Bridging the Gap

In the last couple of posts we’ve been talking about the evaluation, intentionally taking time to see how we are going on our path to manifesting our vision. One strategy we use in the evaluation is called bridging the gap.

When we refer to the gap we are talking about the distance or difference between what we had planned to occur and what really did occur. If we have used the three step process for successability, we have clarity as it relates to what we planned to have occurred (see the posting on clarity). This makes it easy for us to see if there is a gap, and if there is, easy to determine exactly what it is.

As part of your motivation plan, you have written down your goals and your tasks. Are you accomplishing your goals? If you aren’t, that is your gap. Are you completing your tasks? If not, then that is your gap. If you are accomplishing your goals, is your vision becoming manifest? If not, that is your gap.

Once you have identified your gap or gaps, it is time to bridge the gap, find out why you have a gap, and figure out how to close that gap, how to make happen what you have planned on happening. Make sure you don’t forget the Drucker ratio when you examine the gap. Instead of asking why something went wrong, ask how you can make it right.

Use your vision > goal > task paradigm to assist you in bridging the gap. If you are completing your tasks, but the goals aren’t being met, than you need to redefine your tasks. If you are completing your goals, but your aren’t manifesting your vision, you need to create new goals, are maybe restate them more clearly. If you aren’t completing your tasks, you need to figure out why. Are they too difficult? Are there things blocking you from completing them?

Perhaps you missing some skills you need to accomplish your goals. What type of training can you get to add those skills. Are there changes to your environment, either physical or social that will help you bridge the gap?

What you want to do with this strategy of bridging the gap is come up with solutions that are clearly stated and achievable, that will get you back on your path to manifesting your vision.

Using the Drucker Ratio in the Evaluation

When we institute a practice evaluation into our self motivation system, we need to keep in mind its purpose. What purpose does evaluation have on our motivation, and how can we use an evaluation to positively impact our motivation. The most obvious reason is to improve our system of self motivation, and so we set up an evaluation that will be effective in doing that.

But the evaluation should also be structured to enhance your motivation; that is, it becomes a factor in how motivated you are as you do the evaluation and afterwards. We do this by making the the evaluation enhance our successability, our confidence in our competence.

One of the ways we ensure that the evaluation will enhance our successability is by making sure we use what I call the Drucker ratio. Peter Drucker was one of the foremost thinkers and writers about people as they interact with the places they work. One thing he wrote about was how managers treat their workers. He posited that the average worker does good work about 90% of the time and inadequate work about 10% of the time. (I think he got the numbers pretty accurately about me!) Consequently, he argued, when a manager is talking to a worker about the worker’s performance, 90% of what he says should be positive. The ratio of the positive feedback to negative feedback, he argues, should be the same as the ratio of good work to inadequate work. How many of us have worked for managers who followed the Drucker ratio? Bosses like that are not real common.

But luckily for us, we control the type of manager we are to ourselves. We control the type of evaluation we give ourselves, when they are positive and when they are negative. We want to maintain the Drucker ratio when we do self evaluations of our movement toward our vision. We want to encourage ourselves and foster high successability, confidence in our competence. It is a simple concept, but so many of us are quick to dump on ourselves when we mess up.

We certainly do need to be honest with ourselves, and call attention when we are not moving forward, so we can make corrections, but we also need to celebrate the good things we are doing.

By maintaining the Drucker ratio in our evaluations, we increase our motivation and keep moving forward toward our vision.

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.

Social Environment

My last posting dealt with physical environment. Today’s will deal with social environment.

Social environment means all the people and the collections of people who surround you and with whom you come in contact and the interactions you have with them. We use the term very broadly. There are so many different types of people in your social environment. Some examples are role models, mentors, professional organizations, family, friends, service clubs, peer partners, counselors, teachers, trainers, seminars. The list goes on and on.

As intentional men, our goal is to use our social environment to enhance our motivation. My vision is me as a public speaker, training people how to motivate themselves so they can become all they are capable of being. A large part of my social environment is Toastmasters, an organization that has given me, and continues to give me, experience, skill and camaraderie. If you are interested in public speaking, or just wish to get more comfortable speaking in public, check it out at www.Toastmasters.org. I belong to two clubs, one is a regular club and the other one an advanced club, the members of which are all professional speakers.

I am also a member of a marketing group. This group, through its newsletter and by interactions with other members, teaches me the skills I need to market myself as a speaker and an author. Having these two things, Toastmasters and my marketing group, in my social environment enhance my motivation.

I continually become more and more conscious of my social environment. My physical environment has pretty much stayed the same for the past two years, with the exception of the purchase of a new computer. Other than that, I use the same desk, in the same room, in the same house. My physical environment works well for me as it is, so changing it is not necessary, except for maybe once in a while cleaning up the mess.

My social environment, however, is continually in flux. I recently contracted with a publicist/expert/counselor. She is very experienced in book publishing and public speaking. She knows people who can do the things I need doing, like setting up an appropriate web page. She also is a source of encouragement. This woman is a new part of my social environment, one that definitely enhances my motivation.

No matter what your vision, there are ways for you to enhance your motivation by working on your social environment.

Physical Environment

The third factor of self motivation is environment, both physical environment and social environment. Today’s posting deals with physical environment.

Physical environment is usually what we think about when we hear the word environment. It’s a place. It’s the place where you do the work that is required to manifest your vision. But it’s more than just the place; it also includes the things in that place. For many people the place will be an office, whether outside or inside their home. For others it might be in their car, for example, a person who does outside sales. A library could be a physical environment, for a researcher. The place or places where you pursue your vision is your physical environment.

As intentional man your goal is to make your physical environment enhance your motivation. There are several ways you can do this. The first way is to set up your physical environment so that you are more productive. This increases your successability, your confidence in your competence.

My physical environment, the place, consists primarily of my office in my home. In my office I have a desk, on which is a computer. I have a wide screen monitor which lets me have two documents open at the same time, next to each other on the monitor. This makes the constant editing I have to do so much easier. I have a built in book shelf next to my desk, on which I keep the books related to the work I do to manifest my vision. They are right at hand whenever I need to look up something. My physical environment, both the place and the things in it, make me more productive and thereby increase my motivation.

Another way to make your physical environment enhance your motivation is to make it inspiring. Posters are a great way to make your physical environment motivating. Many different inspirational posters are available at any mall. But inspiration can come from something as simple as an advertisement from a magazine. I have above my desk a Smith Barney advertisement I cut out of a magazine. It shows a new Town Car backing out of the drive way of a very nice, upper middle class home. In the back ground you can see the sun is just coming up. The ad reads, “Luck? There’s blind luck, dumb luck and then there’s get-up-every-morning-at-5:30-and-sweat-the-details-luck.” I may not want a Town Car, but the beautiful house looks real attractive, and these words remind me that to achieve my dreams I need to work hard; luck is not going to do it.

Your physical environment may be the dining room table after the kids have been put to bed. It doesn’t matter. Whatever your physical environment, there are steps you can take to make it more motivating for you. It’s well worth your while spending some time thinking seriously about the changes you can make in your physical environment to enhance your motivation.

Environment, The Third Factor of Self Motivation

The third factor of self motivation is environment. This recognizes that your environment plays a large part in how motivated you are. Your environment can increase your motivation, or it can decrease your motivation. It’s up to you, because ultimately you control your environment.

In my book, Motivate Yourself, I tell about a wonderful speech my friend Mykassa Dixon made at a Toastmasters speech contest. (Mykassa won). Mykassa’s speech was about Mr. Bouncy Ball. Mykassa actually had a ball with him on the speaking platform and bounced it onto the floor which was about a foot lower. Mykassa explained how the in order for the ball to bounce back it had to bounce on the right environment. If he tried to bounce it on sand, for example, that would be the wrong environment; it would not bounce back. Mykassa had shared with the audience a major disappointment he had experienced and was explaining how he was able to bounce back from that disappointment, with the proper environment.

In my model for self motivation, I go one step further than Mykassa did. I believe in order to do anything, not just bounce back, we need to have the right environment.

What’s interesting about Mykassa’s speech, as it relates to self motivation, is that the speech itself, on the surface, is talking about physical environment, the ball won’t bounce back on sand or on water, but it will bounce back on wood or cement. The physical environment in his speech, however is actually a metaphor for the people in his environment; the support, understanding and encouragement they give him help him to bounce back from his major disappointment.

What makes this interesting is that when we deal with environment in self motivation, we are dealing with both our physical environment, the place where we pursue our vision, and our social environment, the people we surround ourselves with on our journey. Both types of environment can have a major impact on our motivation.

The Ball in the Box Game

In my last posting I stated that motivation is at the highest level with tasks of a moderate risk, neither too high, nor too low. In this posting I will tell you about a game I call the ball in the box game, a game I do in my workshops. My game is based upon a game used by a researcher in motivation, Richard DeCharms. Each player when it is his turn is given eight balls. They are told that the first four balls are practice and the second four count. The goal of the game is to get two of the final four balls into a box I have placed about twenty feet away. The player is instructed that he is to use the four practice balls to determine the distance away from the box that he wishes to use for his four final balls. He gets to choose the distance for his final four balls. He can try different distances during the practice balls, but once he chooses a distance for the four final balls he cannot change his mind.

DeCharms’s research showed there are three possible choices, 1) very close so the player cannot miss, 2) far enough away that he is unlikely to get any balls in the box, and 3) somewhere in between 1) and 2) so as to make getting two of the balls into the box challenging, but possible.

Psychological testing of the participants by DeCharms showed that the people who chose 1), very close to the box, fear failure. They fear failure so much that they are afraid to take any risk. They succeed, but at what? At nothing. By taking the path of least resistance, they guarantee they won’t fail, but they also guarantee they won’t ever accomplish anything worth while.

People who chose 2), very far away from the box, his research showed, fear the appearance of failure. They stand so far away that even if they miss, they haven’t really failed, because what they were doing was impossible. By doing this they avoid responsibility when they fail.

People who chose 3), a moderate distance from the box, far enough to make it challenging, are what DeCharms called the reasoned risk takers. Research shows that this is the way a person who is successful in their life plays the ball in the box game. A successful person in his life sets the bar high enough so he will have to work to achieve success, but low enough so that success is possible. Once he succeeds, he sets the bar just a bit higher.

This is how we set the level of risk in the goals and tasks we establish so that we keep our motivation high. By keeping our motivation high, we will continue to move forward toward manifesting our vision.