Success experiences

In today’s posting I’m going to write about a strategy to increase your successability. Successability, your confidence in your competence, is the second factor of self motivation. The model for self motivation tells us that if you increase your confidence in your competence, you will increase your motivation. What intentional man does, as contrasted to automatic man, is create situations for himself which increase his confidence. One way to do this is to give yourself challenges which you can overcome. I call these success experiences.

My Masters degree in education is in instructional design. An instructional designer designs educational instruction. As a designer, we would create the instruction a teacher would use to teach her students. We would plan out what topics were addressed each class. We determine the books that were to be used. We create the syllabus. One of our tasks is to build motivation into the instruction. One way to build motivation into the instruction is to give the learner tests, written or performance based, which the learner can be successful at. Teachers who make their tests extremely hard are not doing it to motivate their students. (To the contrary, perhaps, they are doing this to intimidate their students.) We don’t want to be a bad teacher to ourselves. We want to be like the good teacher who gives tests hard enough that they challenge the students to be their best, and which help make sure the students learn, but not so hard they get discouraged and give up.

Every time you successfully face a challenge, every time you have a success experience, your confidence in your competence grows. Every time your confidence grows, you increase your motivation.

A good teacher wants to help her students create success experiences. A good teacher does not want to have intimidated, frustrated students. Though I had learned this in class, I did not have first hand experience of it until I was in the middle of writing my book. I had decided I wanted to learn to play classical guitar. I can read music, having played brass instruments when I was in middle and high school. What I did not realize when I decided upon the classical guitar was first, that it is an extremely difficult instrument to play, and second, that as you are performing you do not read the music; the music is seen as a crutch. Instead you are to memorize the music, and memorize where each finger is on the neck and which finger is picking which string, for each note in the piece. I found it much easier to read the music than to memorize it. I’m afraid my memory for music was not yet developed adequately. I had accepted that. For a year I had been enjoying myself, playing music which actually sounded pleasant. It was hard work, but because I had been having many success experiences, I remained motivated and continued practicing.

My teacher felt, correctly I am sure, that in order for me to move to the next stage as a classical guitar player, I was going to have to start memorizing, memorizing the music and the finger positions. And so instead of giving me music for the next piece, a Bach cello solo piece, he tried teaching me, measure by measure. In my half hour lesson I managed to “memorize” three measures. He told me to go home and practice them. Good luck. By the time I got home, I couldn’t remember any of it. And I was totally stressed out!

This was NOT a success experience. I was totally amotivated (the opposite of motivated) and I never returned for the another lesson. In fact, yesterday I put my guitar in the mail and shipped it to my daughter, whose music memory is better than mine.

The exact opposite situation was shown to me Thursday morning. (I work with my trainer Thursdays and Sundays, as part of my social environment.) After an hour of working solo, a new client showed up for his training. The new client is an older man, with health challenges. To me he appeared extremely uncertain about his physical abilities. My trainer must have studied success experiences. Everything he had this new client do challenged the man, but was within his ability. He was never allowed to fail. With every success, the man’s motivation grew.

Which way do you want to treat yourself, like the good teacher or the bad teacher? If you want to motivate yourself, and keep yourself motivated, create success experiences for yourself. Put yourself in situations in which you can blossom, in which you feel powerful. This doesn’t mean don’t challenge yourself. It means challenge yourself with reasonable challenges, challenges that you can overcome, so that you thereby increase your motivation.