Leveraging your motivation

In today’s posting I am going to share with you a strategy to increase the power of your motivation. You use this strategy when your motivation to do a certain thing, or not do a certain thing, just isn’t strong enough to accomplish what you want.

I first became aware of this strategy years ago, before I even started studying motivation, but it was so powerful that it stayed with me ever since. I heard it from a man who was giving a talk on weight loss. He works to keep from being overweight, and he shared that when he travels, he has struggles maintaining his diet. He told us when he flies his diet choices are severely limited. Soon after takeoff the stewardess will bring 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; there are no brownies 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. He knows that once the brownie is covered with mayo, it is not at all enticing, and he can eat his healthy sandwich and then throw away the brownie.

What occurs is 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. So what he does is leverage that limited motivation. By acting quickly, before the call of the brownie 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, Motivate Yourself: A step by step guide to becoming all you can be, I remembered the story the man told and realized what he was doing was leveraging his motivation.

I also leverage motivation. On my way home from work I pass by a video rental store. I know that if I stop and rent a DVD, that 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 and write in my blog. My motivation is 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 intentional man and taking charge of your motivation, you too can become a motivation powerhouse.