Need motivation to quit smoking?

Disclosure: I am not a smoker, never was. I never could see spending all that money, having my clothes smell, suffering through a cross country air flight unable to feed my addiction, putting my body though the health issues involved, and putting up with the ostracizing that non-smokers inflict on smokers. (Like I said, I am a non-smoker; these are just some of the complaints I have heard from my brothers.)

But maybe you are a smoker. And maybe you aren’t happy about the daily expense of your “habit” and all the other non monetary costs you have to suffer to maintain this habit. And maybe you have quit, maybe several times, but you’ve never been able to stay quit. Sounds like you have never been motivated to make the change you want in your life permanent.

Can the self motivation model be used to make this change? Yes, it can. Any change you want in your life can be made using the model.

Let’s look at how this could be done.

The self motivation model looks like this:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

This means that your motivation is related to your vision (How worthwhile to you is the change you want to make?), your successability (How confident are you in your competence, your ability to make the change?) and your environment, both your physical environment (where you will do the work necessary to make the change) and your social environment (the people and organizations available to you).

The first step is to state the vision, the change you want to make in your life. In order for your vision to be motivating it has to be to be clearly stated and it has to be valuable to you. You can’t get much clearer than this: “I do not smoke.” To make this vision valuable to you, you should write out the benefits of making the change, and the detriments of not making the change.

Benefits of making the change:
*I can use the money I save by not purchasing cigarettes to take a vacation.
*I won’t have to get my clothes dry cleaned as often (saves cash and time)
*I will be better able to taste the food I eat.
*Add your own items here

Detriments of not making the change
*I increase my risk for strokes
*I get winded when I exercise
*I limit the field for a significant other
*Add your own items here.

Next we look to successability, our confidence in our ability to make the change.
One way to increase successability is to break down the change into its component parts, the steps we need to make to accomplish the change. Breaking it down makes the change not seem as daunting. For example, we can break down I am not smoking into:

*I julienne some carrots, so that when I get the urge to smoke, I will eat a piece of carrot instead.
*I place a rubber band around my cigarette pack so when I reach for it, I will see the rubber band which will force me to make a conscious decision, smoke or not smoke.
*I quit buying cigarettes so I am forced to mooch and become a pariah.
*I buy a nicotine patch, so abstaining is easier.
*Add your own items here

Finally we look to our environment. To make our physical environment (the place where we are making the change) help us make the change, we remove all ash trays to a high shelf, so that any time we want to smoke, we need to pull out a kitchen chair to reach the ashtray.

Our social environment (the people and organization available to us) can be very helpful in making this change. We can enlist friends to help us stay cigarette free. We can ask our smoking friends not to give us cigarettes when we mooch. We can join a smoking cessation program. We can enlist a medical professional to help us in our desired change.

Quitting an addiction like smoking can be very difficult, but using the model for self motivation will keep you moving toward your goal.

If you have quit smoking or some other addiction, please share with your fellow readers a strategy or two you used, by leaving a comment below.

A visual image of motivation

When I think about motivation, I get a visual image related to trains. I love trains, perhaps because my dad always set up the Lionel’s at Christmas time to circle around the tree. To get to work I have to go through a railway crossing and it’s a great start to my day if I need to stop for a train, so long as I am in the front of the line and get to really see it.

This is the image I get when I think about motivation. There’s a whole string of railcars in a siding. There are flatcars, tankers, gondolas and boxcars. Each one is filled with some commodity. The flatcar has logs on it, the tanker is filled with vegetable oil, the gondola is filled with grain and who knows what treasures are in the boxcars.

Then a locomotive backs into the siding, and gets hooked up to the string of cars. The locomotive reverses direction, and, slowly at first, and then picking up speed, it pulls the cars out of the siding.

Without the locomotive, the cars just sit in the siding, the commodities in them useless, without value. But with the locomotive, the railcars are taken to markets where the commodities can be bought and sold. With the locomotive, the commodities have value.

And that’s how it is with motivation. We all have our dreams, our aspirations, the important changes we want to make in our lives. There are dreams of a better paying, more fulfilling job, dreams of a healthier life style, or of a loving relationship. These dreams sit in the siding of our minds. Without motivation, they just stay in our minds, and, like the commodities in the railcars left in the siding, they are useless, without value.

But when we apply motivation to them, we push them out of our minds, we push them into the universe, and we manifest those dreams in our lives. We make them become real. Our lives become the markets where our dreams and aspirations gain their value.

This is what motivation does for us. And this is why learning how to motivate yourself is so important.

Don't let the blame game rob you of your motivation.

In the model for self motivation, a detractor is anything that robs you of your motivation. And, just as different things motivate different people, so too do different things rob the motivation of different people. Consequently, we all have our unique detractors.

There are, however, some detractors that are more universal. One of these universal detractors I call the blame game. Although in the media it is more commonly related to politics, many of us do the blame game in our personal lives as well. The blame game is what happens when you look outside yourself for the causes of your problems.

Here are some of the things you might hear when the blame game is being played:
That other guy didn’t do what he was supposed to do.
It’s the economy.
My car wouldn’t start, so I couldn’t …
I don’t have enough time to…
I couldn’t get my computer to work.
My dog ate my homework.

In the blame game sometimes we blame other people and sometimes we blame circumstances. The reason we play the blame game is to excuse ourselves, to avoid responsibility for our own perceived shortcomings.

One of the problems with the blame game is you spend time excusing mistakes that would be better spent correcting them. The bigger problem with the blame game is that when you blame other people or the situation, you are admitting that you are not in control, that these other people or the situation is in control. This means you are giving up your power. Giving up your feeling of power adversely impacts your motivation because it lessens your confidence in your competence, your successability.

Furthermore, when you give up your control, you turn off your creativity; you feel that nothing you can do will make a difference, so why come up with new ideas.

The fact that sometimes there may be some validity to the finger-pointing doesn’t make finger-pointing any more effective.

The solution is simple. Be aware; take charge of your life. When you find yourself playing the blame game, pause and ask yourself, “If I couldn’t use that excuse, what would I be doing differently?”

Then go ahead and do it.

Select, don't settle

Back in the 60’s Barney’s New York, at that time a clothing store, ran an advertising campaign based on the slogan, Select, don’t settle. The advice rings just as true today as it did then.

Too often we settle on less than what we truly want. We may create good reasons for doing it. Maybe we settled on a job that offered us security, even though the work didn’t excite us. Some of us have accepted a position, “temporarily”, while we are looking for the perfect position, but after a couple of years we stopped looking. Or maybe we settled on a particular relationship, not because we loved the other person, but because we felt comfortable around that person.

Look at the definition of the word settle and you will see why this is a problem: "a gradual sinking to a lower level.” That’s exactly what we do when we settle, we accept something less than what we are capable of, or something less than we want and feel we deserve.

Settling like this adversely impacts your motivation because it robs you of your opportunity to have a worthwhile pursuit. According to the model for self motivation, the more worthwhile your pursuit is, the more motivated you will be. The converse is just as true, the less worthwhile your pursuit is, the less motivated you will be. Settling means you are doing something that is not as worthwhile as what you could be doing.

Settling seldom involves taking a risk; we certainly don’t risk not getting it; it’s already in the bag. Selecting, on the other hand, generally means taking a risk. Maybe we won’t get it; and then we will be disappointed or embarrassed. Maybe we will get it, but won’t like it. Or maybe we won’t be successful once we do get it. Selecting, rather than settling, is risky.

But taking a risk is necessary if we want to have the optimum life, to live life to the fullest.

Do you really want to cheat yourself out of a fulfilling life? When you think you might be settling, ask yourself, “How close to the target do I want to stand?” If you find yourself standing right on top of the target, so there is no way you can miss, make a commitment to go after what you really want, with gusto. Make a promise to yourself, in the words of Ken Christian, author of Your Own Worst Enemy, Breaking the Habit of Adult Underachievement, to “consciously aspire to a higher standard, one worthy of your possibilities, in everything you do.”

Make yourself a positive part of your social environment

In the model for self motivation, environment is one of the three factors. This means that your environment impacts your motivation. If your environment stinks, so will your motivation. If you fix your environment, you will improve your motivation.

Your environment has two parts, your physical environment and your social environment. Your physical environment is where you actually do the work on your vision, the change you want to make in your life. Your social environment consists of all the people and organizations that surround you or are available to you.

The people in your social environment can impact your motivation negatively or positively. If you surround yourself with people who think you are stupid or that your vision is something you aren't capable of, your motivation will suffer. If, on the other hand, you surround yourself with people who think highly of you, and who encourage you and even assist you in the change you want to make, your motivation will increase.

Your role in enhancing your motivation is clear: surround yourself with loving, supporting people, and avoid the negative people.

One problem people often mention to me is when the negative people are in their own family, in which case avoiding them can be a struggle. In a future blog I’ll write about what to do when you face this problem of non-supportive family members, but for today’s blog I want to write about a more insidious problem, this problem happens when that negative person in your environment is you. I have a lot of familiarity with this. I can be my strongest critic. I’ll ask myself, “Why would anyone want to read what you have to say about motivation?” or I may tell myself, “You’re too lazy – you never follow up on what you start.”

I suppose psychologists could help us figure out why we are so critical of ourselves. Maybe it's because we've heard negative messages about ourselves from others for so long we no longer need to hear them from outside, we have integrated them into our beings. When there is no negativity from family members, we provide it for ourselves. Maybe in your family the message wasn’t directed at you; maybe your parents were very critical of themselves so you learned it from them. Who knows?

If you are like me and the most negative person in your social environment is yourself, there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that this negative person (yourself) is worse than a shadow. A shadow is only around in the day time, when the sun is out. But if you are the negative person in your life, you are around 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Whenever you need some good old criticism, you are there to provide it.

But here's the good news. The good news is that you are in control. You may not be able to make your brother stop calling you fat, or make your mother stop saying you are lazy, but you do have total control over what you say to yourself. It may be difficult to get you under control, but one thing is for sure. You have more control over yourself than you have over anyone else.

So how do you do it? How do you stop being your own worst critic? Here’s six simple tips to becoming your own cheer leader:

1. Any time you find yourself becoming critical of yourself, stop and take a deep breath. Critically examine your self criticism. Nine times out of ten you will find it is overly harsh, or even unwarranted.

2. Re-experience your past successes. Get in touch with your experiences with success by writing success stories, each recalling a situation that occurred in your life of which you are proud, a situation that reflects positively on you. It could reflect positively on your character, or on your skill, or on some other characteristic. Refer to these stories when you are feeling extra critical of yourself.

3. Every evening, in bed, before you fall asleep, acknowledge what you accomplished that day.

4. Give yourself continual positive feedback, “pats on the back.”

5. Don’t take yourself so seriously. You really aren’t special enough to deserve a full time critic :-)

6. Take advantage of the positive people in your social environment; if it isn’t filled with supportive people, change it.

The Bible says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” The corollary to that is, “Don’t do to yourself what you would not do to others.” You wouldn’t say such negative things to anyone else; don’t do it to yourself!

If there are strategies you use when you are feeling extra critical about yourself, why not share them with your fellow readers by leaving a comment.

You failed. Now what?

A lot of people are writing about the fear of failure, and all the possible causes of it. But what happens if it’s no longer just a fear, but a reality? What if we grabbed for the brass ring and it slipped out of our hand. Our grasp was not sure enough.

What do we do with these feelings that almost all of us have faced in our lives? Do we just roll over and play dead? We’re know we are supposed to get back up on the horse, but sometimes it’s hard.

If you are in this predicament, here are four strategies that might help.

Strategy 1: Accept that in order to do something really well, in order for you to get better and better, you need to continually put yourself in a position to fail and, when you do fail, to correct for the failure.

As Mario Andretti said, “If things seem totally under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”

Realize that the bigger the change you want to make, the more difficulties you will face. There will be missteps, road blocks and dead ends. Prepare yourself for this, and do what you have to do. To do something really well, you are going to have to take risks. An old English proverb states that a smooth sea never made a skillful mariner.

Strategy 2: Know that every mistake merely means an unwanted result. Every mistake is but on opportunity for learning.

Stay aware of the positive aspects of what we call failure. The naval ships in World War Two had these amazingly big guns, which would fire shells at targets on the land. The gunner who aimed the gun had two controls. The first control moved the gun left and right. The second control raised and lowered the gun. When the gunner thought he was on target he would fire the gun. He observed what occurred and modified what he did based on the result. If the shell went to the left of the target, he moved the gun to the right. If the shell went to the right of the target, he moved the gun to the left. If the shell went over the target, he lowered the gun. If it fell short of the target, he raised the gun. The gunner didn’t get upset when he missed the target and call himself a failure. He corrected for the error. Each time he did this, he got closer to the target. He only had to hit it once.

Failures allow us to fine tune and correct. Sometimes it is the only way to hit the target. So thank your failure for the lesson it taught you, and use the “failure” to get closer to your target.

Strategy 3: Pat yourself on the back, because failure means you are taking risks. If you easily achieve everything you try without failing, you’re probably not pushing your limits; you’re probably standing right on top of the target.

We don’t want to be one of those people who stand right on top of the target. We want to be risk takers, moderate risk takers, so we achieve something of importance.

You won’t ever run into a road block unless you are moving.

Strategy 4: Pick yourself up, dust yourself off, start all over again.

The song Pick Yourself Up by Jerome Kerns and Dorothy Fields, from which this strategy is taken, is one of the most inspirational songs I know. Don’t lose your confidence if you slip, the song goes, be grateful for a pleasant trip.

As the American poet Maya Angelou said, “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.”

Use these four strategies when you are feeling in the dumps because something didn’t work out as you had planned, and remember what Abraham Maslow, the father of motivation, wrote about failure. “One’s only failure is failing to live up to one’s own possibilities.” When Maslow wrote of one’s possibilities, I like to thing he was writing about vision, these wonderful changes we all want to make in our lives.

Motivation and the five steps to financial control

In my last blog I gave five steps to help you regain control of your finances. In this blog I will show how those five steps were developed to motivate you to make this important change in your life. Even though all too many people want to make this major change in their lives, they need motivation to start making the change, and motivation to keep the change in place. The model for self motivation can help them make this dream come true.

This is the self motivation model:
MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

This means that your motivation is related to your vision (How worthwhile to you is the change you want to make?), your successability (How confident are you in your competence, your ability to make the change?) and your environment, both your physical environment (where you will do the work necessary to make the change) and your social environment (the people and organizations available to you).

Step One and Step Two are focused on the vision, the change we want in our life, regaining control of our finances. Step One, the why for this change, is focused on making us determine how this change we want to make in our life is worthwhile. The more worthwhile a change is, the more motivated we will be to make it happen. So we write down all the positive reasons for implementing the change, and all the negative things that will happen if we fail to implement the change.

Step Two is focused on getting clear on exactly what our vision means. The clearer we are in our pursuits, the more motivated we will be.

Step Three, describing in detail how we are going to make this dream come true, addresses the second factor of self motivation, successability. By breaking this large, overwhelming dream into its component parts, we see that it is really a series of tasks that we feel confident we are perfectly capable of doing. The more confident we are, the more motivated we become.

Step Four, making a conscious decision to take charge of our financial life, is similarly motivating. It means we see ourselves as powerful and confident. When we don’t feel in control, when we aren’t making our own decisions, either because we are letting someone else make them for us, or because no decisions are being made, we are listless and unmotivated.

Step Five, finding resources to assist us in making this dream come true, is addressing factor three, environment. The three resources suggested in the posting are but the tip of the iceberg. Taking a hard look at your social environment will reveal many more.

No matter what dream you are pursuing, whether it deals with your finances, your health, your relationships, whatever, the self motivation model can be used to make it come true. It’s a great tool!

Five steps to regaining control of your finances

Too many people are becoming mired in more and more debt. Many of them are starting to see how their life’s blood is being sucked away, and want to be shown a path toward financial freedom, a place where they control their finances, instead of their finances controlling them.

In today’s posting I will give five steps to financial freedom, steps by which you can seize back control of your finances. In my next posting I will explain the science behind the five steps, showing how they fit into the model for self motivation.

Step One: Write down why you want to regain control of your finances. What will you gain? reduced stress? the ability to buy things you need? a feeling of pride at how responsible you are? Also write down what will happen if you fail to make this change. Will you have to file bankruptcy? Will you lose your house?

Step Two: Determine exactly what regaining control of your finances means in your situation. How will you know when you have regained control of your finances. Does it mean reducing your debt? Does it mean living below your means so you can be paying off your debt? Write down what will be occurring in your life when you have succeeded.

Step Three: Write down a clear description of how you are going to make this change happen. Make a plan. Write down all the steps you can think of that will help you make this change. Will you cut up your credit cards? Will you track your spending for a certain period of time? How long? Will you make a budget? Will you set aside a set percent of each pay check to use toward your debt? Will you need to take an additional, part time job for a while to catch up on your debt? Will you contact your creditors to try to work out a payment plan?

Step Four: Be in charge. Suze Orman says in The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, “True financial freedom is not only having money, but having power over that money as well.” Make a conscious decision that you control your financial life. You are the boss!

And last, but by no means least:

Step Five: Find resources that will help you make this change. The worse the economy gets, it seems, the more resources there are for those who need help getting back on their feet. Here are three:

1. Credit counseling is a big resource, but make sure you do your research. Check out the Federal Trade Commission’s website for what you need to know before you retain a credit counseling company: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/credit/cre13.shtm

2. The federal government can be of assistance. Go to usa.gov and type into the search screen “debt relief” for information and direct assistance.

3. If you are facing foreclosure, contact your state’s bar association for the names of attorneys who have volunteered to assist people with your problem.

Getting control of your finances will be a struggle, but by applying these five steps, and working hard, it’s a struggle you can win.

Motivation and the Job Search

One very common change people want in their lives has to do with their employment. This is an extremely stressful change, in fact a job change is one of the top stressors, coming after only a death in the family and a divorce. It’s no wonder that so many of us are hesitant to seek a better job, even if we are unhappy in our present one.

I am frequently asked whether you can use the self motivation model to find a job. My response is that the self motivation model can be used for any change you want to make in your life, even a change involving your job, whether it means finding a job by someone who doesn't have one, or someone who wants a better one.

Recall the self motivation model is:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

This means that your motivation is related to three factors, your vision (How worthwhile to you is the change you want to make?), your successability (How confident are you in your competence, your ability to make the change?) and your environment, both your physical environment (where you will do the work necessary to make the change) and your social environment (the people and organizations available to you).

VISION
Let’s look first at your vision. Ask yourself, “How important is finding a new job to me?” If the change you want to make doesn’t feel important to you, you are unlikely to take the steps you need to take to make it happen. You won’t be motivated. But there are ways to make a prospective change feel more valuable to you, which will result in enhancing your motivation.

One way is writing down all the positive points about a new job. Will it pay more? Will there be more prestige? Will it be more interesting and fulfilling? Will there be more job security? More potential growth? Write down all the positive reasons for having a different job.

Sometimes just as important to making a change feel more worthwhile is to write down all the bad things about your present job. Are you bored? Are you frustrated with management? Are the office politics driving you crazy? Write down all the negative things that are occurring by your failure to get a new job.

Why do I say write them down? So you can use the written words as tools to keep yourself motivated as you make the change. When you are feeling lazy and not up to working, looking at the two lists can often give you the nudge you need to get going.

Sometimes we are hesitant to change jobs because we believe that moving to another business or agency will just mean more of the same. If that’s so, maybe you need to figure out what job you would really like to have. Taking such a job would definitely be a worthwhile change.

SUCCESSABILITY
Next we look at successability. In poor economic times, many unemployed people have given up searching for jobs; they don’t have any confidence that they can be successful in their job search. Without confidence, they are not motivated to even look.

If we are in this unfortunate state, how do we get back our confidence? Perhaps the best thing we can do is get clear exactly what we want in a new job, and get clear on the steps we need to take to make that desired job ours.

Clarity increases our confidence in two ways:
1) We can’t feel confident we will be successful if we don’t even know what success entails.
2) We can’t feel confident we will be successful if we don’t know how to achieve that success.

Using the three step process to successability described in my blog posting of October 21, 2009, is a great way to get clarity. If you want clarity, I urge you to visit that posting.

ENVIRONMENT
In this posting I’m going to focus primarily on how to use your social environment to motivate you to do the work necessary for this job change.

The positive, motivation building elements in your social environment we call your resources. Here are just a couple of the many resources available for people looking for jobs or making career changes:

Job counseling: having someone guiding you on your path and helping you recognize your positive traits is powerfully motivating.

Skills Training: Do you need training to make you more desirable to employees? Explore possibilities such as on the job training in your present job. Look for skills training at your local community college or training facilities. New job skills will also make you more confident in your ability to find that new job, which will further enhance your motivation.

Networking opportunities: We have all heard, “It’s not what you know; it’s who you know.” So make sure you are the one who knows that special person that will land you the job. Brainstorm to figure out where the people you need to know congregate. Maybe it’s the local better business bureau. Maybe it's monthly meetings of a related professional association. You may feel a bit uncomfortable if this is not something you have done in the past. Take baby steps. Tell yourself you are just going to the first meeting to observe. If someone initiates contact with you, be warm and open. This may be the person you need to know, or this person may know that person and be willing to introduce you.

If you have been dreaming about getting a job, finding a better job, or changing your career, using the self motivation model can help you make your dream come true.