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.