I’m not particularly interested in playing video or computer games, and you may well not be either, but taking a close look at them can provide us with some surprisingly useful information about how we motivate ourselves. And although in most cases, video games don’t motivate players to do anything particularly constructive, the lessons we take from them can be applied to virtually any kind of goal.

To get an idea of why we would care about video or computer games, think about the times you’ve seen someone who was very involved in one. They may play for hours at a time, postponing food and drink and bathroom breaks, accomplishing difficult tasks despite regular failures and setbacks, disregarding most of the world around them in favor of singleminded attention to a goal. A hard-core gamer might do this every day they can, week after week. Even children with ADD and ADHD seem to be able to focus intently on video games, according to research.

When this kind of attention is directed at video games, it’s a little disturbing. Having fun is great, but being obsessed with a video game is probably not the healthiest way to live. The interesting part comes when we imagine this same amount of focus and perserverance applied to some other task, like practicing the violin, studying algebra, building a house, or examining a patient in a health clinic. In fact, the description of someone who’s absorbed in a video game sounds an awful lot like the description of someone experiencing flow. Are there lessons we can learn from video game playing to understand better how to focus on other, more useful tasks?

Sorry, that’s a dumb question. You’ve probably read the title of this post, so you already know the answer is “yes.” I hope you’ll accept my apology for wasting your time with that kind of rhetorical silliness: I know you’re busy. Let me cut to the chase.

What is it about video games that engages attention and brings out so much focus and determination? It’s a combination of factors, each of which can be applied to self-motivation. Don’t be fooled by the fact that the video game is external to the person playing it, because there is no real carrot or stick. The forces driving a determined gamer all occur within their mind: they are the exact mental triggers that can potentially make any activity compelling.

Challenging, but Not Overwhelming
Video games strive to be hard enough that the player always has to focus attention in order to survive or succeed, but easy enough that eventually almost anyone who keeps trying can become skillful. The initial difficulty makes the later accomplishment much more gratifying, and ensures that the player can’t turn attention away from the game without sacrificing success.

When we want to accomplish something in our own lives, it can be helpful to array the job in front of us so that we have to dive in and work hard. This means creating goals that are difficult to achieve. Instead of having a goal of “cleaning the house,” you can have the goal of “making the kitchen spotless in 45 minutes.” If your kitchen would normally take you an hour and fifteen minutes to clean well, this is a difficult goal. You’d have to focus hard and work at top efficiency, ignoring distractions. When the kitchen is clean, level 1 has been cleared, so to speak. Whether or not you managed to complete the job in 45 minutes barely matters once the kitchen is actually clean. Then on to level 2 …

The Next Thing Needs to Be Done Right Away
In most good electronic games, there’s always another monster lurking, another disaster that needs to be averted, another question to answer. You can’t complete one thing and then relax: you complete one thing and immediately turn your attention to the thing after it, because your only other choice is failure.

In the same way, if you’re working on starting a home business, the most productive way to go about it is to know exactly what you need to achieve–probably in the form of a to do list–and to go about methodically completing one thing after the other. You write the business plan. As soon as that’s done, you immediately start on the financial projections, and then launch directly into the marketing plan, and so forth. The easiest way to keep these tasks going is to not just to keep a task list, but to make sure that the next task to do is already at the top of your list . This takes active management of the list to handle the changing situation. If you have a reliable queue of things to do, you can concentrate on one at a time and work through them without having to hesitate or lose momentum due to not knowing what to do next. If you finish a task and the next one isn’t already identified, make prioritizing your tasks itself the next thing you do.

Always Knowing the Stakes
In life, bad choices often don’t make any immediately noticeable impact. If you decide not to work on your novel today, or to ignore the argument you had with your significant other instead of considering how you could work it out together, everything may seem fine for now–but the long term effects could be a book that doesn’t get finished (or takes much longer than you wanted it to) or a relationship that becomes painful and frustrating.

In video games, by contrast, bad choices usually bring immediate trouble. If you don’t send your peasants out into the fields, your city starves and production grinds to a halt. If you don’t bother to keep an eye out for traps, you could suddenly end up impaled on something. These kinds of results tend to be very motivating: you put out your peasants or do regular scans of the area automatically to avoid trouble and prevail in the game. Creating automatic behavior is the power of a good feedback loop.

We can apply this motivating factor to our lives by reminding ourselves of the real consequences of our actions. If you have the choice of either filing your papers at the end of the work day or letting them pile up, you can focus on how enjoyable it will be coming in the next morning to a clean desk. If we want to avoid buying a bag of potato chips, you can imagine what you’ll look like the next time you put on a bathing suit if you are carrying on a love affair with Pringles. To motivate yourself to do something, think about the pleasing results. To motivate yourself not to do something, think about the unpleasant results.

Engineering Our Own Motivation
Developers of electronic games put enormous effort into designing game play, making a game as appealing and involving as possible. A relatively small amount of planning in our own lives can allow us to accomplish the same thing with our goals.

Photo by Shelms.

After losing a job, motivation can be a little hard to come by. A lost job usually serves up a double whammy: a massive blow to self-respect in being fired, forced to resign, or laid off, and a goodly serving of uncertainty about where the next job is going to come from. The combination of sadness about the past and anxiety about the future can be pernicious, because just when you get one side of the problem under control, the other can sneak up and wallop you.

I was forwarded this useful article from the New York Times Web site today, and it has some good points to make: “Accentuating the Positive After a Layoff“. While reading it, however, I realized there are some basic elements of motivation that apply to job loss: here those are.

If You’re Beating Yourself Up, Here’s How to Stop
It’s hard to be kind to yourself after losing a job. You may blame yourself, for good reasons or silly reasons, or be unable to let go of anger, or feel hopeless about the future. These kinds of feelings almost always are the result of broken ideas, things we tell ourselves that sound true but are actually bunk. Some common ones follow, along with some good ways to repair them. For a much more in-depth treatment of broken ideas (under their more proper psychological name of “cognitive distortions”), read Albert Ellis and Robert A. Harper’s A Guide to Rational Living or David Burns’ Feeling Good.

I should have _____
“Should” is almost always a red flag word. Looking back at the past, it helps to know how we would handle a similar situation in the future, but since there is no way at all ever to change what we’ve done in time gone by, it can be a lot more constructive to say “I did ____. If the situation came up again, I would do ____. I’m going to accept that I made a bad choice. What can I do in the future to help turn things around?”

I’m such a ____
Labeling means taking one or more incidents in the past and concluding that they add up to an unchangeable tendency to fail. Yet our brains are amazingly adaptable; we can change virtually anything we want about our behavior or even our skills. A bad choice or a failure is nothing more than a specific bad choice or failure. It doesn’t decree how we will act in future.

My boss/coworkers/clients/etc. should have _____
“Should” again, and again it points to something we can’t change. We can influence others, but we generally can’t force them to act a particular way. It can help in these situations to remind ourselves that we have no control over other people, only control over how we respond to them. We can then turn our attention to the areas of our lives where we actually do have some control.

I’m not going to find a job/decent job/job around here/job in my field
This one is called “fortune telling.” We can’t predict the future, and there’s no point in pretending we can. It can help in these situations to map out all of the possibilities we’re hoping to avoid and say to ourselves “OK, that might happen, even if I don’t want it to. If so, what’s going to be the best thing for me to do?”

This is awful!
Watching a child die is awful. Being imprisoned in  a tiny cell in a Southeast Asian country for eight years is awful. But having to sell your beloved late-model car and move to a second-floor walkup in a town you don’t like is merely unpleasant. If you look at your future and see things you don’t like, remind yourself that they’re just things you don’t like, and that your job is just to make good decisions. Very few things we don’t like will last through our entire lives. Generally they’re just something to be gotten through as well as can be managed until they’re gone.

Make goals, not wishes
It’s tempting in these situations to make goals like “I will get a new job right here in the city within three months, for at least as much as I used to make.” The problem is that something like that is not a goal, because it’s not under your direct control. It’s more of a wish: it depends on other people doing things, and we’ve already established that other people are (inconveniently) not under our control. Goals are motivating and worth pursuing, as long as they’re entirely under your control. A real goal might be something like “I will apply for at least 15 jobs a week,” or “I will study a new job skill for at least two hours a day until I have a new job,” or “Every morning, I will come up with one new thing I haven’t tried yet to help me in my job search.” As mentioned in the S.M.A.R.T. post, good goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. The “attainable” part needs to include being under your direct control.

There is an up side
Any change, even a very messy one, has the potential for positive side effects, sometimes substantial ones. For instance, many people who have lost their ability to walk, see, or hear through an accident literally refer to their experience as the best thing that has ever happened to them. As strange as it may sound, it can make sense, because a major life problem is a wake-up call: it slaps us in the face and forces us to look around. What do we really have going for us, when it comes right down to it–what skills, what passions, what resources? What do we truly want to do with our lives? Is making a living enough, or do we want something more? If so, what is that thing? Are the choices we’ve been making really making us happy? It’s possible to be happy without a lot of things, including sight, hearing, and the ability to walk. A happy life with less is better than an unhappy life with more.

And almost any change also has little benefits, things that you’re probably more than happy to leave behind–a cramped office or an over-controlling manager or a long commute. Don’t hesitate to take pleasure in the improvements in your situation, even if they’re small compared to the problems that have arisen.

You don’t have to be happy about losing a job (though it’s possible, and it can help). And you don’t have to pretend that everything is going to come out the way you want it to just because you wish it (which doesn’t help). But taking a calm look at what has happened and where you are now can at worst help you put to rest anxieties you don’t really need, and at best help you see opportunities you hadn’t previously imagined.

Photo by Rhett Sutphin; it may or may not actually depict a lost job

There’s a short video with an accompanying article at Mindtools, a personal development site with a business focus at http://www.mindtools.com/goals on goal-setting as a habit, covering both in terms of lifetime goals and shorter-term tasks and targets. My favorite part of the article (and the video) suggests using the mnemonic “SMART” to remember what makes a good short-term goal. A good target or short-term goal, the article recommends, is

• Specific
• Measurable (that is, afterward you can tell whether or not you accomplished it)
• Attainable (though it attainable with some preparation first is OK)
• Relevant (to your priorities)
• Timebound (you plan do do it by a particular deadline)

There are other good points in the article as well;  it’s worth a look. (Thanks to Jeff Grundy’s podcast 30wastedyears.com for posting about this at http://30wastedyears.com/quick-video-from-mind-tools-on-goal-setting/ )

What’s your biggest goal right now, the one you most want to tackle? If you don’t know that off the top of your head, that may be a big obstacle to getting much done. If you do know, great–and on to the next question, which is this: what is the very next thing you’re going to be doing to further that goal?

Do you know that one off the top of your head? If so, go to the head of the class! If not, you can still go to the head of the class, but first you have to get in the habit of queuing things up for yourself. It sounds simple and inconsequential, but it’s actually simple and crucial.

The logic is pretty straightforward: if I know what my next step is, then I’ll recognize as soon as there’s a good opportunity for me to take it and am prepared to take that opportunity. Once I’ve tackled that step, I take a moment to think about the next step so that I know what that is. Working this way, I’m never that far from thinking about or being able to act on my goals, and sometimes my subconscious may even be able to make extra progress on my project without me expending any real effort.

Looking at it from another perspective, knowing your next step is an effective way to minimize anxiety about a big project. If there twenty things you could do next and you haven’t picked one as being the first, then you’re in a position where you have to worry about all twenty. If you’ve carefully chosen one of those things to do next, you only have to worry about that one until you complete it; then you choose the next one and still only have to worry about one, even though you’re moving right on down the list.

By the way, “the next step” means something that you actively have to focus on to do. If the next thing you need to do to achieve your goal is something that you don’t even have to think about, something that’s already set up for you or already an ingrained habit, ignore it for the purpose of knowing what’s next. But those are specifically the kind of areas where no motivation work is needed. What we’re talking about here is the next step that’s going to take some kind of effort or attention from you.

This approach separates choosing something to do from actually having to do it, which also combats anxiety. Since considering all the things you might have to do can be a source of stress, and since getting yourself to do something difficult can also be a source of stress, taking the two separately can make each piece easier to deal with.

Some examples of choosing the next step: If you’re writing, it might be starting the next chapter, or planning out the next piece of the outline, or editing a particular section; if you’re working on fitness, it might be exercising in the evening, or planning your next meal; if you’re organizing your home, it might be the next area you plan to clean up, or the next habit you need to practice; if you’re quitting smoking, it might be simply restocking your supply of gum or reading up on emphysema. Regardless, always knowing your next step keeps you literally one step ahead.

Photo by Tojosan

1. Not having a clear goal in mind
Not knowing exactly what you want, or knowing that but not keeping it in mind, makes it very hard to remember what you need to do or why. If you don’t have a clear, short explanation of your goal that you could give anyone who asked at a moment’s notice, talk with a friend or write down your ideas until you can summarize your goals without even having to think about it. Then make sure to tell yourself about your goals regularly.

2. Trying to pursue more than one goal at a time
While it’s not absolutely impossible to pursue more than one goal at a time, doing so dilutes attention, focus, and mental resources. We only have so much time, attention, and effort we can put into changing our lives: trying to do more than one thing at a time is inviting trouble. What’s the single most important goal you have in front of you? Once you’re well on your way with that single, most important goal, it might be possible to get started on a second one.

3. Not being committed
Being committed to a goal means accepting it, taking complete responsibility for it yourself, and being willing to submit to the changes it will require in your life. (See Why Self-Reliance Requires Surrender.) If you’re not fully committed to your goal, feelings of resentment or rebelliousness, or a tendency to blame forces outside yourself for being in the situation you’re in, will block you from moving forward.

4. Failing to plan out specific steps
Knowing your goal is important, but in order to make real progress toward it, you’ll need to know exactly what you expect yourself to do. At any moment, you’ll need to know what the step you’re working on is and what the next step will be when you’re done with that.

5. Not setting aside time
You won’t make much progress toward your goal if you don’t set aside time to work on it. If you just try to fit it in when you have spare time, you’ll find your goal often gets lost in the shuffle.

6. Not keeping up a feedback loop
Having a feedback loop means stopping regularly (at least once or twice a week) to look carefully at what you’ve been doing to reach your goal and noticing what you need to work on, pay more attention to, improve, handle differently, or keep up. Some techniques for doing this include journaling, meeting with a group, blogging, participating in an online forum, or talking with a friend who’s helping you keep on track.

7. Not paying attention to your thoughts
Building willpower or reaching a goal means changing habits, and changing habits means paying more attention to when decisions are arising and what factors are influencing our decisions. Bad choices are very often choices that we rushed past or didn’t think carefully through at the time. Understanding what’s going on in our own minds when making choices doesn’t always get us to make better choices, but it’s a necessary step to getting better and better at making those choices. For one way to become more aware of your choices and thinking, read How To Improve Willpower Through Writing Things Down: Decision Logging.

8. Not enjoying the steps
It’s easy to think of the steps we need to take to reach a goal as being painful or difficult, but finding the pleasure in those steps simplifies everything. See Using enjoyment as a tool to reach goals.

9 Not preparing
If we wait until we’re actually faced with choices, we may not be prepared to tackle them well. Some choices even pass by before we realize they were coming, unless we prepare by looking ahead. An example is lateness: being on-time means planning intelligently for when to leave for an appointment and getting everything ready beforehand so that it’s possible to leave at that time. Even for choices we recognize as they come up, we may not be mentally or emotionally prepared to tackle them. Paying attention to broken ideas, meditating, and organizing are some of the techniques we can use to prepare ourselves to do better.

10. Taking setbacks too hard
Changing habits is hard, and doing a difficult thing day after day often means some short-term setbacks or failures. Failure doesn’t need to be a pattern: it can be taken as a learning experience. Consider that if a person is trying to quit smoking, their chances of succeeding are much higher if they have tried and failed to quit smoking before than if they had never tried. Even failure is a step forward. It’s not trying at all that we have to watch out for.

Here’s a funny problem with motivation: in order to understand ourselves well enough to manage our emotions and ideas, we need to be mindful, which is to say, to live in the present, to pay attention to what is really going on inside and around us right now. But we also need to visualize where we’re going, to gain inspiration and energy from seeing what we could become and to anticipate both obstacles and rewards. And despite present and future, we also need to look back at what we have done regularly, to understand how things we’ve tried in the past have worked out so that we can repeat or change them, depending. We can’t do all of these things at the same time. Which is really more important?

Of course, that’s a trick question. Mindfulness is essential to changing ourselves, and visualization is an important step in motivating ourselves, and reflecting on the past to change the present (that is, creating a feedback loop) is an essential part of getting and keeping on track. The trick is to know when to do what. If anyone tells you to always live in the moment, ask them whether or not they look both ways when they cross the street.

The past (reflection or feedback) is important when we’re already working steadily toward a goal and are not conflicted in what we want to do. Reflection helps us correct our course and repeat successes.

The present (mindfulness) is where we need to put our minds when we are feeling conflicted or unhappy or distracted, or just want to be able to focus better. Mindfulness practices (especially mindfulness meditation) help us become serene and attentive.

The future (visualization) is where we need to place our thoughts when we’re not sure what we want to accomplish, or else when we want to build up enthusiasm for moving forward. If we’re feeling bad and unready to face the future, that’s a good sign that we need to concentrate on the present for a while instead, but if we’re calm and want to make decisions or get ourselves moving, visualizing the results of good choices now can be a tremendous help.

It will certainly be worth going into more depth on each of these subjects–feedback loops, mindfulness, and visualization–but even without that kind of detail, we’re ahead of the game just by knowing where in time to put our attention so as to best help our own motivation.

Photo by azharc

In my post How to Strengthen Willpower Through Practice back in May, I mentioned how useful I’d been finding a practice I call “decision logging” in terms of building willpower, and I promised to give proper attention to the subject in the future. Here, after some delay, is that post.

Decision logging (“d-logging”) is a practice we can use to become more aware of what decisions come up for us during a normal day, how we are making those decisions, and what in our lives is influencing those decisions. The payoff of d-logging is that we become much more aware of what’s going on in our own bodies, minds, and environments–more mindful. Mindfulness is a powerful and central factor in improving willpower, because willpower means being able to make good decisions, and making good decisions requires understanding what’s going into them.

D-logging takes effort, but is very simple to do. All that’s required is to commit for a day at a time (preferably multiple days in a row for a total of at least a couple of weeks in total) to jotting down brief notes whenever

1. You notice you have a meaningful decision to make
2. You notice something going on with yourself that may influence your decisions
3. You have any insights into your own behavior or thinking

By “meaningful decision,” I mean a decision that deals with an area in which you’re trying to improve your willpower or motivation. It’s not important to d-log about how you pick what to wear for the day or which radio station to listen to unless those are concerns of great importance to you.

The kinds of things that go into a d-log include:

• Moods
• Physical sensations, like hunger, fatigue, or comfort
• Ideas or judgements about what’s going on, like “Everything seems to be going wrong this morning” or “I wish I could remember to be a little more relaxed about driving”
• When and how meaningful decisions are coming up
• Anything else that might influence how you make those meaningful decisions

Writing these things down brings them to the forefront of your attention and causes you to see them clearly for at least a moment or two, and seeing them clearly makes it much easier to deal with them. For example, if you’re frustrated about problems you’re having with your car and later in the day find yourself treating coworkers badly, you may find through d-logging that it’s the car that’s really driving your decisions about how to deal with people. Once you recognize this, you may come to the conclusion that taking that frustration out on the people you work with isn’t what you want to do, and you can focus on dealing with your feelings about your car in a more constructive way.

You can d-log on a computer, on paper, or by any other means that suits you (I often use an Alphasmart), but actually writing things down is essential–it’s not enough for this practice to just kind of mentally note them. It’s also essential to be completely honest with yourself and not to leave things out because you feel preoccupied, anxious, embarrassed, or frustrated about them: those are often exactly the kinds of things that are most helpful to recognize.

Of course privacy can be a concern. If you need to, you can toss out what you’ve noted very soon after it’s written down–even immediately. It is very helpful to be able to look back over your decision logs and learn from them, but if your concerns about privacy would prevent you from doing it otherwise, it is true that just writing things down does that most important job of focusing your attention.

Plan to keep your log on days when making notes repeatedly throughout the day will be doable for you.

To d-log, start each day with a fresh file or piece of paper and put the date at the top. Jot down the time whenever you write something down after not having any entries for a while. This helps put things in a time framework, so that you can look back and notice how something you felt at 10:00 in the morning did or didn’t influence something you did at 2:00 in the afternoon.

No one else has to see your d-logs, although if you have someone you feel you can tell anything to and want their help, it could be enlightening to share. You might want to explain what you’re doing to various other people if you’ll be needing to do it around them a lot, but in some cases such an explanation may result in someone asking to see what you’re writing, and since your d-log is meant to be completely candid, this could be a problem.

Over even a relatively short time–days, or weeks–d-logging can help build practices of mindfulness and of thinking through decisions that we’re used to making automatically, acting on habits we may or may not like. The importance of understanding our own thoughts and feelings and how they bear on their decisions is hard to overstate.

If d-logging is highly impractical for you, fortunately there are other routes–though they may be longer or more difficult–to developing mindfulness, especially doing mindfulness meditation.

D-logging will take a certain amount of attention and commitment, but it’s not hard. One beautiful thing about d-logging that’s not true of many approaches to developing willpower is that you can use it to improve willpower in any number of areas at once. Normally if you want to work on self-motivation, it’s important to focus on one specific area, since lack of focus tends to make motivation fall apart. D-logging is different because you’re not concentrating on promoting a particular goal, but only on understanding yourself and your thinking better. Yet this kind of thinking tends to have immediate, noticeable results on achieving goals.

Don’t be too concerned if you start d-logging on a particular day and don’t do a good job of following through. Any of this practice you do, even if it’s not for a full day, helps, and it’s always possible to try and do better the next day.

While d-logging is particularly powerful in terms of developing willpower, there are also other kinds of logging and writing that can bolster motivation, and I’ll cover some of these in future posts.

Writing picture by MikeOliveri
Self(?)-portrait by FotoRita [Allstar maniac]

You may not be someone who’s trying to lose weight, eat a better diet, get more exercise, or in some other way make changes to become more fit or healthy–but if you aren’t, you’re probably in the minority (and I tip my hat to you).

For the rest of us, I’ll skip the prolonged introduction and go straight to the useful information. And while you may have already heard this a thousand times, just in case, I’ll mention that the real goal here has to be becoming comfortable with leading a healthy lifestyle. Anything short of that will quickly turn on you and bite you in the butt.

1. Know what you should be eating and keep careful track
Most of us have no idea how much we’re actually eating in a day, and many of us have no idea how much we should be eating if we want to lose weight. Do a little research to figure out what your daily food intake would need to be for you to lose weight, then faithfully keep track in terms of calories or some other good measure, like exchanges. To find out calorie counts for a particular food, a Google search for the name of the food plus the word “calories” usually does the trick. It can be helpful to keep a list of foods you eat often and what their counts are for reference.

Not keeping track of this information means that we remain ignorant of the impact of the things we’re eating, so that the reasons behind not being able to lose weight remain a mystery. If we know the impact of each thing we eat, we then have the information we need to make good choices.

2. Pay attention to how you feel and what you’re thinking
Many of us eat badly in response to stress or other negative emotions, or for very unconstructive reasons, like wanting to be polite or because an unusual food happens to become available. The more mindful we become of what is going through our heads when we’re faced with decisions, the better equipped we are to deal with our own thoughts and emotions instead of to automatically revert to bad eating habits. To really notice our own thoughts, we have to take a step back right at the moment of choice–for instance, just as we’re deciding what to have for lunch or whether or not to go exercises.

A technique that can really help here, once a thought is recognized, is idea repair. Another is something I call “decision logging,” which means jotting down thoughts, feelings, and any other conditions throughout the day that might influence decisions. Doing this for a couple of weeks can provide a truckload of insight into where our feelings and inclinations are coming from, and it can show where the opportunities are to cut off negative emotions before they really kick in. This process can be useful for much more than weight loss, of course.

3. Visualize your goals
Spend some time on a daily basis–even just a few minutes–imagining yourself having achieved your goal, and allow yourself to enjoy the feelings of having done it. It’s much easier to be motivated by positive emotions (even if they come from imagining things) than it is to be motivated by vague inclinations. Negative emotions–guilt, shame, frustration–are lousy motivators, and are unlikely to be able to keep you consistently working on a tricky task for long. Use encouraging visions of the future as a continuing source of pleasure to associate with your process. The more you enjoy what you’re doing, the better you’ll do at it. And speaking of which …

4. Enjoy the steps
It’s easy to tell ourselves that exercise is painful and inconvenient, or that eating something healthy is boring. And certainly any process of changing major habits has its hard parts. If we focus on those, though, then again we’re associating negative emotions with our process instead of positive ones, and that won’t get us very far. Instead, it helps to focus, again and again, on the positive or pleasurable parts of the things we need to do. If I’m out running, I can put my attention more on the beauty of the park I’m running through or on the fact that I’m getting a quarter of a mile further than I was getting a week ago rather than on the physical effort or concerns about how I look, for instance.

There is something to enjoy in virtually any good step we take. Even hunger can be enjoyed when we have to experience a small amount of it while changing our eating habits, for instance because of the feeling of success and virtue, or because it’s an indication that we’re doing something that’s working.

5. Set up a feedback loop
Unless we reflect on our successes and mistakes, we tend to repeat the mistakes and only stumble on the successes now and again. At least once a week, and preferably more often, it can be a huge help to reflect on what you did, how it went, and what you want to do in the future. This will help keep you on track.

There are a variety of ways to set up feedback loops. Some commercial weight loss programs offer weekly group meetings and weigh-ins, which can work very well. Buddies can also work well, as can blogs, online forums, and journaling. More public ways of getting feedbacks (like groups and blogs) also can up the stakes for doing well, which can be very motivating to some people (but too much pressure for others). Choose the method that works best for you and make it a priority to do it regularly. If you miss a round of feedback, be sure to include that in the things you consider the next time. In other words, even your feedback loop can benefit from feedback.

6. Cut short arguments with yourself
Many of us are used to looking at choices we really want to steer clear of–often about a food that we don’t need and that would throw off our calorie count for the day–and then debating with ourselves, trying to convince ourselves to follow the virtuous path. But between a piece of chocolate cake and some vague idea of virtue, chocolate cake very often wins, so an alternative strategy is to turn around and walk away, immediately–even if the debate is still going on in your head. You don’t have to convince yourself to avoid something that would be bad for you or to do something that would be good for you if you simply go ahead and take the best available action. Concentrate on the simple physical acts: turning and putting one foot in front of the other, or putting on your workout clothes. These kinds of behaviors can shortcut the endangered decision-making process and help support automatic positive behaviors.

As always, there’s a lot more we could say on this subject, but this is a good start for now. And just so you know: I’m neither a professional nutritionist nor a psychologist. I’m also not qualified in any way to give you personal medical advice.

However, I’ve been studying the factors that go into self-motivation intensively for some time now and have myself lost upwards of 40 pounds while becoming much healthier. Don’t make me post before and after pictures, because I will if I have to. Regardless, I hope you’ll find these ideas useful and comment with questions or about your experiences.

Bike picture by Erica_Marshall
Shoe picture by Fey the Ferocious Feyrannosaur

Terms like “resignation,” “surrender,” and “submission” are practically cuss words in Western culture–certainly in America, anyway. Americans are brought up to believe that we should never give in to anybody, never submit to anything, and always be in control. We’re led to believe that strength always requires this kind of control, and so we tend to think of things like drug trafficking, terrorism, and our own habits as things we need to wage war on rather than things we simply need to find solutions to. Drug trafficking and terrorism are way, way outside the scope of this site, but there’s a crucial lesson about habits here. That lesson is resignation: to truly conquer bad habits, we need to surrender to our own best choices.

The kind of surrender we’re talking about here isn’t the kind where you give up your will to another person, or another force, or someone else’s ideas: instead, it’s letting go of things that may feel comfortable or at least familiar but that are holding you back, like broken ideas, and being willing to make new choices. It’s giving up the things we think we want, when necessary, to achieve the goals that are actually most important to us.

One example that many of us struggle with on a daily basis is priorities. If a person honestly has more things to get done than they’re able to handle, as many of us do, really taking control of the situation requires, strangely enough, letting go of some control. To put it plainly, if I have more to do than I can accomplish, then I’ll be able to handle things best if I resign myself to the fact that certain of those things aren’t going to done–and use that new point of view to make sure the most important items will get done.

Failing to resign ourselves in situations like that means that the things left undone are determined by whim and chance instead of by choice. If I “need” to practice some music, buy some new shoes for my son, exercise, answer some e-mails, and look up a new book I heard about, yet don’t have time for all of those things, then I run the danger of running out of time and (for instance) not getting the shoes and not exercising. As a matter of fact, I may naturally gravitate toward the least important and most immediately appealing of those things, like playing the music and surfing the Web reading reviews of the book. When I explain why I didn’t exercise or buy the shoes later, I may say “I just ran out of time.” Yet in actuality, not resigning myself to the time limitations in the first place meant that I really would have been choosing to do the less important things over the shoes and the exercise. If I resign myself to not having time to learn new music and buy new books, I might get done everything I actually need to get done, and while this may seem less appealing in the moment, over the long term I’m likely to experience more pleasure and more happiness because of having made these seemingly less appealing choices.

Which leads us to another important place for resignation: easy pleasure now versus happiness in future. For instance, I regularly do push-ups, building up my strength both for general health and as part of my Taekwondo training. In the moments I’m doing them, push-ups are hard to enjoy: they make me breathe hard and cause my muscles to strain in a way that feels suspiciously like mild pain. Yet if I don’t resign myself to experiencing this mild pain, then I’ll tend to avoid push-ups most of the time and won’t experience the pleasure of having that strength and being able to do the things push-ups allow me to do (even if that’s mainly just more push-ups).

Another kind of resignation that can make a world of difference in self-motivation is resigning ourselves to take responsibility rather than putting the blame outside ourselves. For instance, if a person has major financial problems but fails to take action because they feel those problems are mainly other people’s faults, they’ll most likely continue to have financial problems. It’s giving up that excuse of blaming outside conditions and resigning ourselves to take responsibility for our own lives that enables us to have some power over our situation.

There’s a surprising and wonderful side effect to resignation, too: it makes unenjoyable things more enjoyable. When I resign myself to doing push-ups, I’m no longer telling myself “These are hard. These are painful. I don’t want to do these.” Instead I’m saying “Time to do some push-ups. I can manage this.” This doesn’t make the exercise any more physically comfortable, but it frees up my attention to focus on things like the power I’m feeling in my muscles and the joy I can take in increasing my personal record, doing a few more push-ups than I’ve ever done in one go before. There are elements to enjoy in virtually any seemingly unenjoyable step to a worthwhile goal. Even hunger can bring a smile to your face if you resign yourself to a little of it (in a healthy context) and begin to experience it as the sensation that often goes with your body burning stored calories–and I say this from experience. But more on enjoying the unenjoyable in another post, because that’s a big subject.

So how do we know when to use resignation in our lives? Resignation is needed whenever we know what we need to do but are having trouble bringing ourselves to do it.

Resigning ourselves, as much as it sounds like knuckling under, is really much more like bravery than cowardice. We can go out and face the dangers that worry us and surrender ourselves to the possibility that we might be hurt, might have to go through something difficult, or might fail; or we can hide and hope that things will just somehow work out, often ensuring hurt and difficulty and failure. Surrender here means not giving up what’s important, but giving up what isn’t: more often than not we need to give up things we think we want in order to get the things we really want.

Chess photo by Some nutter called Mark Grimwood
Letting go picture by niko si
Diving picture by mcescobar1

In recent weeks I’ve taken to watching the Web (through a convenient Google Alert) for blog posts, pages, and articles on willpower, self-motivation, and self-control, and usually I find at least a couple of new ones (other than my own) to look at every day. Occasionally I’ll see a piece that does a very good job of talking about one or two pieces of the puzzle, and once or twice I’ve read ones that have plenty of good advice (I try to remember to link to those, when possible). Often, though, the person posting seems to have seized on one piece of information and drawn some conclusions that are … well, I’m going to have to say “ridiculous.”

A New York Times blog post suggested trying to strengthen willpower by brushing your teeth on the wrong side, because that takes extra effort and the thinking was that anything that takes extra effort is a good way to build willpower. A Psychology Today blog post proposed eating plenty of chocolate to help quit smoking. A recent article from Reuters suggested making lots of “bad” foods available in your house to improve your eating habits, on the idea that having more chances to resist those foods will always increase willpower.

And the ideas in these articles are usually not coming from journalists gone wild: they’re usually coming from scientists who get very involved with one aspect of willpower and make unscientific assumptions about how those aspects should be applied.

Building willpower is not difficult if you’re willing and you understand all the pieces, but it is complicated, and focusing on one piece of a complex problem to the exclusion of others is a dangerous approach. It’s like setting a house on fire to warm it more efficiently. Willpower, like any complex thing, is a balance.

In the above examples, the confusion seems to stem from not balancing the building of willpower with constructive habits and making good use of the willpower we already have. Yes, the more we use willpower, the stronger it gets. However, it’s also true that we have a limited capacity to exercise willpower, and the more struggles we put ourselves into, the sooner we’re likely to cave and start making bad choices. Fortunately, making good choices not only strengthens our willpower over time, it also gets us in habits that tend to make exercising willpower less of a struggle. Brushing our teeth on the wrong side or strategically placing bags of potato chips around the house does not aid us in making good choices: it’s just an artificial approach that can be used to demonstrate things in laboratories. And making bad food choices in order to make better smoking choices is a dangerous strategy because it is doing as much to erode our willpower and good habits, in a general sense, as it is to promote them.

I’ll cut in for a moment here to say that I surely don’t know every single piece of the puzzle either. For instance, I haven’t yet researched hypnosis, which if you go by the stories one hears can have some impressive effects. And I have a lot to learn about meditation, which has been shown in numerous studies (and in my own experience) to be profoundly supportive of the states of mind needed to exercise willpower or achieve goals. So certainly take everything I say with a grain of salt, too. But my goal on this site is to bring together knowledge about self-motivation from as wide an array of good sources as I possibly can, and having found many of those sources already, I am lucky enough to sometimes see where good studies are spawning bad ideas when other studies shed more light on the situation.

Back to the question of evaluating advice about willpower: fortunately, it seems to come down to a certain amount of common sense. If the advice involves making good choices, improving state of mind, or learning how to handle situations better, it’s probably good. And if it sounds too nutty to be true, it probably is.

Photo by KristopherM