Best Way To Motivate Yourself

Motivate Yourself

1. Tell yourself a true lie

I remember when my then-12-year-old daughter Margery participated in a school poetry reading in which all her classmates had to write a "lie poem" about how great they were. They were supposed to make up untruths about themselves that made them sound unbelievably wonderful. I realized as I listened to the poems that the children were doing an unintended version of what Arnold did to clarify the picture of his future.

By "lying" to themselves they were creating a vision of who they wanted to be. It's noteworthy, too, that public schools are so out of touch with the motivational sources of individual achievement and personal success that in order to invite children to express big visions for themselves they have to invite the children to "lie." (As it was said in the movie ET, "How do you explain school to a higher intelligence?") Most of us are unable to see the truth of who we could be.

My daughter's school developed an unintended solution to that difficulty: If it's hard for you to imagine the potential in yourself, then you might want to begin by expressing it as a fantasy, as did the children who wrote the poems. Think up some stories about who you would like to be. Your subconscious mind doesn't know you're fantasizing (it either receives pictures or doesn't). Soon you will begin to create the necessary blueprint for stretching your accomplishments. Without a picture of your highest self, you can't live into that self. Fake it till you make it. The lie will become the truth.

2.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 expecet.

Motivate Yourself

3. 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.

4.Program your biocompute

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.

Motivate Yourself

5.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."

6.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.

7. Set a specific power goal

Most people are surprised to learn that the reason they're not getting what they want in life is because their goals are too small. And too vague. And therefore have no power. Your goals will never be reached if they fail to excite your imagination. What really excites the imagination is the setting of a large and specific power goal. Usually, a goal is just a goal. But a power goal is a goal that takes on a huge reality.

It lives and breathes. It 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 mind. You've got it written down. And you love writing it down because every time you do it fills you with clarity of purpose. In his audiotape series, "Visioneering," my old partner Dennis Deaton teaches the transforming power of lofty goals.

Deaton talks about creating a "mental movie" that you watch as often as possible. He urges you to make it a movie that stars you—living the results of achieving your specific goal. Walt Disney left us many great things: Disneyland, Walt Disney World, great animated films, and Annette Funicello. But what I believe was his greatest gift was the summing up he did of his life's work: "If you can dream it," he said, "you can do it." A power goal is a dream with a deadline. The deadline itself motivates you. People who have created power goals start living on purpose. They know what they're up to in life.

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.

Motivate Yourself

8. Find your master key

I used to have the feeling that everyone else in life had at one time or another been issued instruction books on how to make life work. And I, for some reason, wasn't there when they passed them out. I felt a little like the Spanish poet Cesar Vallejo, who wrote, "Well, on the day I was born, God was sick." Still struggling in my mid-30s with a pessimistic outlook and no sense of purpose, I voiced my frustration once to a friend of mine, Dr. Mike Killebrew, who recommended a book to me. Until that time, I didn't really believe that there could be a book that could tell you how to make your life work.