Give yourself the right message

Michael Bloomberg, the extremely popular mayor of New York, is characterized as being very complementary of his city workers. He is quoted as saying, “The problem is, if you never give an agency credit for doing a good job, you’re not going to have good people there and they’re not going to stay motivated.”

I work for a state agency and we weren’t treated very complimentarily by the legislature in the session that just ended, so I appreciate what Mayor Bloomberg said. But I wondered how what he said fit into the model for self motivation.

Recall the model is

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

It means that your motivation is a function of (impacted by) vision, successability and environment.

Were you to apply the Mayor’ words to self motivation, rather than motivation directed at someone else, you would say you need to be complementary to yourself in your self talk. Self deprecating talk, in which you demean yourself, is demotivating, robs you of your motivation. Complementary talk, on the other hand, can be very motivating.

It has this impact on your motivation at least two ways, both of which can be seen by examining the model for self motivation.

The first impact is to your vision. Recall that the vision is the reason you were put on this planet, your potential manifested. Self deprecating talk adversely impacts the power of your vision. If your vision is worthwhile and meaningful to you, it will increase your motivation. If, on the other hand, you continually spout negative things about yourself, demeaning yourself, your motivation cannot help but suffer. Look at the definition of demean, “to reduce in worth, to degrade.” Such talk lessens the value of your vision, and lowers your perception of your potential, resulting in reduced motivation.

Self deprecating comments also adversely impact the your successability, your confidence in your competence. By engaging in negative self talk, you are directly questioning your competence, your worth as a human.

Many of us are hard on ourselves, harder than we would ever be on anyone else, and harder than anyone is on us. This is not good for our motivation. There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging our mistakes, in fact it’s a good thing as it’s the only way to learn by our mistakes and improve. Just remember, criticize the mistake, not the one who made the mistake.

By engaging in positive self talk, on the other hand, talk complementary to ourselves, we can increase our motivation and move forward in achieving our dreams.

What type of self talk do you do? Do you feel the impact of the talk on your motivation?