Browsing the archives for the feedback loops tag.
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Getting Past Our Own Uncomfortable Silences

Handling negative emotions

Unfortunately, these days I do a lot of driving. I say “unfortunately” for two reasons: the environmental impact (although I drive an extremely eco-friendly car, as cars go) and because the driving means more time spent away from my family.

Driven to think
But there are benefits from my drives, and one of the biggest is the chance to sit and think, alone and uninterrupted. I’ve come up with any number of writing ideas–books, stories, articles, blog posts, forum topics, and so on–plus solutions to mundane life problems, ways to attack complicated tasks, insights into my personal relationships, and so on. Perhaps most beneficially of all, I often use time alone in the car to think through my own mental and emotional state, as a way to reflect, clarify, understand, and transform.

This kind of thinking doesn’t have to happen in a car, of course: I can talk with friends, family members, or mentors; write in journals or word processing files; reflect while out walking; or take other steps (see “How Feedback Loops Maintain Self-Motivation“). But I have to admit that being alone in a car has been better than any other method I’ve yet found for getting through the uncomfortable business of really looking at my thoughts, my problems, my baggage, and my bad habits.

The uncomfortable silence
I’m used to getting started thinking about my life. Sometimes it comes automatically, as when something’s been bothering me and my wandering mind seizes on it and begins to tease out the contributing factors. Other times I have to dig in intentionally, either to try to address a particular problem or to find out why I’m feeling the way I am at that moment.

The hard part is the uncomfortable silence. You may be familiar with it: it’s when you’ve had the first glimmers of self-reflection but haven’t yet really dug in, so you’re tempted to turn on the radio, listen to an audiobook, call someone on a cell phone, or do anything else to stop the quiet. My thoughts at these times are usually along the lines of “I’m too tired to deal with that right now,” “I wonder what’s happening in the news?” and “I should probably finish up with that audiobook so I can bring it back to the library.” There are clues that I’m about to think about something that isn’t ego-gratifying or fun, and my gut instinct is to avoid delving.

But I’ve done this kind of thinking enough to recognize those moments, and the discomfort itself these days stands out to me like a blinking red light: “Oh,” I think. “Looks like I’ve got a bite!” Then, most of the time, I sit and wait for it to really come out. There are times when I give in to the urge to go to the radio or to listen to my current Kindle book or to call someone, which is fine in its way, even if not ideal, but when I steer clear of those distractions, I’m usually rewarded.

Why it’s worth pushing through the uncomfortable part
My reward for outlasting the uncomfortable period is that I often get to whatever’s making me uncomfortable in the first place and have a chance to first recognize it, then do something about it. For instance, I might realize that I’ve been acting in a way that I don’t like, or that I need to put more time and effort into something neglected.

What’s especially great about this is that digging into something that’s causing me pain and making me uncomfortable tends to make the pain and discomfort go away. I start feeling I’m on top of the problem and get to experience some optimism that things will be better with it in future.

But if habits were easy to change and thought patterns were easy to fix, our bad habits and patterns of negative thinking wouldn’t occur in the first place. The discomfort around difficult issues is one of the reasons those issues can continue doing us harm: it prevents us from digging in by scaring us off. If we get in the habit of pushing through that discomfort, then we have much more power over our own emotions and hang-ups.

Comfortable silences
Of course, there are times when reflection pays off without any discomfort. One especially useful form of this is spending time thinking about goals paying off: in effect, we can live in a future in which something wonderful has happened, simultaneously getting joy out of the future event and increasing motivation for working toward that future.

For more on that subject, see “Motivation through visualization: the power of daydreams.”

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Recovering After a Failure of Willpower

States of mind

We’re well into a season in which, for Americans at least, restraint isn’t very popular. We start out with a holiday that celebrates eating as much as possible, work up to a holiday that celebrates spending as much as possible, and cap it off with a holiday that celebrates staying up late and drinking.

All right, I admit that this isn’t the kindest or even most accurate depiction I could give of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s, but the point is that whether or not you happen to celebrate any of these holidays, it’s likely you run into times when you don’t exercise the amount of willpower and restraint you would like to. Practically everyone does sometimes. Over time we can get better at exercising restraint even when we’re receiving messages to do otherwise, but what do we do to get back on track after losing our willpower for a while? Here are some specific things that can help:

  1. Don’t beat yourself up. Feelings of guilt, shame, frustration, disappointment, and depression are common after a failure of willpower. These are traps: avoid them. If you get caught up in destructive emotions, it will be hard to learn well and regain your focus. Identify broken ideas that aren’t doing you any good, then repair them: see “All About Broken Ideas and Idea Repair.”
  2. Get smarter. After a failure of willpower, you have an ideal opportunity to learn from your mistakes. Start a feedback loop to figure out how to change your behavior next time, and keep using it to see how well your new approaches work. Your feedback loop (which could be journaling, talking with a friend, talking to yourself, etc.) will include a description of exactly what you don’t like that you did, what you were thinking when you did it, and some ideas for changing what you do in the future. It will also include acknowledgments of any good decisions you made.
  3. Look ahead. One of the best ways to do well with willpower is to prepare solutions in advance. For instance, if you ate much more than you wanted to at your last family gathering, you might want to plan what you’re going to eat before you go to the next one. See “How Preparation Enables Stronger Willpower.”

You might also be interested in reading “How to Recover When You’ve Completely Blown It,” which talks more about failure in general and its role in successfully pursuing a goal.

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How to Believe

States of mind

Accomplishing new goals in our lives usually means changing our habits, and changing habits requires commitment to a goal. Underneath that commitment, though, there has to be faith. There’s a goodly amount of research out there to support the idea that if we don’t believe we can do something difficult, we won’t make a very good attempt at it.

Why belief is important to success
Belief’s importance makes a lot of sense: after all, accomplishing something difficult means putting in effort and attention over time, and as human beings, we tend to be very bad at putting time and effort into something when we don’t believe we’ll succeed–and rightly so! It doesn’t make much sense to expend our efforts in areas where we expect to fail.

But a problem comes up when something that we really can do feels impossible. We might want very much to do that thing and know exactly what steps we should be taking, but if we have trouble picturing success, eventually resolve tends to falter. We stop putting in effort because we have a crisis of faith, and that interruption causes our effort to fail, which reinforces the idea that what we wanted to do was impossible in the first place.

While fortunately we human beings tend to compensate for this sometimes with bull-headedness and unrealistic expectations (and I really do think that’s fortunate–otherwise we’d be like movie studios that only produce copycat movies for fear that something original will flop), more often, lack of belief leads to failure.

So sometimes, the reason you don’t believe you can earn a degree and get a better job is just that you’ve never had a better job, or the reason you can’t really believe you’ll lose weight is because you haven’t done it successfully before. Yet both of these things, for example, are achievable by almost anyone.

Building belief
So how can we help ourselves believe in our goals? Here are some ways to make that happen:

  • Talk to or research someone else who’s done it. Seeing is very close to believing.
  • Learn about how things work. For instance, learning about the relationship between building new muscle and increasing metabolism can provide more reason to be optimistic that exercise will lead to weight loss.
  • Root out broken ideas. It’s common to tell ourselves “facts” that don’t really hold up on examination. The page “All About Broken Ideas and Idea Repair” provides resources to learn how to repair broken ideas.
  • Track your progress. Every step toward your goal provides evidence that you can get closer. Be aware of your successes to bolster your confidence and your missteps to know where you need to be cautious. For more on this, see “How Feedback Loops Maintain Self-Motivation.”
  • Revisit past successes. If you’ve quit smoking for a couple of months in the past, or if you’ve been caught up with all of your correspondence at other times in your life, remind yourself of what you did and what you were able to accomplish.
  • Visualize success. Imagining a situation vividly enough helps it feel more real. Visualization is a way to get motivation from our own potential future successes.
  • Talk it out with someone supportive. Finding someone who wants to encourage you toward your goals can make a real difference (see “How Supporters and Partners Help Motivate Us“). Sympathetic friends or family members may not have the same blind spots we often have about ourselves, and a little encouragement can go a long way.

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7 Ways to Find Supporters and Partners

Strategies and goals

Following up on my last article, “How Supporters and Partners Help Motivate Us,” here are some ways to find people to help your efforts toward reaching a goal.

  1. Friends and family. It’s not unusual to hide goals from friends and family members, especially goals to fix things in our lives that aren’t going well, for instance getting fit or decluttering. But specific friends or family members who are likely to be sympathetic to our aims–even aims we’d usually keep private–can provide a welcome source of encouragement, feedback, and in some cases inspiration. People you know who are working toward the same goal you are can be especially helpful.
  2. Local groups. The more common a goal, the more likely there are groups to help you succeed in it. Professional associations, Weight Watchers, Alcoholics Anonymous, writers’ groups, and other organizations can be invaluable. In most cases, it’s preferable for the group to include or be run by someone who is already successful in the area in question.
    Three good places to find local groups are the yellow pages, local daily and weekly newspapers, and www.meetup.com, a free resource for finding and forming local groups.
  3. Cognitive therapists. Cognitive therapy can be particularly useful not only in helping work through emotional problems but also in clarifying goals and priorities, clearing away conflicts, and becoming more effective in life. Until relatively recently, far more emphasis in psychological research and practice has been put on people with serious difficulties than on what is now called “positive psychology”: building on strengths and realizing potential. In the last decade or two, this tide has begun to turn, creating much more awareness of therapy as a means to pursuing our better selves. Kari Wolfe contributed an article on this site that gives a good introduction to cognitive therapy, “What in the World is Cognitive Behavior Therapy?“.
  4. Professionals. Depending on your goals, there may be professionals who can help you succeed: organization specialists, fitness trainers, coaches, and others. Both with these kinds of professionals and with therapists, it’s worth putting a good bit of effort into research, as a truly bad fit can be worse than doing nothing at all, but a very good fit can yield benefits far beyond the expected.
  5. Classes. You may not necessarily need more education in the area of your goal, but if education is useful to you and available, getting involved in a class–whether it’s pursuing an MBA, taking a class offered through your local community, or even in some cases taking a course online–can provide connections to people who are care about your goal and can help you move forward.
  6. Online groups and forums. Online groups in many cases don’t offer nearly as much human contact as groups that meet in person, but they can be easy to access and are often large, active and knowledgeable. They can be a source of support and camaraderie online as well as a possible way to meet people who can become friends in person. One excellent example is the free online fitness and weight loss site, SparkPeople.
  7. Events. Events that focus on your goal area can be a great source of new contacts, ideas, friends, supporters, and colleagues.

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How Supporters and Partners Help Motivate Us

Strategies and goals

Recently a reader commented with this useful question: “How do I find people who can support me in reaching my goals, whether by encouragement, having the same/similar goal or even a goal of their own? Are there any tips you can offer regarding how to tell people that I’d like to work on a goal?” In this article, I’ll talk about how other people can fit into your plans for achieving your goals. In the follow-up, I’ll talk about specific ways you can find supporters and partners.

First, it’s worth mentioning some of the benefits of support and buddying up:

  • More resources for information and help
  • More reminders of what you’re doing and why it’s important
  • People to cheer you on and help boost your mood
  • An “audience,” people to witness your progress, making you less likely to just silently let your goal slip (although if you get very anxious about other people’s opinions, this may not be a good option for you)
  • Sometimes, models to emulate
  • Sometimes, companions to do things with
  • Opportunities to maintain a feedback loop, to make it easy to reflect on how you’ve been doing and how you could tweak your approach for the better
  • Increased social time in general, which even if it has nothing to do with your goal tends to improve mood (see “Want to Reduce Stress? Increase Social Time“).

People can help you in a variety of roles:

  • mentors are skilled at doing whatever you’re trying to take on and can provide specific help and guidance. A mentor could be a friend or family member who has already done what you’re trying to do, a specialist like a personal trainer or professional organizer, a therapist, a coach, a teacher, etc.
  • partners want to achieve the same goal you do and can get together with you to work on it. My belief, although I don’t know of any research to back this up, is that partners who are at about the same place you’re in work best, since you two are likely to face similar challenges, and you’ll neither be discouraged by the other person being far ahead of you or impatient at the person being far behind.
  • groups get together on a regular basis to share ideas, witness each other’s progress (or sometimes lack of progress, because occasional failures and setbacks are a normal part of pursuing a goal), offer encouragement, and otherwise help keep each other on track. Online groups generally offer discussion and support without meetings, which adds flexibility but takes away the structure of a regularly scheduled check-in.
  • role models can be people you know or people you’ve only heard of, and have achieved what you want to achieve. Role models offer the opportunity to learn how to successfully reach a goal and a clear reminder that it can be done.
  • supporters include anyone who can make a constructive contribution to your progress by helping to provide information, encouragement, or discussion.
  • competitors are other people trying to reach the same kind of goal as you who inspire you to work harder. Some of us respond well to competition and some don’t. If you’re someone who does, then trying to be the most successful person in your weight loss group or to get an agent before any of your other writer friends can be a good way to stay motivated.

There’s also one group to avoid: detractors. This includes anyone who will get in the way of you achieving your goal, whether or not they mean well. Anyone who encourages or excuses your bad habits, distracts you with things that prevent you from making progress, or actively tries to disrupt you through badmouthing, scoffing, unkind comparisons, or other tactics is worth avoiding if possible, keeping out of the loop if it’s not possible to avoid them, or ignoring if it’s not possible to keep them out of the loop.

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How Do You Keep a Good Thing Going?

Strategies and goals

I’ve been corresponding with someone who has recently become more productive, and this person brought up a very useful question: once you start doing well with something, how do you make sure it continues? Some of the material I’ve dug up in the course of writing for this site offers some answers.

Use feedback loops
First, take a little time to figure out what you’re doing right. The best ways I know of to do this are to talk the situation through with someone sympathetic to your success or to write down your thoughts. What kinds of things do you think about before and during a successful experience? What kinds of thoughts are keeping you on track? Have you made any changes to your schedule, organizing, etc. that might be helping? The more you know about what’s going right now, the more likely you are to be able to keep it going or do it again in the future.

Build a Habit
Second, if you’re not doing it already, you may want to try to get into a habit of doing things at the same time and place each day. By repeating the successful behavior in the same context again and again, you can encourage it to become a habit over time, so that eventually you find yourself getting into the successful behavior automatically.

Troubleshoot
Third, keep a sharp eye out for obstacles. If you start to feel avoidant or negative, that’s not necessarily a problem: we all have our ups and downs. But it can become a problem if the feelings aren’t recognized, understood, and worked through, so it helps to pay special attention to exactly what your thoughts are and use idea repair as needed–the earlier, the better.

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Tools for Feeling Better, Part II

Handling negative emotions

 

In a recent article, I began listing some of the most useful ways I know to get back on track when feeling bad, including idea repair, mindfulness, meditation, understanding schemas, and emotional antidotes. Today’s article forges ahead with 4 more tools for feeling happier and improving mood.

Flow: “Flow” is psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi’s term for a state in which a person is concentrating intently, performing at their highest level of ability, and completely swept up in what they’re doing. It’s a very enjoyable and productive mode of being, and successfully bulldozes bad moods. My article “Flow: What It Feels Like to Be Perfectly Motivated” describes flow, and “Some Steps for Getting into a State of Flow” provides techniques for achieving it.

Exercise: Exercise often gets a bad rap as being tedious, unpleasant, and a disappointing necessity for people trying to lose weight or obsessed with fitness. The truth is that exercise is not only a way to improve fitness but also a powerful means of improving mood: read “Nothing to Do With Weight Loss: 17 Ways Exercise Promotes Willpower and Motivation” to find out more.

Just starting: A person in a bad mood with a task in front of them that could improve things often won’t do that task because when they imagine doing it, they don’t imagine feeling happier. A large part of the reason for this is something called “mood congruity,” a tendency our brains have to assume that we will always feel more or less as we do now. When we’re happy it’s hard to imagine really feeling bad, and vice-versa. Just getting started on something that could improve mood by making progress on a goal, getting into a social situation, moving around, creating a change of scene, etc. can push us over into a place where feeling better begins to seem not so distant. If you’ve ever started doing something you didn’t think you would enjoy and began to have a lot of fun, you’ve experienced the power of just starting (despite not feeling inclined to at first).

Writing or Talking it Out: Writing out thoughts, concerns, possible solutions, and possible results can go a long way toward clearing the mind and providing reasons to feel better. An intensive process of logging the details of each choice you make, Decision Logging, can provide a lot of insight into what’s going on in a person’s mind as well as immediate opportunities for rethinking things. Writing down progress, self-evaluation, and plans for the future creates a feedback loop. Free writing or keeping a journal can provide an outlet for pent-up emotions while creating clarity. Or instead of writing about what’s going on with you or how you feel, you could connect with a sympathetic and supportive friend, family member, romantic partner, or therapist and talk things through.

For more tools, see the other articles in this series: Part I and Part III.

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Black belt

Self-motivation examples

I’ve always been interested in the martial arts, ever since I lingered over ads offering the secrets of judo in the backs of comic books I read as a kid. There’s a kind of promise in martial arts that it’s possible to do things with our bodies that are very nearly magical. This is the same reason I’ve been drawn to the psychology of self-motivation, because just as I’ve been learning and practicing the basic skills of Taekwondo (stances, blocks, kicks, sparring techniques, etc.), over the past several years, in that same period I’ve also been learning and practicing the basic skills of self-motivation (feedback loops, idea repair, visualization, reframing techniques, etc.). And it turns out that training in self-motivation can achieve things that are also very nearly magical.

Friday night, in Burlington, Vermont, I tested successfully for my first dan black belt in Taekwondo Chung Do Kwan at the Blue Wave Taekwondo Association‘s Winter Camp. This was a big win for both my Taekwondo training and my self-motivation training.

In some ways it seems as though my self-motivation training was completely unnecessary: as I describe in this post, I love training in Taekwondo even though it’s effortful, sometimes inconvenient, and occasionally painful. Since I love to do it, why would self-motivation be necessary?

But that’s a trick question: the key to self-motivation is to love what you do, whether that thing is getting your personal records in order, writing about the psychology of self-motivation, crafting a novel, or doing the dishes. This sounds both simple and useless: sure, we get things done when we love to do them, but if we don’t love to do them, we’re out of luck, right?

But of course my sense of things is that we’re not out of luck at all. It took a conscious shift in attitude every time I dragged my tired butt up the steps to the third floor Taekwondo gym after a long day at work over the past few years, changing my thinking from “I’m too tired to work out” to “I work out whether I feel tired or not.” And it’s been improved by mindfulness, like when I had begun my testing Friday night and consciously brought myself to realize that while there was definitely pressure to do well (especially from myself), I was having the time of my life. I had told people before testing that I wasn’t nervous yet, but that I thought I would be at testing. As it turns out, I wasn’t nervous. I screwed some things up (though fortunately not badly enough to threaten my succeeding), but when something did go wrong, I just did my best to collect myself and move forward. I may have been a little hyper, and my attention was certainly scattered at times, but I wasn’t nervous: I was profoundly content.

The secret about learning to love doing something–like testing for black belt or starting a workout when you’re really tired–is that even things that seem unappealing to us at first, if they’re really furthering goals we care about, tend to become more interesting and enjoyable once we resign ourselves to doing them and get started. Loving to do something sometimes comes naturally, sure, but a lot of the time it takes work, which comes in the form of using the skills and practices I talk about on this site: idea repair, feedback loops, visualization, identifying mental schemas, and so on.

The phrase “black belt” is often used to mean mastery, but in Taekwondo at least, becoming a black belt is just the beginning. As my instructor, Master White (who is profiled here and who also tested on Friday–incredibly, for his seventh dan black belt) says, “black belt” means that you’ve gotten down the basics and are ready for the real fun to begin. And although I think the real fun began long ago, I am definitely ready.

Photo by Mr. Lloyd Blake, via Mrs. Carrie Blake

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The Top 10 Willpower Engine Posts of 2009

Resources

It was in April of 2009 that I started the Willpower Engine. 132 posts and more than eight months later, I’ve been interested to see what kinds of articles have gathered the most attention. And while the reasons one post might get seen more than another are a little chaotic–more of an indication of successfully getting the word out than of anything–it’s also true that some of my favorite posts show up on this list.

So here, without further ado and with a few brief notes, are the top 10 Willpower Engine posts this year.

#10 – How Feedback Loops Maintain Self-Motivation – Feedback loops are one of the most useful of all tools for maintaining motivation. Keeping focus and really thinking about our recent experiences in light of our goals can keep those goals alive and moving forward in our minds.

#9 – How Much Sleep Do You Need? 8 Hours Isn’t for Everyone – I had been wondering for years if “8 hours” was really the amount of sleep everyone needed, and it turns out it isn’t. The way to learn how much really is needed turned out to be very simple.

#8 – Do you have enough talent to become great at it? – The books that informed this post were revelatory for me. Our culture takes the existence of natural talent as a given–yet the idea of “talent” turns out to have some serious flaws, which create some incredible opportunities when we realize them.

#7 – How To Improve Willpower Through Writing Things Down: Decision Logging – When I first tried Decision Logging, I thought it might be a magic bullet. It turns out to require too much time and attention to do all the time, so it’s not a magic bullet–but it can give self-motivation a very powerful boost by focusing attention and sparking insight.

#6 – How to Strengthen Willpower Through Practice – The idea of willpower as a muscle that can be strengthened by exercising it has some limitations–but in many ways, this picture of willpower holds true, and strengthening our natural good inclinations is a very valuable things to be able to do.

#5 – 7 Key Self-Motivation Strategies for Writers – This post was an early precursor to my free eBook, The Writing Engine: A Practical Guide to Writing Motivation, and it offers some of the most immediately useful advice I have for writers who want to write more.

#4 – How Long Does It Take to Form a Habit? – There are a lot of places out there on the Web that make claims as to how long it takes to form a habit, but very few seem to be based on anything more than someone’s rough guess. Fortunately, there is a bit of research done to look at the question more carefully, and this post is based on that research.

#3 – Broken ideas and idea repair – Like feedback loops, idea repair (called “cognitive restructuring” in the psychological literature) is one of the most useful skills this site has to offer: it provides a way to understand negative emotions and bad moods and turn them around. I later followed this post up with some additional, practical information in How to Detect Broken Ideas and How to Repair a Broken Idea, Step by Step.

#2 – 6 Key Self-Motivation Strategies for Losing Weight – Weight loss has been one of the key areas where I’ve made use of self-motivation in my life, and with two thirds of adult Americans being overweight, I’m in good company for wanting to make that change. As demoralizing as trying to lose weight can be, it is possible, and this post offers some of the best information I have as to how to best do it.

#1 – How Tools and Environment Make Work into Play, Part I: The Example of Scrivener – It may seem surprising that the most popular post on the entire site focuses as much on a particular product as it does on a motivation strategy, but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me that this post is read as much as it is. Any really good tool–like Scrivener for a writer, or a really excellent brush for a painter, or the arguably industry-changing Red One camera for an indie filmmaker–provides a whole lot of motivation with very little of the usual investment of time and effort. Money aside, who doesn’t want instant motivation improvement?

And there are the most popular Willpower Engine posts for the year. What about the coming year? Your comments, ideas, and messages are always appreciated and of interest. Write me if you have ideas about what kind of article would be of the greatest use to the greatest number of people in 2010.

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