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!

The interplay of the factors of self motivation

The model for self motivation is

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

This means anything you do to one of the factors on the right, will automatically impact your motivation. Make your vision more desirable, your motivation will increase. Take actions to increase your successability (your confidence in your competence) your motivation will increase. Surround yourself with people who support you (environment), your motivation will increase. Negatively impact any of the three, and your motivation will suffer.

But the relationship is more complex than that, because the three factors of self motivation are not three independent factors; instead they are interrelated. Steps you take to impact one factor will frequently favorably impact not only your motivation, but will also favorably impact another factor, which in its turn will favorably impact your motivation.

A major interaction is the one between successability and the environment.

People who have high levels of confidence in themselves (successability) are more likely to use the resources available in their social environment. They will seek out relationships in their social environment that will help them achieve the goals they are seeking. As a result, their confidence will increase even more. Those who feel less confident, on the other hand, are less likely to pursue these relationships, so they will lack the support and other benefits that such relationships can provide. As a result, their confidence in their ability will diminish even more.

The more confident person will be more likely to pursue the training and skill gathering opportunities available in the environment, whether from institutions of learning or less formal training from social organizations or from their employer. As a result their confidence will increase as they acquire additional skills. The less confident person will question his or her ability to succeed at such training and will be less likely to attempt it. As a result, the person with low confidence will not be able to benefit by these resources.

The relationship between vision and successability is just as important. It is easier for a confident person to come up with a more exciting, more compelling vision. The more desirable the vision, the more valuable it is to the person, the more motivating it is to the person. A less confident person is more likely to accept what he has been offered, rather than selecting what is truly dear to his or her heart.

The reason this interdependency is important for you, is so you know to work on all three factors. Don’t ignore any of the three. Working on all three factors gives you three times as many opportunities to increase your motivation. But because the three are interrelated, the outcome can often result in more than three times as much motivation. On the other hand, ignoring any of the three can have a powerful impact on your motivation as well, but in a negative direction.

Vision, successability and environment are the three factors of motivation. Use all three to maximize your motivation.

P.S. If you want to know how to increase your self confidence, take a look at my last posting.

Three strategies to increase your self confidence

In my last blog post I wrote about an article by Albert Bandura on self-efficacy, a synonym of sorts of “successability.” I shared how important it was for our motivation that we have confidence in our competence in order to stay motivated, by contrasting the behaviors of persons with high confidence in themselves to those with low confidence. In today’s blog posting I share with you strategies based upon Bandura’s article you can use to increase your confidence in your competence, your self-efficacy.

The three strategies to increase your confidence in yourself:

1. Create mastery experiences.

Successes build your self confidence. Failures can erode it, especially if you already have low self confidence. However, if the successes are too easy they can lead you to become easily discouraged when the string of successes don’t continue. To maximize the impact of your successes they need to be worthwhile successes, ones that you have worked hard on, and ones at which you have risked failure. (In the model for self motivation we know that the optimum level of risk is a moderate level of risk.

2. Observe successful people doing what you want to do.

Seeing people similar to yourself succeeding at the things you want to succeed at raises your belief that you too are capable of succeeding. Bandura refers to this as modeling. The greater the similarity between you and the person you are modeling, the stronger the positive impact on your confidence. There is additional benefit to modeling; it can result in you learning skills that you may not already possess. Modeling is a great use of your social environment.

3. Surround yourself with supportive people who believe in you.

Search out people who will support you in your journey, people who believe in you. This can be an individual or an organization of like minded people.

Bandura refers to this as social persuasion. He points out that people whose essential competence is affirmed by their associates are more likely to try harder and sustain their efforts in the face of adversity. They are also more likely to seek out resources from which they can improve even further. Those who are told they are incompetent by associates are more likely to not even try, or, if they do try, to give up at the first sign of adversity.

By using these three strategies you will increase your successability, your confidence in competence, and thereby increase your motivation. I suggest you spend a little time thinking about how you can put these strategies into play in your life. Is there some place, some organization you can join where you can implement all three strategies at once. Using your social environment to do this is a great way to leverage your motivation.

If you know of such an organization that can serve this purpose for you, please share it with your fellow readers by leaving a comment.