HOW TO STAY MOTIVATED



HOW TO STAY MOTIVATED

Ours is the easiest activity to love when things are going great, and the easiest activity to hate when things are not going so well. The key is not to get too “high” with the highs or too “low” with the lows. Everyone must understand that people will disappoint you on occasion, and people you count on moving forward may not make a positive decision. That’s simply a part of our activity - and you must endure those setbacks in order to get to the successes that await you. Here are some ideas to help you stay motivated, even during the most trying times.

LEAVE YOUR COMFORT ZONE

Remember, only challenge causes growth. Only challenge will test our skills and make us better. Only challenge and the self-motivation to engage the challenge will transform us. And every challenge we face creates a more skillful self. Colin Wilson said, “When a butterfly has emerged, it can never turn back into a caterpillar.” Use your comfort zones to “rest in”, not to “live in”. Use them consciously to relax and restore your energy as you mentally prepare for your next challenge.

PLAY YOUR CHARACTER

How you act is who you become. Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy had the following observation “Spock had a big, big effect on me. Doing that character, I learned so much about rational logical thought that it reshaped my life”. You’ll gather energy and inspiration by “doing the character” YOU want to be. Years ago, I learned that I could motivate myself by thinking and acting like a motivated person. With practice, the line between “acting” and “being” disappears. We don’t realize that we miss opportunities in life when we don’t ACT like the person we want to be. Remember, we become who we ACT LIKE we are!

REPLACE YOUR HABITS

Trying to move toward the life we want while dragging along our bad habits is like driving our car with the brakes on. We must go to the beneficial impulse that drives the habit, and then build on that to make the habit grow from something negative into something positive. What we then achieve is habit-replacement.

One of the benefits of habit-replacement is that it’s fundamentally creative.

And the true sadness and ineffectiveness of habit-elimination is that habit-elimination is fundamentally destructive. It’s motivated by fear. Habit-replacement is motivated by love for the future, and it relies on creativity for its ultimate success.

Replacement is powerful because it works, and where bad habits are concerned it’s the ONLY thing that works. I’ve known people who quit smoking without intending to. They took up running, or some other form of regular aerobic exercise, and soon the breathing and relaxation they were getting from the exercise made the smoking feel bad to their bodies. They quit smoking because they had introduced a replacement.

People who diet have the same experience. It isn’t staying away from fattening food that works - it’s introducing a regular diet of delicious, healthy food that works. It’s replacement. Subconsciously you don’t think your habit is bad because it’s filling a legitimate need. So the way to strengthen yourself is to identify the need and build on it. Honor the need by REPLACING the current habit with one that is healthier and more effective in filling your basic need.

DON’T STOP THINKING

Motivation comes from thought. Every act we take is preceded by a thought that inspires that act. And when we quit thinking, we lose the motivation to act. Pessimists are “all or nothing” thinkers. They think in catastrophic absolutes. They’re either going to do something perfectly, or not at all. Pessimists like to leave problems behind. They think so negatively about “doing the whole thing perfectly” that they end up doing nothing and becoming passive. Whereas the optimist always does a little something, always takes an action and always feels like progress is being made.

Because pessimists have a habit of thinking “it’s hopeless” or “nothing can be done,” they quit thinking too soon. An optimist may have the same initial negative feelings about something, but he or she keeps thinking until smaller possibilities open up. This is why Alan Loy McGinnis, in his inspiring took “The Power of Optimism,” refers to optimists as “tough-minded.” The pessimist, as far as the use of the human mind goes, is a quitter.

During the near disastrous Apollo 13 mission, while the astronauts’ lives were still in doubt, there was one glaring pessimist in Houston ground control who made the comment that he feared Apollo 13 might become the “worst space disaster” in American history. The ground commander in Houston turned to him and said with optimism and anger, “On the contrary, Sir, I see Apollo 13 as being our finest hour.” And he turned out to be right, which illustrates the life-or-death effectiveness of optimistic thinking.

Whenever you feel pessimistic or overwhelmed, remember to keep thinking! The more you think about a situation the more you will see small opportunities for action - and the more small actions you take, the more optimistic energy you will receive. An optimist keeps thinking and self-motivates. A pessimist quits thinking - and then just quits.

Pessimists continually use their imaginations to visualize worst-case scenarios, and then concluding that those scenarios are so hopeless that there is no cause for action. Therefore, pessimism always leads to passivity. Begin the habit in yourself of saying no to negativity. When negative thoughts start their argument in your mind (which they always do, even for the optimists) DON’T STOP THINKING. Thinking leads, sooner or later, to optimism - and optimism is always self-motivating.

HAVE FUN TO PUMP YOURSELF UP

When you’re having fun, your body chemistry changes and you get new surges of motivation and energy. And there isn’t anything you do that can’t be transformed into having fun, particularly our program. Make a commitment to yourself to find the “natural highs” you need to stay motivated. Then support your activities by telling yourself that you’re not interested in doing anything that isn’t fun. Once you have made a job fun (like prospecting), you have solved the problem of self-motivation.

PLAN YOUR GAME

You can create your own actions in advance, much like a football coach scripting the first few series of plays, so that your life will respond to you. If you can hold the thought that at all times your life is either a creation or a reaction, you can continually remind yourself to be creating, planning and forecasting. “Creation” and “Reaction” have EXACTLY the same letters in them. They are Anagrams. Maybe that’s why people slip so easily out of one and into the other.

FEEL GOOD FIRST

Most people think they’ll feel good once they reach some goal. The problem with putting off feeling good about yourself until you hit a certain goal is that it may never happen. By linking your happiness to something you don’t have yet, you’re denying your power to create it for yourself. Remember, happiness is a place to COME FROM, not to GO TO! If you make feeling good about your life dependent on reaching a certain goal, you’ll be unhappy throughout the journey to the goal. Happy people fly faster toward what they want. Your happiness is your birthright - it shouldn’t depend on your achieving something.

MAINTAIN YOUR POSITIVE FOCUS

Most of us don’t ever focus. We constantly feel a certain amount of psychic chaos because we’re always trying to think of too many things at once. Former Dallas Cowboys football coach Jimmy Johnson gave the following talk to his players before the 1993 Super Bowl: “I told them that if I laid a two-by-four across the room, everybody there would walk across it and not fall, because their focus would be that they were going to walk that two-by-four.

But if I put that same two-by-four 10 stories high between two buildings only a few would make it, because their focus would be on falling”. Most of us tend to lose our focus because we’re constantly worried about so many negative possibilities. Rather than focusing on our goals, we are distracted by our worries and fears. Focus on what you want, and it will come into your life. Focus on being a happy and motivated person, and that’s who you will be.

WORK ON YOUR WILLPOWER

The first step in developing your willpower is to accept its existence. You have willpower just as surely as you have life. If someone were to put a large barbell weight in front of you and ask you to lift it and you knew you couldn’t, you wouldn’t say “I have no strength”. You’d say, “I’m not strong enough”. This is more accurate language, because it implies that you COULD be strong enough if you worked at it, and it also implies that you DO have strength.

It’s the same with willpower. When you accept that little piece of Chocolate Cake, it’s not because you have no willpower. It is only that you chose not to exercise it in that particular instance. The second step is to know that your willpower, like your arm, is yours to develop. You are in charge of making it strong or letting it atrophy. It’s not best strengthened by random external circumstances. Willpower is an inside game. Nothing happens until you generate the will to make it happen!

But if we absolutely deny the existence of willpower, we are no longer responsible for developing it. Make a promise to yourself to be clear and truthful about your own willpower. It is always there, and to make it stronger and more useful to you, you have to be willing to play the inside game. You must be willing to EXERCISE your will power to make it stronger, just like any muscle in your body. Repeatedly making small positive decisions in your life is the sure way to strengthen your will power and self-discipline. It’s not about taking one great BIG step; it’s about consistently taking many small ones.

SERVE AND GROW RICH

You can motivate yourself by increasing the flow of money into your life. Most people are embarrassed to even think this way, because they don’t want to be thought of as “greedy” or “obsessed with money”. But do you know who is REALLY obsessed with money? People who don’t think they have enough! They obsess about money all day long. It’s in their family discussions, it’s in their minds at night and it becomes a destructive part of their relationships during the day. The best way NOT to be obsessed with money is to trust your game plan for earning your way to financial freedom.

The road to not being poor always travels through your professional relationships in life. The more you SERVE those relationships, the more productive those relationships will become, and the more money you will make. In his book “Creating Affluence”, Deepak Chopra wrote “Money is the life energy that we exchange and use as a result of the service we provide to the universe”. When you understand that money flows from SERVICE, you can understand something even more valuable: Unexpectedly large amounts of money come from unexpectedly large degrees of service! Accordingly, it’s always a smart business move to do more than you are being paid to do. As Napoleon Hill said “Poverty is no disgrace, but it is certainly not a recommendation”.

GIVE AWAY SOME POWER

In most relationships, we tend to stay focused on ourselves. However, you can stay motivated by giving someone ELSE the ideas necessary for self-motivation. You can have any experience you want in life simply by giving that experience away to someone else. When we shift our focus to the other person in the relationship, something extremely powerful happens - by forgetting ourselves we begin to grow. Personally, I have more fun and enjoy more financial success when I stop trying to get what I want and start helping other people get what THEY want!

LIVE A WHOLE LIFE TODAY

John Wooden, the most successful College basketball coach of all time, lived a philosophy passed on to him by his father - “make each day your masterpiece”. There was no reason for his players not to play as hard in practice as they would in a game. He wanted every player to go to bed each night thinking “Today I was at my best”. The key to success lies in your willingness to do the very small things, but to do them TODAY! Today is a microcosm of your entire life - it is your whole life in miniature. Make each day your masterpiece.

Life is NOW, life is not later on. And the more we hypnotize ourselves into thinking we have all the time in the world to do what we want to do, the more we sleepwalk past life’s finest opportunities. Self motivation flows from the importance that we attach to TODAY!

MOVE YOUR GOAL POSTS

Most people are surprised to learn that the reason they’re not getting what they want in life is because their major goals are too small. A goal is just a goal. A POWER GOAL is a goal that takes on virtual reality. It lives and breathes and provides motivational energy. It gets you up in the morning. You can taste it, smell it and feel it. You’ve got it clearly pictured in your own mind. You’ve got it written down.

And you keep writing it down because every time you do it fills you with clarity of purpose. Walt Disney summed up his entire life’s work with the statement “If you can dream it, you can do it.” How can you tell if you’ve got a big enough and real enough power goal? Simply observe the effect your goal has on you. It’s not what a goal IS that matters, it’s what a goal DOES!

DON’T FORGET SMALL GOALS

Many people completely overlook the power of small goals - goals set during the day that give energy to the day and a sense of achieving a lot of small “wins” along the way. I refer to my large goals as “Outcome Goals”, and my small goals as “Process Goals”. The beauty of Process Goals is that they are always within your immediate power to achieve them. Process goals give you total focus. When you are constantly setting process goals, you are in more control of your day, and you feel a sense of skillful self-motivation. At the end of the day, you can check your progress toward your Outcome Goals. You can adjust your process goals to take you closer to the outcomes you want, and always keep the two in harmony.

People who get into the habit of setting small goals all day long report a much higher level of consciousness and energy. It’s as if they are athletes constantly coaching themselves throughout a game. They are happier people because their day is being created by the power inside their own minds, and NOT by the power of the world around them. An example of a process goal would be to get something done that you’ve been putting off, let’s say before lunch. No matter what, you won’t stop for lunch until you’ve completed that task. Set several of these throughout the day - you won’t believe how your productivity will improve.

ADVERTISE TO YOURSELF

For the most part, unsuccessful people tend to visualize the penalties of failure, while winners visualize the rewards of success. Let’s discuss what actually happens to the subconscious mind when you send it a picture of something you want. Because the subconscious mind only communicates with vividly imagined or real pictures, it will NOT seek to bring into your life anything you can’t picture. Without “advertising” our goals to ourselves, we can lose sight of them altogether. It’s possible to go an entire week, or two, or three without thinking about our main goals in life. We get caught up in reacting and responding to people and circumstances and we simply forget to think about our own purpose. We need to advertise our own goals to ourselves. Otherwise, our psychic energy is spread too thin across the spectrum of things that aren’t that important to us.

By writing goals down, I am like an airline pilot who is consulting his map prior to takeoff. I am orienting my mind to what I am up to in life. I am REMINDING myself of what I really want. We wouldn’t think, before an airline flight, to poke our heads into the cabin and saying to the pilot “Just take me anywhere”! Yet that’s how we live our days when we don’t check the map. Good athletes don’t leave their training to chance. They set up systems and schedules to ensure that they’ll be in shape by the time the season arrives. Neither should we leave the achievement of our own goals and dreams to chance.

BRAINSTORM BY YOURSELF

Brainstorming is a great method of coming up with new and creative ideas to solve problems. The main rules for brainstorming sessions are 1) There are no stupid ideas - the more unreasonable the better, and 2) Everyone must participate. This works so well because the usual restraints against creativity are lifted. You can get all the benefits of a group brainstorming session, simply by doing the exercise yourself.

On the top of a piece of paper list whatever problem you want solved or goal you want reached. You then put the numbers 1 through 20 on the paper, and you begin your brainstorming session. You have to list 20 ideas, and they don’t have to be well thought out or even reasonable. Give yourself permission to flow. Your only objective is to have 20 ideas scrawled down within a certain short period of time. If you do this every day for a week, you will end up with 100 new ideas. Are all of them usable? Of course not, but who cares? When you began the process, you probably didn’t have ANY usable ideas.

This system works so well because it relaxes the normal restraints against creative, outrageous thinking. It invites the right side of your brain to play along. Self-mentoring is the best mentoring you can get, because your mentor knows you so well!

KEEP ALL OF YOUR PROMISES

When President John Kennedy promised that America would put a man on the moon, the power of that promise energized NASA for the all the years it took to accomplish that amazing feat. I his book about the Apollo 13 mission, astronaut Jim Lovell called Kennedy’s original promise as “outrageous.” But it generated the motivation necessary to achieve the outrageous.

In his book Passion, Profit and Power, Marshall Sylver recalls seeing a billboard in Las Vegas put up by one of the casino owners who wanted to become a nonsmoker. The billboard read: “If you see me smoking in the next 90 days, I’ll pay you $100.000.” Can you see the power in that promise?

I’ve found much more power in having my promises and goal be completely separate. My promises are all for keeping, and they all must be within my power to keep, and I must keep them all. When I fail to live this way, I weaken my self-respect and I hurt other people. Promise the things you know it’s in your power to deliver, and then deliver. Your goals can go even further than that. Set them out there in the vicinity of President Kennedy’s moon. Then go for them, keeping all your promises along the way.

GIVE SOME LUCK AWAY

To basketball coach John Wooden, “making each day your masterpiece” wasn’t just about selfish personal achievement. In his autobiography “They Call Me Coach”, he mentions an element vital to creating each day - he said “You cannot live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you”.

I agree with that. But there’s a way to make SURE you can’t be repaid - and that’s doing something for someone who won’t even know who did it! This gets into a theory that I’ve had for years, that you can actually create your own luck in life. You can CREATE luck by giving it away. If you know about someone who is hurting financially, and you arrange for a few hundred dollars to arrive at their home, and they don’t even know who you are, then you’ve MADE them lucky.

By making someone lucky, something happens in your own life that also feels like pure luck. When YOU get lucky, you’ll get more motivated, and you’ll feel more like the universe is on your side. Experiment with this a little, and don’t be imprisoned by rationality on this subject. See if you can begin creating your own luck. You’ll be very surprised by the results.

DO SOMETHING BADLY

Sometimes we don’t do things because we’re not sure we can do them well. We feel we’re not “in the mood” or at the right energy level to do the task we have to do, so we put it off or wait for inspiration to arrive. The most commonly known example of this phenomenon is what writers call “writer’s block.” The “block”, or lack of self-motivation, occurs not because the writer can’t write, but because the writer thinks he can’t WRITE WELL!

The cure for writer’s block, and also the road to self-motivation, is simple. The cure is to go ahead and write “badly.” Novelist Anne Lamott in her book “Bird by Bird” says, “The key to writing is to just start typing anything - it can be the worst thing you’ve ever written, it doesn’t matter. Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.” Singer-songwriter John Stewart says, “When you’re in the first stages of creating, NEVER, EVER censor yourself.”

We’re so often afraid to do things until we’re sure we’ll do them well, we don’t do anything. This tendency once led someone to comment, “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly”. Going out for a run can give me an example of the same phenomenon. Because I don’t feel that I have a good strong run in me, the “voice” says “not today.” But the cure for that is to decide to do it badly: “I don’t feel like running now, so I’m just going to go out and run slowly, but at least I will be running.”

In many ways, we are all novelists - our novels are our lives. And many of us get a tragic form of writer’s block that causes us to not write anything at all. It’s a tragedy, because deep down we are very creative. We could write a great “novel.” It’s just that we’re so afraid of writing badly, we never write. Don’t let this happen to you. If you’re not motivated to do something you know you need to do, just decide to do it “badly.”

BE THE CHANGE

Don’t try to change other people - it doesn’t work. You’ll waste your life trying. Many of us spend too much time trying to change the people in our lives. We think we can change them in ways that will make them better equipped to make us happy. This is especially true of our children. We talk to our children for hours about how we think they should change. But children don’t learn from what we say - they learn from what we do!

Gandhi said “You must BE the change you wish to see in others.” By BEING what you want THEM to be, you can lead by inspiration. Nobody really wants to be taught by lectures and advice. They want to be taught through inspiration. Sales Managers often asked me how they could get a certain salesperson to do more self-motivational activities. I’d tell them that they have to BE the salesperson they wanted to see. I’d say “Take them on a sales call and let them watch you. Don’t TELL them how to do it, INSPIRE them to do it.”

What you TELL people to do often goes right by them. Who you ARE doesn’t! The change in you is contagious. When you YOURSELF change, watch how the people around you change. When you look at your organization, they are a mirror image of you. If they have a negative attitude, you better check your own!

SEE THE GOLD

When I’m happy, I see the happiness in others. When I’m compassionate, I see the compassion in other people. When I’m full of energy and hope, I see opportunities all around me. When I’m angry, I see the hypocrisy in others. When I’m depressed, I notice that other people’s eyes look sad. When I’m weary, I see the world as boring and unattractive. In every circumstance, we can look for the Gold or look for the filth. And what we look for, we find.

Our self-motivation suffers most from how we choose to see the circumstances in our lives. That’s because we don’t see things as they are, we see things as WE are. Colin Wilson said “When I open my eyes in the morning, I am not confronted by a world, but by a million possible worlds.” It’s always your choice. Which world do YOU want to see today? Opportunity is life’s gold. Your opportunities will multiply when you CHOOSE to see them.

SIMPLIFY

The great Green Bay Packer football coach Vince Lombardi was once asked why his world championship team, which had so many multi-talented players, ran such a basic and simple set of plays. He answered “It’s hard to be aggressive when you’re confused.” One way to simplify is to combine tasks. Combining allows you to do two or more things at once. The “creative orientation” to the day - making each day your masterpiece - allows you to look at all of these tasks and small goals and ask yourself “What can I combine?”

In her book “Brain Building”, Marilyn Vos Savant recommends something similar to simplify life. She advises that we make a list of absolutely every small task that has to be done, say over the weekend, and then do them all at once, in one focused action. In other words, fuse all small tasks together and make the doing of them one task so that the rest of the weekend is absolutely free to create as we wish. Get into the habit of doing everything right on the spot - don’t put anything unnecessarily into your future.

Most people are reluctant to see themselves as being creative because they associate creativity with complexity. But creativity is simplicity. Michalangelo said that he could actually SEE his masterpiece “The David,” in the huge, rough rock he discovered in a marble quarry. His only job, he said, was to carve away what wasn’t necessary and he would have his statue. Achieving simplicity in our cluttered and hectic lives is also an ongoing process of carving away what’s not necessary. When you simplify your life, it gathers focus. The more you can focus on the life you want, the faster you’ll get it.

If you’ll use these ideas and techniques, I’m sure you’ll master the art of self-motivation.

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