Best Way To Motivate Other People

Motivation People

1.Welcome the unexpected

Most people do not see themselves as being creative, but we all are. Most people say, "My sister's creative, she paints," or "My father's creative, he sings and writes music." We miss the point that we are all creative. One of the reasons we don't see ourselves that way is that we normally associate being "creative" with being "original." But in reality, creativity has nothing to do with originality—it has everything to do with being unexpected. You don't have to be original to be creative. In fact, it sometimes helps to realize that no one is original.

Even Mozart said that he never wrote an original melody in his life. His melodies were all recombinations of old folk melodies. Look at Elvis Presley. People thought he was a true original when he first came upon the scene. But he wasn't. He was just the first white person to ever sing with enthusiasm. His versions of songs, however, were often direct copies from African-American rhythm and blues singers.

Elvis acknowledged that his entire style was a combination of Little Richard, Jackie Wilson, and James Brown, as well as a variety of gospel singers. Although Elvis wasn't original, he was creative. Because he was so unexpected. If you believe you were created in the image of your Creator, then you must, therefore, be creative. Then, if you're willing to see yourself as creative, you can begin to cultivate it in everything you do. You can start coming up with all kinds of unexpected solutions to the challenges that life throws at you.

2.Choose the happy few

Politely walk away from friends who don't support the changes in your life.

There will be friends who don't. They will be jealous and afraid every time you make a change. They will see your new motivation as a condemnation of their own lack of it. In subtle ways, they will bring you back down to who you used to be. Beware of friends and family who do this. They know not what they do. The people you spend time with will change your life in one way or another. If you associate with cynics, they'll pull you down with them. If you associate with people who support you in being happy and successful, you will have a head start on being happy and successful.

Throughout the day we have many choices regarding who we are going to be with and talk to. Don't just gravitate to the coffee machine and participate in the negative gossip because it's the only game in town. It will drain your energy and stifle your own optimism. We all know who lifts us up, and we all know who brings us down. It's okay to start being more careful about to whom we give our time. In his inspiring book Spontaneous Healing, Andrew Weil recommends: "Make a list of friends and acquaintances in whose company you feel more alive, happier, more optimistic. Pick one whom you will spend some time with this week." When you're in a conversation with a cynic, possibilities seem to have a way of disappearing. A mildly depressing sense of fatalism seems to take over the conversation. No new ideas and no innovative humor. "Cynics," observed President Calvin Coolidge, "do not create." On the other hand, enthusiasm for life is contagious. And being in a conversation with an optimist always opens us up to see more and more of life's possibilities.

Kierkegaard once said, "If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never."

Motivation People

3. Break out of your soul cage

Our society encourages us to seek comfort. Most products and services advertised day and night are designed to make us more comfortable and less challenged.

And yet, 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. Every challenge we face is an opportunity to create a more skillful self. So it is up to you to constantly look for challenges to motivate yourself with. And it's up to you to notice when you're buried alive in a comfort zone.

It's up to you to notice when you are spending your life, in the image of the poet William Olsen, like a flower "living under the wind." 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. But if you use comfort zones to live in forever, they become what rock singer Sting calls your "soul cages." Break free. Fly away. Experience what the philosopher Fichte meant when he said, "Being free is nothing. Becoming free is heavenly."

4. Try interactive listening

The principle of using interactivity as a creativity-builder is not restricted to computer games or chat rooms. Once we become fully conscious of this principle, we can find ways to become more interactive everywhere.

We can even make conversations with our family and friends more interactive than they once were. We all have certain business associates or family members that we think of as we do television sets. As they speak to us, we have a feeling that we already know what they're going to say. This lowers our own consciousness level, and a form of mental laziness sets in. Whereas in the past we might have just passively suffered through other people's monologues, we can now begin introducing more interactivity.

In the past we might have punctuated our sleepy listening with meaningless words and phrases, such as "exactly" and "there you go," but we weren't truly listening. But that passive approach shortchanges ourselves and the people we are listening to. "When we are listened to," wrote Brenda Ueland, "it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life."

The more thoughtful our questions get to be, the more interactive the conversations. Look for opportunities for interactivity to motivate yourself to higher levels of experience.

5. Turn into a word processor

If you associate the word "willpower" with negative things, such as harsh self-denial and punishment, you will weaken your resolve to build it. To increase your resolve, it's often useful to think of new word associations.

To weight lifters, failure is success. Unless they lift a weight to the point of "failure," their muscles aren't growing. So they have programmed themselves, through repetition, to use the word "failure" in a positive sense. They also call what we would call "pain" something positive: "the burn." Getting to "the burn" is the goal! You'll hear bodybuilders call out to each other: "Roast 'em!" By consciously using motivated language, they acquire access to inner power through the use of the human will. Zen philosopher and scholar Alan Watts also used to hate the word "discipline" because it had so many negative connotations.

Yet he knew that the key to enjoying any activity was in the discipline. So he would substitute the word "skill" for "discipline" and when he did that he was able to develop his own self-discipline. Language leads to power, so be conscious of the creative potential of the language you use, and guide it in the direction of more personal power.

Motivation People

6. Program your biocomputer

If you're a regular consumer of the major news programs, you belong to a very persuasive and hypnotic cult. You need to be de-"programmed." Start by altering how you listen to electronic radio gossip, the news, and shock and schlock TV shows. Program out all the negative, cynical, and skeptical thoughts that you now allow to flow into your mind unchecked when you hear the news.

7. Just make everything up

Sometimes in my seminars I will ask the people in the audience to raise their hands if they think of themselves as "creative." I've never had more than a fourth of the audience raise their hands. I then ask the people how many of them were able to make things up when they were younger—make up names for their dolls, make up a game to play, make up a story for their parents when the truth looked less promising. All hands go up.

So, what's the difference? You made stuff up as a child, but you're not a creative adult? The difference is that we have charged the word "creative" with meaning something truly extraordinary. Picasso was creative.

Meryl Streep is creative. Wyclef Jean is creative. But me? So one of the ways to get started creating goals and action plans is to just "make them up," like you did as a kid. Think of creating in simpler terms. Think of it as something all humans do very easily. French psychologist Emile Coue said, "Always think of what you have to do as easy and it will be."

Motivation People

8.Make somebody's day

To basketball coach John Wooden, making each day your masterpiece was not just about selfish personal achievement.

In his autobiography, They Call Me Coach, he mentions an element vital to creating each day. "You cannot live a perfect day," he said, "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 I've had all my life, that you can create luck in your life. Not from the idea that luck is needed for success, because it isn't. But from the idea that luck can be a welcome addition to your life.

You can create luck for yourself by creating it for someone else. 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 will then happen in your own life that also feels like pure luck.

(I can't explain why this happens, and I have no scientific basis for it, so all I can say is try it a few times and see if you aren't as startled as I have been at the results...it doesn't have to be money, either. We have a lot of other things to give, always.) When you get lucky, you'll get more motivated, because you feel like the universe is more on your side. Experiment with this a little. Don't be imprisoned by cynicism posing as rationality on this subject. See what happens to you when you make other people get lucky.

9. Turn your mother down

Psychologist and author M. Scott Peck observes, "To a child, his or her parents represent the world. He assumes that the way his parents do things is the way things are done." In Dr. Martin Seligman's studies of optimism and pessimism, he found out the same thing:

We learn how to explain the world to ourselves from our parents—and more specifically, our mothers. "This tells us that young children listen to what their primary caretaker (usually the mother) says about causes," writes Seligman, "and they tend to make this style their own.

If the child has an optimistic mother, this is great, but it can be a disaster for the child if the child has a pessimistic mother." Fortunately, Seligman's studies show that the disaster need only be temporary—that optimism can be learned...at any age.

But it is not self-motivating to blame Mom if you find yourself to be a pessimist. What works better is self-creation: to produce a voice in your head that's so confident and strong that your mother's voice gets edited out, and your own voice becomes the only one you hear. And as much as you want to eliminate the continuing influence of a pessimistic adult from your childhood, remember that blaming someone else never motivates you because it strengthens the belief that your life is being shaped by people outside yourself. Love your mom (she learned her pessimism from her mother)—and change yourself.

10.Think your way up

In some of my seminars I like to draw a picture of a ladder on the board and call it "the ladder of selves." On the very bottom I write "The Physical," in the middle I put "The Emotional," and at the top I place "The Mind." We can move up or down this ladder by the sheer force of will, although most people don't know they have that option.

By traveling up the ladder, past the physical, through the emotional, and into your mind, you have the opportunity to be creative and thoughtful. You can see possibilities. Many of us, however, never get past the emotional section of the ladder. When we're stuck there, we begin thinking with our feelings instead of thinking with our minds.

If you hurt my feelings, and I'm angry and resentful, I might give you a long and eloquent speech about what's wrong with you and how you operate. But, because I'm thinking with my feelings instead of my mind, I'm destroying something with my

speech instead of creating an understanding. People do this without knowing it.

They let their emotions speak for them, instead of their thoughts. So what you hear is fear, anger, sadness, or other emotions put to words, but never creating anything. If you can picture this ladder inside of you, and start to notice that you are letting your feelings do your thinking and speaking, you can move up. You can get creative and really think and then speak.

As Emmet Fox says, "Love is always creative and fear is always destructive." Go ahead and feel your feelings. But when it's time to talk, let your mind into the conversation. Your mind is what motivates you to your highest performance, not your feelings.