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.