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!