Do you struggle with motivating yourself?
Even if it’s something you know you should do?
Kinda sucks, doesn’t it?
Well, it doesn’t have to be that way because we’re going to be uncovering what motivation is and get a better handle on it.
I’m not here to stand up on a podium and give you a rah-rah speech. It wouldn’t do you much good anyway.
My goal is to give you a fundamentally different viewpoint on what motivation is.
To begin with, we can refer to motivation as an experience.
And when I say experience, I mean “a particular instance of personally encountering or undergoing something.”
And most of us have probably had an experience where we felt particularly motivated to do something, even if we couldn’t explain why.
According to NLP (short for Neuro-linguistic Programming), there is 2 primary motivational bias for people: towards motivation and away motivation.
Towards motivated people are naturally oriented towards the thing that they want and they consciously and/or unconsciously move towards it.
Away motivated people are those who are inspired to move away from the things that they don’t want.
This can be a useful way for looking at the idea of motivation, however, we’ll be going much deeper in this post.
To start, I want you to think of a time when you felt particularly motivated to do something.
It could be anything big or small.
We’re going to use this as a reference experience.
As you’re thinking about this time where you felt particularly motivated to do something, I want you to note the visual representations.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Is it in color or black-and-white?
- Where are you? First-person or third-person point-of-view?
- Is the image contained within a frame or is it panoramic?
- Is it a still image or a moving picture?
- Is the image close to you or far away?
- Is the image in front of you? To the side of you? Behind you?
- How bright is the image?
- Is it focused? Fuzzy? Blurry?
Now that you have a clear idea of how you visually represent the image, I want you to note your physiology within the image.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What’s your posture like? Straight up? Slouched?
- How are your muscles? Relaxed? Contracted?
- Where’s your gaze directed? Eye-level? Above eye-level? Below eye-level?
- What’s your breathing like? Fast or slow? Shallow or deep?
- How’s your energy? High? Low?
- Do you have an urge to move in a particular direction?
Now, you should have two complete lists denoting your visual representations and your physiology for a motivating event.
Next, I want you to find an experience where you had no motivation to do the thing whatsoever.
Once you find one, I want you to go through the same questions as for the motivating experience.
By the time you’re done, you should have two separate lists: One for how you represent a motivating experience and one for how you represent an unmotivating experience.
I want you to note the similarities and differences between each one.
You might think that all we need to do is change the representations for the unmotivating experience so that it’s the same as the motivating experience.
And then we’ll be motivated to do that thing, right?
If only it were that easy.
To truly understand motivation, we need to drill down and understand ourselves at a much deeper level.
If you’re curious to learn more, click the button below to continue…