough to motivate you as well as you can motivate yourself. The best way to take control of your motivation is by creating a plan for motivation. If you don’t know what a plan for motivation entails, I urge you to sign up for my free monthly self motivation newsletter, by entering your email address in the box to the right of this blog. It will teach you all about self motivation and how you can achieve your dreams.

When people hear I teach the skill of self motivation, I am frequently asked what happens if someone isn’t motivated to become motivated. Often the person is just a wise guy, but sometimes the person is curious about a relative or friend who seems totally unmotivated.

The answer is we frequently don’t have enough motivation to succeed at our goals, but with a simple strategy I will share with you, it’s possible to give that limited amount of motivation much more power. I’m talking about the strategy of leveraging your motivation.

I first became aware of this strategy years ago, before I even started studying motivation, but it was so powerful that it has stayed with me. The man from whom I heard it had been trying to lose weight. He works hard to stay on his diet, and when he travels, he has struggles maintaining his diet. When he flies his diet choices are severely limited.

Soon after takeoff the flight attendant brings him and his fellow passengers lunch. As soon as he opens the package containing his lunch, he is confronted by the dessert, usually a brownie. The brownie entices him, but he knows he must resist; brownies are not on his diet.

So what he does, as soon as he sees the brownie, is open up the mayonnaise packet that comes with the lunch, and spreads the mayo all over the brownie. It sounds pretty gross, which is exactly the point. He knows that once the brownie is covered with mayo, it is not at all enticing, and he can eat his healthy sandwich and throw away the brownie.

The man knows his motivation to eat healthy and get slim is not as strong as he wishes it could be. It is strong enough to resist the brownie so long as there is a delicious sandwich waiting for him. It is not strong enough, however, to resist a brownie after he is done with the sandwich and has nothing else to eat to satisfy his urges.

What he does is leverage that limited motivation he does have. By acting quickly and destroying the brownie, making it inedible, before its call becomes overpowering, he is able to stay on his diet.

He didn’t refer to what he was doing as leveraging his motivation. Years later as I was writing my book, iMotivateMe: Take Control of Your Motivation to Reach Your Goals and Achieve Your Dreams, I remembered the story and realized what he was doing was leveraging his motivation.

I leverage my motivation. On my way home from work I pass by a video rental store. I know that if I stop and rent a DVD, once I eat my dinner that DVD will entice me and I will probably spend the evening watching it. I will not do what I know I need to do, work on my book, write in my blog and do my social media.

My motivation is simply not strong enough to resist a DVD on my television stand; not for the whole night. But my motivation is strong enough to make me keep my foot on the accelerator as I speed by the video store.

Whereas I would need at least two hours of motivation to keep from watching the DVD once it were in my house, I only need ten seconds of motivation to keep myself from renting a video.

That’s what leveraging motivation is all about, making limited motivation have a much stronger impact than you would expect it to have.

There are lots of ways you can leverage your motivation. By being creative, by being an intentional person and taking charge of your motivation, you can leverage your motivation to become a motivation powerhouse.