A case study in the self motivation model, Part Two

I shared with you in my last posting that I was having trouble motivating myself to get serious about tweeting. I decided to share with you how I am now using the self motivation model to motivate myself to get start using Twitter effectively.

As a reminder, the model for self motivation is:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

Vision is that thing you want to accomplish, the change you want to make in your life; successability is your confidence in your competence; and environment is the place you do your work (physical environment) and the people and organizations that are in your life or that are available to you (social environment). Anything you do to one of the three factors on the right will automatically impact your motivation.

I first looked at the factor vision. One way for me to increase the motivational power of my vision is to make it worthwhile to me. To be perfectly honest, I am tweeting because someone whose opinion I strongly respect suggested it would be important in marketing my book. But remember what I wrote in my last post about something being important to another person? It doesn’t make a bit of difference. If it isn’t important to you, it won’t be motivating.

So what makes it important to me? Why is it a worthwhile undertaking? At this point I get stuck because I don’t really know what the undertaking is. First I need to decide exactly what the change is that I want. Vision is a change you want to make to make your life better.

I need clarity in exactly what my undertaking, my vision, is. So I grab a pen and this is what I write down. The change I want is a large number of qualified followers to my Twitter account. I want this change because when the book is completed and printed I want to be able to get the word out through Twitter to people who are interested in buying a book that will teach them how to make their dreams come true, or who are able and willing to get the word out about my book to those who are interested in such a book. A qualified follower is someone who fits in either or both of those two categories.

I think that is clear. And because it is clear, I see immediately why it is worthwhile to me - because I want to sell my book. It will be a very good book and will be helpful to many people, changing their lives for the better. But if no one knows about it, no one will buy it, and I’ve wasted four years of my life and I haven’t been able to help anyone make their dreams come true. Building a list of qualified followers is exactly the marketing I need to make all my hard work worthwhile.

That takes care of my work with vision. My vision is clear and it is worthwhile to me. I’m already feeling motivated, because I have a better handle on why I am learning all about Twitter. Motivating yourself is not brain surgery. It’s really that easy.

Please join me in my next blog posting as I share how I am using the remaining two factors of the self motivation model, successability and environment, to motivate myself to effectively use Twitter in my life.

A case study in the self motivation model, Part One

I’ve been trying for a while to get myself to do some serious tweeting (@motivateyou) but am having a bit of a struggle. I’ve downloaded information off the internet showing me how to tweet and how to build a following, but it’s not working. There always seemed to be something more important or fun (like mowing the lawn) that needed doing.

Sound familiar?

Yup, I wasn’t motivated. Me! Mr. @motivateyou who writes a blog about motivating yourself. So after three months of this … yes, three months, I decided I needed to take a look at this problem, and share in my blog how I addressed this issue. I decided I would apply the self motivation model to my issue, to motivate myself about tweeting. I think it is called walking the talk.

The model for self motivation is:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

Vision is that thing you want to accomplish, the change you want to make in your life; successability is your confidence in your competence; and environment is the place you do your work (physical environment) and the people and organizations that are in your life or that are available to you (social environment).

My initial gut feeling was that where I can make the most impact is in the first factor, the vision. I don’t think I have a good handle on why Twitter is important to me. But as I was writing that, I realized that successability is probably impacting me as much. I wasn’t very confident that I would be successful in using Twitter; when I sign on to my account I felt like one of the nerdy kids trying to get recognized by the cool clique. That feeling didn’t make me want to do much with Twitter. So I wasn’t. Two out of three, so far, although I knew I could also make some changes in my environment to increase my motivation.

In this posting I will address how to make the vision motivating, and in my next posting the work I will share the work I did on vision, and in a following post, the work I am doing on successability and environment.

The two keys to maximizing the motivational power of the vision are:

1. Make it worthwhile to me
2. Make it clear to me

Let’s talk about these one at a time.

Key #1 Make my vision worthwhile to me.

In order for the vision to motivate you, it must be worthwhile or valuable to you. This is really two different requirements 1) worthwhile, and 2) to you.

It doesn’t really matter if it is valuable to another person. Unless you make it worthwhile to you, personally, it will not motivate you. If you are trying to make a change in your life because someone else thinks it is important, that will not be enough to motivate you, even if that other person has let you know that it is important to them, sometimes many times, no matter how many times you promise that other person you will try. Unless it is important to YOU, you will not be motivated to make the change.

This does not mean we won’t be motivated to make changes other people want us to make; it just means we are going to get in touch with why it is important to us. The bottom line is, we need to know why it is important to us to make the change.

Key #2 Make my vision clear to me.

The more clear we are as to what the change is that we want to implement in our lives, the more motivated we will be to make the change. A fundamental truth in motivation is that clarity is motivating. We see this in successability, the second factor, and it is true as well in vision, the first factor. Make sure you know exactly what change you want to make in your life and you will be more likely to accomplish it.

Please join me in my next blog posting as I share how I am using the model to motivate myself to effectively use Twitter in my life.

The interplay of the factors of self motivation

The model for self motivation is

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

This means anything you do to one of the factors on the right, will automatically impact your motivation. Make your vision more desirable, your motivation will increase. Take actions to increase your successability (your confidence in your competence) your motivation will increase. Surround yourself with people who support you (environment), your motivation will increase. Negatively impact any of the three, and your motivation will suffer.

But the relationship is more complex than that, because the three factors of self motivation are not three independent factors; instead they are interrelated. Steps you take to impact one factor will frequently favorably impact not only your motivation, but will also favorably impact another factor, which in its turn will favorably impact your motivation.

A major interaction is the one between successability and the environment.

People who have high levels of confidence in themselves (successability) are more likely to use the resources available in their social environment. They will seek out relationships in their social environment that will help them achieve the goals they are seeking. As a result, their confidence will increase even more. Those who feel less confident, on the other hand, are less likely to pursue these relationships, so they will lack the support and other benefits that such relationships can provide. As a result, their confidence in their ability will diminish even more.

The more confident person will be more likely to pursue the training and skill gathering opportunities available in the environment, whether from institutions of learning or less formal training from social organizations or from their employer. As a result their confidence will increase as they acquire additional skills. The less confident person will question his or her ability to succeed at such training and will be less likely to attempt it. As a result, the person with low confidence will not be able to benefit by these resources.

The relationship between vision and successability is just as important. It is easier for a confident person to come up with a more exciting, more compelling vision. The more desirable the vision, the more valuable it is to the person, the more motivating it is to the person. A less confident person is more likely to accept what he has been offered, rather than selecting what is truly dear to his or her heart.

The reason this interdependency is important for you, is so you know to work on all three factors. Don’t ignore any of the three. Working on all three factors gives you three times as many opportunities to increase your motivation. But because the three are interrelated, the outcome can often result in more than three times as much motivation. On the other hand, ignoring any of the three can have a powerful impact on your motivation as well, but in a negative direction.

Vision, successability and environment are the three factors of motivation. Use all three to maximize your motivation.

P.S. If you want to know how to increase your self confidence, take a look at my last posting.

Three strategies to increase your self confidence

In my last blog post I wrote about an article by Albert Bandura on self-efficacy, a synonym of sorts of “successability.” I shared how important it was for our motivation that we have confidence in our competence in order to stay motivated, by contrasting the behaviors of persons with high confidence in themselves to those with low confidence. In today’s blog posting I share with you strategies based upon Bandura’s article you can use to increase your confidence in your competence, your self-efficacy.

The three strategies to increase your confidence in yourself:

1. Create mastery experiences.

Successes build your self confidence. Failures can erode it, especially if you already have low self confidence. However, if the successes are too easy they can lead you to become easily discouraged when the string of successes don’t continue. To maximize the impact of your successes they need to be worthwhile successes, ones that you have worked hard on, and ones at which you have risked failure. (In the model for self motivation we know that the optimum level of risk is a moderate level of risk.

2. Observe successful people doing what you want to do.

Seeing people similar to yourself succeeding at the things you want to succeed at raises your belief that you too are capable of succeeding. Bandura refers to this as modeling. The greater the similarity between you and the person you are modeling, the stronger the positive impact on your confidence. There is additional benefit to modeling; it can result in you learning skills that you may not already possess. Modeling is a great use of your social environment.

3. Surround yourself with supportive people who believe in you.

Search out people who will support you in your journey, people who believe in you. This can be an individual or an organization of like minded people.

Bandura refers to this as social persuasion. He points out that people whose essential competence is affirmed by their associates are more likely to try harder and sustain their efforts in the face of adversity. They are also more likely to seek out resources from which they can improve even further. Those who are told they are incompetent by associates are more likely to not even try, or, if they do try, to give up at the first sign of adversity.

By using these three strategies you will increase your successability, your confidence in competence, and thereby increase your motivation. I suggest you spend a little time thinking about how you can put these strategies into play in your life. Is there some place, some organization you can join where you can implement all three strategies at once. Using your social environment to do this is a great way to leverage your motivation.

If you know of such an organization that can serve this purpose for you, please share it with your fellow readers by leaving a comment.

Self confidence and motivation

It was in an article by Albert Bandura, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and a prolific writer and thinker, that I first read the term self-efficacy. Bandura defined the term as “an impression that one is capable of performing in a certain manner or attaining certain goals. It is a belief that one has the capabilities to execute the courses of actions required to manage prospective situations.” A shorter definition I’ve read is a feeling of competence in one’s ability to deal with new situations.

If you are thinking this sounds similar to successability, your confidence in your competence, the second factor of self motivation, I agree with you.

Bandura had written the article, entitled “Self-Efficacy”, for the Encyclopedia of Human Behavior. In it Bandura explained, among other things, the interaction between self-efficacy and motivation.

He writes that there are five major differences between people who are confident in their abilities and those who are not. These differences result in those who are confident being able to accomplish so much more in their lives:

1. The confident person approaches difficult tasks as challenges, in fact will actually create challenges in his or her life, challenges the person looks forward to meeting. The non-confident person perceives difficult tasks as threats, and shies away from them.

2. The confident person is able to maintain sustained effort in meeting their challenges. Set backs and failures are not devastating to them; they quickly recover and proceed on their path once again. The non-confident person is not as committed to his or her goals. When set backs or failures occur, they see themselves as incompetent and give up.

3. The confident person has lower stress because of their confidence in their ability to deal with situations that may arise. The non-confident person easy becomes stressed and depressed because of their perceived lack of control over events.

4. The stronger the perceived self-efficacy, the higher the goal challenges people set for themselves and the firmer is their commitment to them.

5. Confident people are motivated to achieve their goals; non-confident people have low levels of motivation.

Clearly we each want to be a person with high self-efficacy. It sure sounds a lot better to me! But what if we aren’t such a person? If we have low self esteem, are we stuck forever with low motivation? Luckily for us, Bandura not only wrote that we can positively impact our self-efficacy, but he tells us how to do it. Come back and read my next posting Sunday evening and I will share what he wrote.

Getting motivated to exercise

There are so many articles these days about the importance of regular exercise, few would question it is important. Nevertheless, though we admire those who seem to like nothing better than exercise, for many of us exercise comes lower on the priority list.

So how can we use the model for self motivation to get us to put on the tennis shoes and start working out? I’m glad you asked.

The model for self motivation is simple:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

Anything you do to any of the three factors on the right has a direct impact on your motivation. That's what makes the model so practical. It's easy to put it into practice. Here are some helpful strategies using the model you can use to get you, and keep you, motivated to exercise.

Vision (the worthwhile pursuit) The more worthwhile or valuable your pursuit is, the more motivated you will be to work on achieving it. Consequently, your goal is to make exercising more worthwhile. How we do this:

• Find an exercise that you enjoy. The more you enjoy it, the more value it has.
• Learn the benefits of exercise. Exercise will help you live longer by avoiding hypertension, heart attacks, strokes, osteoporosis.
• Create your personal "reasons list"; the reasons you want to exercise. Some examples are: fit into you old slimmer clothes, be better at the sports you love, looking better for another person, be stronger, look good when you go to the beach, stress relief.
• Use the time exercising for just thinking about things
• Take advantage of the social benefits of exercise, getting to visit with similarly focused people. The track club was a big motivator for me when I was running
• One of the funniest benefits, a friend’s reason for running: being able to eat and drink all you want.
• Rewarding yourself: Although most experts say external motivation doesn’t have the motivational impact of internal motivation, many people find creating rewards for successful completion of tasks, for example, renting a video for every two work outs completed, increases their motivation, perhaps by indirectly enhancing the worth of their vision. Try it out for yourself.

Successability: the more confident you are in your competence the more motivated you will be. How we do this:

• (yup, here too) Find an exercise that you enjoy; you are more likely to do it and enjoy the motivating impact of many successes. A success is when you do what you are motivating yourself to do, in this case, exercising.
• Exercise first thing in the morning, every morning. Make a habit of exercise.
• Set and write down precise goals; the more clear you are the more motivated you will be.
• Make sure your goals are attainable. Don’t have as a goal something you are unlikely to accomplish.
• Keep track of what you have done with an exercise log. When I ran I always kept one, but especially for the races. Over the years my PR’s would slowly come down, and I was able to use my successes in races to keep myself training day to day. For most runners racing is more fun than training, so you use your racing successes to motivate you on your training runs. Successes increase successability which increase motivation.
• Take time to appreciate the results of your exercise program.
• Read inspirational stories of persons doing the sport you are doing, or who are accomplishing the goals for which you are exercising. The successes of others will help you realize that your goals are achievable, that you can be successful.

Environment: You can adjust/change your environment to enhance your motivation. Here’s some strategies:

To enhance your physical environment, the place where you live and where you do your work:

• take a photo of your self at the start of your program and at regular intervals so you can see the improvement and post them on your wall.
• Put motivational quotes or posters on the walls.
• Put pictures of sports models, who look like you want to look, on the walls.
• If you go to a gym, make sure it is a place you want to be at.

To enhance your social environment, the people and organizations (groups of people) that surround you:

• Exercise with a friend. (I used to run weekly with a much better runner; he would motivate me to push harder than I ever would have pushed by myself.)
• Find a fitness class or hire a trainer. Not only will you rely on their expertise, but also on them motivating you to try "just a bit harder."
• Join a club of like minded people.
• Tell people what are going to do; your pride will motivate you to “keep your word."

Do you have a strategy for keeping you on an exercise program? If so, please share it with other readers by commenting below.

Overcoming a defeatist attitude. Part 2

In my most recent posting I shared with you how a defeatist attitude can rob you of your motivation. It does this by negatively impacting your successability, your confidence in your competence. I encouraged you to identify those things that made you feel you were not capable of achieving your dreams. It is only by knowing what those things are, that we can address them.

Once you have identified them, your social environment can be very helpful in fixing them and thereby increase your confidence. Your social environment includes all the people and organizations that surround you or that are available to you. Your social environment is helpful because it contains resources that can help you fix these problems.

Let’s look at some of the ways we can use our social environment to increase our confidence.

If your lack of confidence is because you lack certain skills, you can use resources in your social environment to gain these skills. A source for learning those skills may be as close as your present job; find out if your present employer offers on the job training. You may have to look outside your job, maybe contacting a local community college or technical school. On-line training is a wonderful resource for learning skills, as learning can take place in your own home, at a time when it is convenient for you.

Maybe your lack of confidence is because you don’t have any contacts; you feel you don’t know the people you need to in order to open the doors that need to be opened. If this is your identified problem, take advantage of organizations in your social environment in which you can network to make those important business contacts.

If your lack of confidence is due to a feeling that you just aren’t the type of person who does whatever your dream is, you need to find an organization where you can practice the traits you feel you need to develop. For example, if your dream is to be a sales person but you feel you are too shy to speak to people, join a social business club and learn in a safe environment how to mingle.

Your social environment is as big as you want it to be. There is an organization to meet just about any need you have.

Be creative in utilizing the resources in your social environment. They can give you a big boost in your motivation.

Overcoming a defeatist attitude. Part 1

Your confidence in your competence, what is called your successability, plays a large part in how motivated you are. If there is a particular goal you desire, but in your heart of hearts you feel that you will not be able to achieve it, you will not be motivated to go after it. It follows, of course, if you don’t go after it, you guarantee you will not achieve it.

When we face such a situation, wanting something but not believing we are capable of getting it, are we caught in a no-win situation? Luckily, we are not. There is a strategy we can use to extricate ourselves from the unpleasantness of the situation. The strategy is called overcoming a defeatist attitude. With this strategy and a little bit of work, we can restore our self confidence, and become motivated to move forward toward our dreams.

Encouraging someone to “be more confident” isn’t very helpful, is it? What they need are specific tasks, behaviors, they can do that will result it them being more confident. This strategy will give you exactly that.

The first step is to identify those things that make you feel you will not succeed at your goal. Do you lack certain skills, skills you feel you need to achieve your goal? Do you lack the contacts you feel are necessary to succeed?

Do this step by brainstorming. Though brainstorming is usually thought of as being done by a group, research has shown that brainstorming is more effective for individuals. In this situation what it means is non-critically thinking of answers to the question, “What do I think will prevent me from achieving my goal?” or “What things will I need to do to get me to the place so I can achieve my goal?”

Try not to think of the issue as how you are deficient as a person, but rather as in what way you have not yet grown so as to be confident in this situation. In other words, the focus will be not on your deficits, but rather on what you can do to help yourself. Non-critically means we just list the things that pop into our mind when we ask the question. We don’t judge our answers, nor do we judge ourselves. We are merely gathering information.

Take some time with this very important first step. Only by identifying specifically what is making you lack confidence can you move forward and remedy the situation.

Once you have identified those things that are adversely impacting your confidence, the next step is to come up with actions that will counter those things.

In my next blog post, on Wednesday, I will provide you with guidance in coming up with the actions you can take to increase your confidence in your competence, and get you moving once again toward your dreams.

For motivation, divide and conquer

Ever feel overwhelmed by how large a task is? Did it seem like there was no way you were going to accomplish it? Did the enormity of the task make you want to just throw up your hands and say, “The heck with this”? If so, welcome to the world of demotivation due to lack of successability.

Successability refers to your confidence in your competence. The more confident you are in your ability to succeed at a particular goal or task, the more motivated you will be to do it. Unfortunately, the converse is also true, the less confident you are in your ability to do the task, the less motivated you will be to do it.

This is the problem with tasks or goals that are really big; they overwhelm you. You wonder if you will be able to do them; they create doubts and make you insecure. You lose your confidence and then lose your motivation.

There is a strategy you can use to overcome this problem. It’s really quite easy.

I call this strategy breaking it down. In this strategy we make what had been an overwhelming task into a series of less onerous tasks. We do this either by breaking the task into its component parts, or by setting a limit on the amount of time we will be engaged in the task at this particular time.

I faced this very problem over this past weekend. I’ve recently started tweeting, so I purchased a book on how to use Twitter in marketing. I believe Twitter is a powerful tool, but only if you know how to use it. So I wanted to learn how to use it properly. Saturday morning I took the book out of my brief case, and the first thing I notice is how long it is, 477 pages, so many pages. The very next thing I notice is that the lawn needs cutting. I was clearly looking for a distracter, some reason to not read the book. But I knew I wanted to become an expert in Twitter; I really wanted to study the book, but my motivation wasn’t strong enough to overcome my reluctance at such a major task as studying a 477 page book. So what I did was set a time limit for myself. I told myself I only needed to read for one hour. I even set the timer on the microwave for one hour so I would not be distracted by wondering when I had completed my hour.

I told myself that after that hour if I wanted to mow the lawn, I would allow myself to. This was a much more manageable task, so with such a manageable task at hand, one I was confident I could complete, I was once again motivated. As it worked out, I studied the book for an hour, and then just kept reading, for another hour.

What we are also doing when we break it down is matching the chore to our available motivation. I didn’t have enough motivation to read the whole darn book, but I did have enough to read for one hour, which turned into two hours.

I could just as easily have broken down the task of studying the book into its component parts. For a book it’s easy to do. Each chapter of the book is a component part. To apply the strategy in this way, I would have assigned myself a certain number of chapters.

Breaking tasks down, either by component part or by setting time limits, can work wonders when you are facing an overwhelmingly big task.

Why not try it out next time you are facing such a task?