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.