Distracters

In my most recent posting, I explained the concept of the detractor as anything that stands in your way of manifesting your vision. I shared with you that the most daunting type of detractor for me was the distracter.

When I talk about the distracter I am referring to those things that temporarily knock me off course as I pursue my vision, my goals and my tasks. Telling you what my most powerful distracter is will explain very well what a distracter is. It might be yours, too. It’s the television. In twelve step programs they tell you that sobriety or being drug free occurs one day at a time. For me, a distracter keeps me from achieving my goals, one day at a time.

A distracter doesn’t knock me off the path. It’s too subtle for that. Instead it temporarily seduces me from my path. Instead of writing a blog entry, I sit down in front of the television and watch mixed martial arts on Spike, or flip over to HBO to see whether an action movie is playing. And it doesn’t matter if I have seen it before, I’ll watch it again!

Other common distracters are alcohol, illicit drug use, going to clubs, hanging out. You know your distracter better than anyone else (except maybe your significant other).

Distracters are generally more powerful when we are supposed to be doing a task that isn’t particularly exciting. Exciting tasks have motivating appeal of there own which is likely to overcome the lure of the distracter, but a boring task may not. Even though we know the task is important, in that it will move us closer to achieving a goal, it may not have a lot of inherent appeal. Consequently, we are more likely to be distracted from tasks that involve drudgery.

It’s important that you look carefully at yourself and figure out what your distracters are, if you don’t already know. Once you know what they are, distracters are not usually too difficult to overcome. The problem is, they must continually be overcome. It’s not a one time battle. The good news is losing a battle occasionally will not keep you from achieving your dreams. That's the key, making sure it only happens occasionally.

Ongoing Improvement

If you have been reading my postings, it may have become apparent to you that in order to become motivated and stay motivated, you need a system, a plan. Haphazard attempts at getting ourselves motivated are not going to work. There are just too many things going on in our lives that distract us and turn us away from our path to expect motivation just to happen. Only by having a system will you be able to keep yourself motivated.

However, the focused activity does not stop after you have created your plan, you need to establish a way to make sure not only that the plan continues to work, but also allows you to improve the plan, as you gain experience and wisdom about yourself. The way we guarantee this ongoing improvement is through evaluation. All highly functioning businesses establish a process for ongoing improvement, through self evaluation.

We’ll talk in future blog postings about how to do an evaluation. Today we will talk about when to do an evaluation, the timing of your evaluations.

There are two ways to time your evaluation; you should use both ways. The first is on a regularly scheduled basis. Every week, two weeks, or month, your choice, you need to sit down and figure out how you are doing. Are you moving forward on your goals? If you find out you aren’t, you will now know you need to figure out why. If your evaluation shows that you are bumping into one particular ongoing problem, this knowledge will allow you to take steps to stop that from happening.

The second way to time your evaluations is on an “as-needed” basis. Evaluations are needed when something good happens, and when something bad happens. When something good happens, we need an evaluation to find out why the good thing happened, so we can make it happen again. We don’t want to lose the benefit of that lesson. We also need to take time to bask in the good feelings that will arise when it happens, and also to see if there are benefits from the good thing that maybe we don’t see at first blush.

When something bad happens, we also need to find out why, so we can avoid it happening in the future. We also may need to take some time to heal over any pain that results when things don’t go according to plan.

As intentional man, we don’t let things happen, we make things happen. A proper evaluation is one way we do that.

Why you would want to motivate yourself.

As I wrote in an earlier blog, most of the research I read on motivation dealt with motivating someone else, the teacher motivating the learner, the coach motivating the athlete, the manager motivating the employee. Motivating another person has its place, certainly, but it seemed to me if I could motivate myself, this would be more powerful for me. My research showed this idea was correct.

I saw in my own life that getting my motivation from another person has at least two problems. My dream was becoming a public speaker. I already had a job doing something else, so I had to do my work on my public speaking after a hard day at the office. If it was a real hard day, I would much rather just eat my dinner, and watch TV. I just wouldn’t be motivated to work on my dream. Occasionally I would go see a motivational speaker, and would be motivated for a couple of days, maybe even a week if the speaker was real good, working on my new career every night, but two weeks later, or a month later, I would I would go back to my old ways, kicking back watching the tube. The problem is the motivational speaker is not always going to be there to make sure you stay on track.

Well, you might respond, can’t you listen to the speaker on a CD? Yes you can, but only if you are motivated to put the CD on. But there is another reason that the speaker, whether live or on a CD,. is not going to be all that helpful in the long run. The reason is that each one of us is unique. We have different likes; we have different dislikes. And similarly, the things that motivate us are different as well. What motivates you is not what motivates me. Unfortunately, no one else is going to take the time to figure out what motivates each one of us to achieve our particular dream. That job is ours!

And that ‘s why we want to be our own motivational speaker, so that we can be there, 24/7, and so we can create a plan of motivation that is uniquely ours, not a generic speech aimed at the masses.

In my next posting on this blog I will be sharing with you the role of intent, the role you will need to play in motivating yourself.