Enrich your self-concept: both with wonderful fantasies of possible successes and with visions of ways you might fail.
Read
inspiring stories which you can relate to your life by using American Guidance
(1977), The Bookfinder. Find other motivational books, such as My
Power Book by Dan and Marie Lena (1991), Ziglar's (1975, 1987) See You
at The Top or Top Performance, or
Robbin's (1991) Awaken the Giant Within, which are mentioned in
chapter 4. Any of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books (Canfield &
Hansen, 1991-6) are touchingly inspirational.
Observe
successful people, role play taking risks and succeeding, and gain knowledge
increasing your expertise. Do everything to increase your ability and
confidence, because believing you can succeed increases your motivation.
Nurture
positive, confident, optimistic attitudes. See method #9. A self-doubting
pessimist can hardly be highly motivated. Imagine in detail how
wonderful life will be when you succeed, how pleased you'll be. Do
this every day.
Using
the methods outlined in chapter 4, learn to think "I am responsible"
(note relationship between outcome and effort), "I am in control"
(note you can change), "I have ability" (note how success increases
as your skills develop) and "I value being successful" (note the pay
offs of doing well). These beliefs lead to hard work and pride.
A
negative, defeatist attitude towards oneself is likely to be detrimental, to
involve a lack of confidence, to reduce motivation, and so on, so work on
improving your self-concept if that is a problem (see method #1 in this
chapter). However, high self-esteem does not lead to high achievement. Rather,
doing well academically and socially leads to increased self-esteem (Nielsen,
1982).
Research
suggests that optimally motivated persons have a balance between their
positive selves and negative selves, i.e. their positive expectations
and their frightening awful possible outcomes. Both dreams and fears are
needed; dreams draw us to success and visions of failure scare the hell
out of us when we goof off (Cantor, Markus, Niedenthal, & Nurius,
1986). Some anxiety is helpful.
Anthony
Robbins (1991), a motivation writer, expresses a similar idea. He says we
should associate massive pain with not changing and massive
pleasure with changing, and do it now!
The examples he gives of massive pain include having an agreement to eat a can
of dog food if you go off your diet, the humiliation of publicly admitting you
have failed (reporting to a support group how you are doing or jumping up in a
restaurant, point to your chair, and shout "Pig! Can't you control
yourself?"), thinking about getting cancer from smoking, thinking about
the terrible loss if your spouse caught you having an affair and divorced you,
etc. Ask yourself: "What will I lose if I don't change?" and
"What will I gain if I do change?" Also, how will my failing to
change affect others--my loved ones, my business, my
chances to do other things? What will changing do for
others or permit me to do? The idea is to make the pay offs and consequences so
strong in your mind that you feel you must change immediately.
Force
yourself every few days to assess the progress you are making towards your
major life goals. This is hard for some people, called certainty-oriented,
who do not want to know how well or poorly they are doing, how able they are,
what the outlook is for them, etc. If you resist taking personality tests,
dislike reading and using methods for increasing self-understanding, and
criticize the test or person giving you accurate but negative feedback, then
you are probably certainty-oriented and failure threatened (Sorrentino &
Short, 1986). Guard against burying your head in the sand. Indeed, if they will
face facts, greater awareness of potential future failures may be quite
motivating for these people.
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