Being motivated generally means being drawn toward something. Even running away from a ravenous smilodon is motivated in a way by a desperate desire to keep on living (though when we get down to the reptile brain like that–eating, sleeping, procreating–the rules are a little different, and a little more fundamental, than when we’re trying to motivate ourselves to complete a term paper or clean out the garage).

The question is, what are you being drawn toward? You don’t necessarily need an end goal, and in fact most kinds of personal improvement have to do with acquiring habits you’ll want to keep for the future, habits you’ll want to keep for a lifetime rather than just use to get to a finish line. The best way to complete one novel is to become the kind of person who writes a lot; the best way to lose weight and stay fit is to become the kind of person who eats well and loves to exercise; and so on.

So we’re not looking for some kind of end state or finish line: instead, we’re looking for a vision of the future, some point along the line when you’ve accomplished some of the things you would most like to accomplish. What does that vision look like?

The reason this vision for the future is important is because we tend to align ourselves with imagined situations, an effect called “mood congruity.” If I vividly imagine a cold, drizzly, depressing day, I’ll tend to feel more depressed. If I vividly imagine a ravenous smilodon, I’ll tend to feel afraid. And if I picture myself in a house that is perfectly organized, I’ll tend to get excited about organizing my house. Our mental imagery affects our current mood and even our desires. That’s why thinking about playing video games instead of studying is a bad way to prevent yourself from playing video games instead of studying: the more we picture something, the more we tend to make choices that are affected by the image.

One last note about drawing ourselves forward: while visions of a good future can help make us enthusiastic about making good choices in the present, the future in question doesn’t have to be a distant one. For instance, if I want to clean the garage, it can be very effective to imagine myself just a couple of hours in the future with a small part of the garage completely taken care of, even if the garage as a whole is going to take me weeks to sort out. Or I might imagine what it will be like to show my spouse that newly-clean corner of the garage, or to think about what I’ll do in a couple of weeks with the money I make selling unneeded things I dig out of the garage on Craigslist. In fact, sometimes the little, short-term payoffs are the most motivating.

So short-term or long, what’s drawing you forward?

Photo by rogiro

For a month and a half now I’ve been pursuing My “Use ’em If You Got ’em” Challenge–basically, to get better and better at using the tools I already understand just when I need them, even at the seemingly worst times. It’s been challenging all right, but also educational, and I feel as though I’m slowly getting the hang of it. Of course it’s frustrating too, because when I don’t do a good job at using my self-motivation tools, because of my research I usually know exactly what I’m doing wrong. But Knowing Isn’t Enough: I’ve been needing to get in the habit of using self-motivation tactics as difficult situation arrives, and while it’s a very beneficial habit, it doesn’t come naturally!

And since it’s a difficult task, it’s been important for me to break it down to the simplest terms I can think of. The terms I’ve come up with make up the title of this post: relax, goals, choice, tactics. When I follow this approach, I have a very good chance of doing well. When I don’t, I’m more likely to rely on old, bad habits.

Before I talk about what each of the steps means, I need to mention the thing that makes any of them possible: mindfulness. I can only use my in-the-moment willpower tactics when I am consciously aware that I’m in a situation where I might make a bad choice. These really aren’t hard to recognize–I always feel a little doubtful, at least, when they come up. What’s hard is learning to wave a red flag at myself in those situations and say “Hey, pay attention to this! Think about what you’re doing!” Yet the more I do it, the easier it gets.

On to the four steps:

Relax: This is essential, and it’s so useful to me that most of the time it’s the only step I need. I find that when I’m in a situation where I’m in danger of making a bad choice, I tend to feel worked up about the problem–one part of me is ready to dig in and insist I make the bad choice, whereas another part of me is gearing up for a ferocious battle. Relaxing means letting go of both of these points of view and taking a few deep breaths. Is the question of whether I watch a movie or work on that project really life-or-death? No, it’s just an opportunity. I do my best to let go of my concerns and not take myself so seriously. Suddenly, making a good choice is no longer a struggle: it’s just one potential path I can take.

Goals: Once I’ve stepped away from the situation a little and let go of the tension, I have room to reflect for a moment on my goals. If I want to lose weight, get more work done, be more cool-headed in difficult conversations, be more organized, or whatever it may be, I can reflect on my vision for myself and remind myself why those goals are important. By thinking about my goals instead of about the bad choice I was considering, I become much more able to focus on good choices.

Choice: In that state of mind, I can choose what I want to do–even if I’m not prepared to do it yet. I can take a moment to visualize my behavior and consciously pick one of those paths. Being relaxed and having my goals in mind, the good choices tend to be much easier at this point, and the bad choices less tempting.

Tactics: If a good choice is not easy to make at this stage–although honestly, it generally is if I go this far in the process–then I can start looking at my available tactics. For instance, if I’m trying not to eat something, I can use any of my 24 Ways to Stop Feeling Hungry. If I’m trying to start a project that’s difficult for me, I can use any one of the 7 Tricks for Starting in on an Unappealing Task. There are dozens of tactics for supporting a good choice on this site, and having even a few available to choose from–whether on a printed list or a memorized or on a bookmarked page I can bring up on my computer–usually gives me enough leverage to make the good choice I want to make.

Relax – goals – choice – tactics is a bit of an advanced technique, but if you’re interested in cultivating good choices, it’s  a habit well worth cultivating. As for me, we’ll see how I do as I get better and better at using my four-step method.

Photo by  sytoha / Syed Touhid Hassan

Following up on Part I and Part II, here is a third and (for now) final set of tools for improving mood.

One small victory: Any accomplishment or success, however minor, creates an opportunity to feel happier. Even simple achievements like doing a few dishes or solving one computer problem refocus attention on constructive things, provide a distraction from annoyances or disappointments, and offer fodder for positive self-talk.

Change of scene: Our emotions often respond directly to things, places, or people we’re used to associating with better moods. It’s difficult to stay in a funk when we’re with people we genuinely like or or in a beautiful and different setting–while even if the surroundings we’re used to at the moment are very nice, a process called “hedonic adaptation” (discussed more in “But It Started Off So Well! What Happened?“) makes places we’ve been exposed to recently much less impactful than they originally were.

You could also stay where you are and change something about it: read “Letting Your Environment Help You.”

Music: Music can have a speedy and powerful effect on mood, even when we don’t feel like listening. For a detailed treatment of the subject, you could read “How and Why Music Changes Mood.”

Visualization: The interesting thing about imagining things to make ourselves feel better is that in many ways, our brains don’t distinguish between something we’re imagining and something that’s actually happening, which is why a good movie can have such a strong emotional effect. Visualizing ourselves in a calm, pleasant place or dwelling on a past or expected event that’s particularly joyful gives a brain the chance to start reacting to that visualization and to shift into the appropriate mood.

Photo by Meanest Indian

Every once in a while, I have a day where enough seems to have gone wrong that I’m lodged deep in a lousy mood. Sometimes I’m not clever enough to be aware of this right away, so it persists until mindfulness finally kicks in with something to the effect of “You’re in a bad mood, and there is no reason for it unless it’s somehow helping you. Is it helping?”

It generally isn not helping. So I try to find my way out of that lousy mood using one of the techniques in this post.

The human brain is not very much like a computer. It changes its own structure constantly, stores information in locations scattered throughout the brain, and even runs two different systems (one neural and mostly cognitive, the other chemical and mostly emotional) at the same time. There’s more on this in my article about science fiction and the human brain at Clarkesworld.

But even though the brain doesn’t work the way computers do in many respects, it is capable of reboots: shutting down everything that’s currently running–including bad moods–and starting from scratch. However, reboots are not always easy. There are at least two things that get in the way.

The first is called “mood congruity”: this is the tendency of human beings to have trouble really imagining any emotional situation other than the one they’re already in. If you’re in a bad mood and you picture enjoying a nice walk outside, chances are it will be difficult for you to believe in your gut that the walk will be enjoyable–even if you have every reason to think it will be, and even if it generally has been under similar circumstances in the past. Whatever mood we’re in, we tend to imagine the future fitting the same mood. This is one reason the advice “Cheer up! Things will get better” often sounds so hollow. Mood congruity can be overcome, but it’s helpful to realize that the way our brians work, they’re a little limited at imagining an emotion while experiencing a contrary emotion.

Another barrier is that generally speaking, any mental control we have over our emotions happens by thinking (cognition), but cognition can change much more quickly than emotion, because so much of emotion has to do with chemicals like dopamine, cortisol, oxytocin, adrenaline, and others. The chemical states that influence our brains aren’t capable of changing nearly as quickly as our thoughts. We can go from thinking about a horrible tragedy to thinking about a really funny joke and back all within seconds, but our emotional state would not be able to keep up. This means that any mental effort to change mood needs to be kept up for a minute or two at least to allow emotions to catch up with cognition. It also means that idea repair doesn’t have its full effect right away, a subject I’ll be tackling in another article soon.

Knowing the obstacles, what are the techniques we can use to reboot our brains? Well, computers can go through a “warm boot” (rebooting through software only) or a “cold boot” (physically restarting the computer), and the same is true of our brains. A mental cold boot can be accomplished with techniques that completely clear out what’s going on in our minds. Two excellent approaches for this are meditation (which narrows focus to a very specific subject while letting everything else kind of float away) and exercise (which creates a physiological state that tends to help us cut back to a minimum of thinking).

Techniques for warm boots change attention, immediate experience, and/or thinking. Idea repair is one very useful means to do a warm boot. Other methods include emotional antidotes; visualization; and getting into a flow state (or at least distracted by something interesting for a bit).

Regardless of which method you use, rebooting takes attention, effort, and a little time. However, it often doesn’t take any more than that, and while not every bad mood can be banished in minutes, many of them can.

Photo by rofreg

In a recent article (How to enjoy the dullest tasks) I talked about ways to make a dull task enjoyable and appealing. In response, friend and fellow writer Oliver Dale posed this question: “Once I’ve started the drudgery, completion isn’t usually an issue. What do you have for getting up the steam to start?”

It’s a great question. Even granting that dull tasks can be enjoyable, how do we face down the initially unappetizing prospect of jumping into them? Here are 7 tricks that can help a person launch into a task that may not be the most appealing possible option. For a wider treatment of getting motivated on short notice, read Don’t Feel Motivated? 10 Ways to Find Motivation Right Now

1. Visualize doing it. When we picture ourselves doing something, our brains tend to become inclined to do that thing. It’s easier to act on an intention when we’re already picturing the experience.
2. Focus on the most appealing thing about the task. How appealing a task is often has a lot to do with what aspects of it we’re thinking about.
3. Get in a habit of doing the task regularly, in the same circumstances, on the same schedule. Unpleasant tasks tend to lose their harsh edge when repeated regularly and done with less conscious thought.
4. Add something pleasurable: for example, put on some music to listen to while doing tedious paperwork, talk to a friend while doing dishes, or watch a movie while folding laundry.
5. List every reason you want to get the task done. Motivation tends to increase when we are more aware of the purposes and intentions of our actions.
6. Focus on the first physical step and just do that. It’s easy to get bogged down in objections and internal debate. If you know you’d like to get something done, sometimes the easiest and most direct approach is to take the first physical step and proceed from there–take out the papers you’ll need, put old clothes when about to clean the attic, pack your gym bag, etc.
7. If you find yourself mentally resisting, figure out what you’re telling yourself and repair your thoughts. For instance, you can change “Ugh, I hate cleaning the fridge” to “If I get started now, in 20 minutes I’ll have a clean fridge.” See the posts on detecting broken ideas and repairing them for specifics on how to neutralize negative thoughts.

Photo by basegreen

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

A good imagination may not be strictly necessary for procrastination, but it can help.

In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen talks about the nature of procrastination: picturing something in the future and imagining how hard it will be or what can go wrong. He goes on to point out that the more easily a person can imagine problems, the more incentive they have to procrastinate “… because their sensitivity gives them the capability of producing in their minds lurid nightmare scenarios about what might be involved in doing the project and all the negative consequences that might occur if it weren’t done perfectly.”

How do people successfully combat procrastination? They take control and move things forward–that is, they figure out what the next physical action is.

Allen is big on the next physical action, and close examination of the idea helps explain why: figuring out the next action changes the focus from broad dangers to easy, short-term wins. For example, if you’re daunted at the prospect of doing your taxes, you may find yourself distracted by thoughts of a big balance due, mistakes, or audits. Figuring out your next task (“Sort through receipts in receipt box” or “Call tax preparer to make an appointment” or “Download an update to the tax softare”), by contrast, puts things on a much more comfortable level. Almost anyone can sort receipts, make a telephone call, or click a button on a Web site, and doing so moves the tax process forward. Reducing large tasks to a series of next actions–only one of which needs to be figured out at any given time–can create enthusiasm or energy around getting things done instead of wrapping the task in anxiety.

Photo by tracer.ca

There’s one particular kind of choice that most of us make several times a day without even noticing it, one that can have a profound impact on our focus, understanding, and drive and therefore on what we accomplish in our lives. These choices are about what to do with spare thinking time. Driving or riding in to work, we might be in a habit of turning on the radio or listening to music or to audiobooks. Waiting at the doctor’s office, we may pick up a magazine or check e-mail on a cell phone. Relaxing after a long work day, we might turn on the television as soon as we have a moment to breathe. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with those things, but they are worth reconsidering just the same, because we can use some of those times to think about our goals.

Why thinking about goals is cool
I admit, “thinking about goals” doesn’t sound like a very exciting activity, but it does have some immediate payoffs. Taking a few moments to write about or think about or discuss or even talk to ourselves about whatever our primary goal is at the moment–eating more healthily, being a better parent, contacting more sales prospects, honing violin skills, or whatever it may be–provides us with four essential ingredients of self-motivation: mindfulness, visualization, feedback, and planning.

The mindfulness advantage of using some of our available mental time to think about a goal is that we have more opportunity to anticipate times when we want to be more aware in the near future–to remind ourselves to be mindful–as well as more time to notice details of things that have happened very recently.

Visualization is about reconnecting with our goals. What are the payoffs of eating well or talking to more prospects? How would it feel to be able to play that really difficult piece on the violin or to get through a disagreement with the kids at home without shouting? Really taking time to imagine how things might be once we succeed at a goal is both informative–we get a clearer idea of where we’re trying to get–and energizing.

The feedback that even a few spare moments provide can offer solutions to problems that may not even have been apparentotherwise. For instance, if I’m trying to be a better communicator and I realize at lunch that I haven’t gathered all the information I need for the meeting I have at 2:00, I may come to the realization that sometimes my communication problems are just lack of preparation. Reflecting often on how things are going with an important goal gives a better short-term understanding of our own actions that can be invaluable.

And planning can be more useful even than it might seem. For instance, if I’m working on always being on time I might think about a 7:00 dinner I’m expected at while driving home from work and realize that I need to leave the house fifteen minutes earlier than I had planned because I need to allow time to stop and pick up a bottle of wine.

Fighting habits to change another habit
Fighting the habit of immediately going to some kind of entertainment or distraction as soon as our brains are available takes some doing, and requires a bit of mindfulness itself. However, the payoff of using even a few spare moments a couple of times a day is greatly increased awareness and greatly improved ability to use the tools available to us to increase motivation.

Photo by tripu

Here’s a common idea of what willpower is. Does it sound familiar?

You’re faced with a choice, like french fries versus carrot sticks or cleaning the house versus dropping onto the couch and watching TV. One of the choices is the one you’d like to actually do now, and the other one is the one you know you’ll wish you had chosen later. So a battle commences between the good choice and the bad choice, and according to this line of thinking willpower means using plain force of character to conquer the bad choice and make the good choice win.

The problem with the idea that willpower as a struggle against bad impulses is that it lines the situation up so that a lot of the time, we lose. People who successfully make the good choices, the choices that lead to long-term happiness instead of short-term pleasure, are not fighting those same fights and winning: they’re pulling the situation apart and preventing the fight from ever occurring.

Just how this works begins to come clear when we look at the kind of thinking that goes into each approach. Let’s take the example of cleaning the house versus watching TV. With the fighting approach, some typical thoughts might be “I really should clean the house, but I don’t want to. I just feel like flopping down on the couch and watching TV. But I need to clean the house! Then again, I’ve had a lousy day, and I deserve at a little rest …”

These kinds of situations lend themselves to generating broken ideas, which tend to derail good choices. Also, thinking about a good choice vs. a bad choice as a struggle tends to lead to focusing on the negatives of the good choice, which is exactly the reverse of what we want, because it makes it harder to care about the good choice.

What’s the alternative? Focusing on small steps toward and attractive things about the good choice. An example of a small step: “Maybe I could just start by putting the books away. That should only take a few minutes.” Something attractive about the good choice might be visualizing how it would feel to wake up the next morning to a clean house or thinking about what kind of music to play while cleaning the stove. Anything that makes the good choice more appealing, interesting, or absorbing, and anything that launches us down the path of starting to act out the good choice, makes the good choice noticeably easier.

It’s clear that as humans, we like to think about pleasant things and don’t like to think about unpleasant things. If we direct our energies toward thinking up pleasant things about the smarter choice rather than toward brainstorming the reasons we don’t want to take that smarter choice, not only are we much more likely to take the smarter choice, but it will be easier and less tiring to do so. This is part of what I talk about in my article “Does Willpower Really Get Used Up?” Willpower seems finite if it’s a force we have to bring to bear in fight after fight. If instead it’s a different way of looking at things, why should it ever get used up or diminished? In fact, the more we use willpower in the sense I mean it here, the better we get at it, and therefore the stronger the willpower gets.

In other words, instead of likening willpower to a muscle we tire out with use but build up over time, we might want to think of it more as a language we learn, as a skill that gets stronger the more we use it, without having to fight ourselves. After all, if we’re fighting ourselves, who is there to lose the battle but us?

In recent articles I’ve posted about choosing a New Year’s resolution and why New Year’s resolutions often fail. Now that 2010 has begun, here are 5 ways to make a New Year’s resolution stronger.

1. Schedule a regular time to think about it
New goals can tend to get shoved out of the way when things get busy or complicated. To make sure that they always come back into the spotlight, it’s important to take time to think, talk, or write about that goal on a regular basis. This kind of attention helps encourage problem-solving and makes more opportunities to reflect on and reinforce the kinds of behaviors that will support the goal.

2. Set waypoints
If your new goal is a long-term one, getting to the vision you have for yourself may be a long, challenging trek. Setting waypoints makes goals more immediate and rewarding. For example: if you’re decluttering your house, make each room a goal of its own, the entire focus of your attention until it’s done. While working on that room, you deliberately give yourself permission not to worry about the rest of the house. It’s a lot easier to come to grips with organizing a room than organizing a house, and worrying about the whole thing at once will only get in the way of the large job at hand.

3. Read and learn
Find books, online forums, blogs, in-person groups, magazines, articles, or any other resource that will help you learn how to pursue your goal better, or even just inspire you to keep pursuing it. Learning more about your goal gives you more power to move toward it, keeps it fresh in your mind, and often provides a vision of what things might be like as you see more success.

4. Be prepared for a few failures
If habits were the kind of thing we could just switch off, there would be no need for willpower. Trying to change a bad habit, adopt a good one, or make regular progress to achieve something challenging is difficult and is likely to involve some setbacks now and then. If and when these come, unless you’re defusing a bomb or building a card house, all is not lost. It will help enormously to step back and try to recover soon from a problem rather than saying “Oh, I blew it–now it doesn’t matter what I do.” Failure is a normal byproduct of success, and a lost battle isn’t the same as a lost war.

5. Stay inspired
Taking on anything challenging means that there will be times when you don’t feel like working on your goal and are faced with the choice of pushing ahead or giving up. At these times, it makes a real difference if you’re in touch with why you’re doing what you’re doing and have kept your enthusiasm for it alive. Visualize what things will be like as you make more progress; review the things that draw you toward your goal; reflect on past accomplishments; explain to friends or family why you’ve chosen the path you have; or do anything else you can to keep yourself inspired. Inspiration does not automatically create willpower, but it certain does help fuel it.

Photo by Tim in Sydney