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

There are times when I feel a little overwhelmed with everything that is going on in my life. It’s my own fault: I have multiple, powerful interests, and follow them energetically, regularly creating new projects to add to an already busy schedule. In recent years I’ve learned to hold back, to mostly stick to just the most important and rewarding projects, but my task list is still long and varied.

This kind of life keeps me engaged and interested, and I get a lot done, but some days I feel as though there are so many things that it’s hard to know where to start. Fortunately, there are specific steps I can take to get back on track. There are also long-term practices I can follow to be more focused and serene in general, but I’ll tackle those in other posts.

1. Take a step back
Your first reaction to this might be “I can’t take a step back! I need to get these things done! And I’m right in the middle of ___!” That’s OK: that may be true. On the other hand, sometimes our general sense of anxiety about needing to get a lot of things done can make us feel as though the particular thing we’re focusing on–which sometimes isn’t nearly as crucial as it seems–absolutely requires our attention. Sometimes it does, but often this is a trap: if we’re always preoccupied with whatever we’re doing right then, we have no time to figure out whether we’re even doing the right thing.

So immediately if possible, or at worst some time soon when the opportunity presents itself, take a step back, breathe, and remind yourself that you’re only one person and, like it or not, will only get a certain number of things done that day. The priorities are to make the best use of your time and not to drive yourself crazy while doing it. Breathing and brief meditation exercises are sometimes helpful for taking a step back, as is simply getting into a quiet room and shutting the door for two minutes. Another good approach is to talk briefly to a friend who’s a good listener. Yet another, which is especially useful for people who like to be in action, is to briefly write out or type out the thoughts that are going through your head.

2. Write down what you need to get done
If you don’t write down the things you need to do, they may tend to chase each other around in your head, and worrying that you’ll forget one can be a source of additional anxiety. If you take a few minutes to list your tasks out, it’s true that it can be daunting because of having to face the whole list, but it’s also calming because it creates focus.

It’s helpful to write things down in a word processor instead of on paper because of the next step, but either way can work.

3. Get the unimportant things out of sight
There may be a lot of things on your list that would be nice to do, but that aren’t essential. It can help a great deal to move these off onto a secondary list. Depending on how much you have going on, you may never get to the secondary list, or by the time you get to it, it may be too late to do some of the items. This is OK! It’s far better to miss out on doing something unimportant than to fail to do something important because of being tied up with these secondary tasks.

If you keep the secondary tasks on the same list as the main tasks, though, they can add to feelings of distraction and anxiety. If you don’t need to do them now, get them out of your way, and remind yourself that they don’t need any of your attention right now.

There are some tips about prioritizing and feeling less distracted by secondary tasks in my post How to manage multiple priorities.

4. Pick the most important thing on the list and get started
This is just a little bit tricky, because we always need to balance importance with urgency. Importance is how much impact doing (or not doing) something will have, while urgency is how pressing it is to do it in the near future. More important things need to win out over things that are less important, but importance doesn’t always win out over urgency: that’s a judgement call.

One way to choose the task you should be doing at the moment is simply to ask “Which thing on this list will I be most happy to get done?”

And while it’s important to do a good job of picking the top task, it’s even more important to be willing to commit to doing the task you pick and not to let yourself be bamboozled by conflicting priorities into doing something unimportant.

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That’s the short version, but while there’s certainly more to say on the subject, the sequence of taking a step back, reminding yourself of what’s important, focusing on that, then taking action on the most important thing for the moment will rarely let you down.

Photo by Cape Cod Cyclist.

 

The term “self-help,” while it’s accurate and useful and descriptive, drives me nuts. Even though we definitely help ourselves when we use self-help resources, neither word in the term is very appealing: “self” implies that we’re doing something “selfish” or “self-centered,” and “help” implies that by ourselves, we’re damaged or insufficient to the task. Taken together, it kind of sounds like a combination of personal weakness and lack of concern for other people. The reason this drives me nuts is that this is the exact opposite of what good self-help does. Really good self-help does help the person who’s doing it, but it’s often even more beneficial to the people around that person.

Sounds like a weaselly self-justification, doesn’t it? Well, if I do my job well in this post, you’ll feel as comfortable as I do that it’s anything but.

First, we all probably realize already that anyone who’s having a lot of personal trouble tends to require help from those around them. If we want to be a positive force in the world, the first task is to not be a drain on it, which means taking care of our own most pressing personal issues so that we can contribute something rather than requiring other people to contribute to us.

It’s also useful to realize that “self-help” is for the strong but imperfect. Perfect people, none of whom I have ever met, don’t need any kind of improvement. The rest of us can either help ourselves, wait for somebody else to help us, or never improve.

With those things established, let’s turn our attention to the people we spend the most time with. For most of us, that means family, coworkers, and friends.

What do family members need from us? Good communication, care and concern, love, united purpose, sometimes financial support, that kind of thing.

How about coworkers? Productivity, good communication again, responsibility, reliability, focus, and more.

And friends? Some of the same things we need from family: good communication, care and concern, happiness.

If we look at these lists–and I admit, they aren’t anything like exhaustive, but they’re a good start–most of these things that other people need from us have to do with us having our @$?! together. Giving other people what they really need means not being preoccupied with our own problems, being aware of what’s going on around us, and being able to focus. And to do all those things, unless we’re naturally gifted in serenity, willpower, enthusiasm, and kindness, we generally need to train ourselves–to help ourselves, if I may say it. We can extend ourselves more and have more to offer if we have done a good job of managing our own anxieties and hang-ups.

And random strangers? These people, too, are most likely to benefit if they come across us while we’re in a good mood, focused, non-defensive, positive. If you’ve ever had a waiter or waitress who was having a really lousy day and managed to get a smile out of them through just being patient and friendly, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that good moods spread from person to person.

But what about the wider circle: our communities, the groups we’re a part of, the world at large? Here the situation is a bit different at first glance, because starving children in far-off countries are not going to get any direct benefit from me being cheerful and serene. These larger and more basic problems in the world are solved through volunteering time, putting in effort to advance causes we believe in, donating money, and these other kinds of external activities.

But the trick here is that being ready to do these external things requires an internal attitude that supports those actions. I can’t donate much money to charity if I don’t have my own finances in order, and I can’t have my own finances in order if I’m full of hangups and damaging beliefs about money. Volunteering time or otherwise helping out a cause I believe in requires me to be available, focused, effective, and clear about my goals–and all of those things are easily complicated by anger, depression, anxiety, trouble organizing or prioritizing, lack of drive, and the other kinds of negative states that effective self-help (among other things) battles against.

So we end up with the same answer no matter whom else we want to help: if we don’t start with ourselves, we’re not going to have much to offer people outside of ourselves. There’s a balance, clearly: it would be possible to sit around trying to improve our state of mind all day and never get up to actually help anyone else. But then, truly improving our state of mind has a lot to do with being aware of what’s going on both inside us and around us, so that any really effective self-improvement sooner or later compels us to get up and turn our attention outward.

Having written all of this out, I still don’t feel entirely at ease with the term “self-help,” or the way self-help is sometimes viewed (the phrases “self-absorbed,” “self-indulgent,” and “navel gazer” unfortunately come to mind). And not everything that claims to be “self-help” really does help anyone at all (I’m looking at you, The Secret!).  But actions, as one of my favorite cliches goes, speak louder than words, and in the end people I meet will understand on some level what good self-help really is because the better I do with it, the more likely it is they’ll walk away from me happier than they came.

Rescue picture in the public domain; original photographer unknown.
Picture of volunteers working on house by FirstBaptistNashville.

One particular self-motivation is so simple in concept (though hard to get used to), and yet so rewarding when you get it to work, I sometimes jokingly refer to it as the “Holy Grail method” of self-motivation. I say this because the most valuable possible insight we could get into self-motivation is something that enabled us to be eager and happy about doing the things we want to see ourselves do.

You may be disappointed with how very simple this is, but I’d urge you to give it a try anyway, since it’s very easy to get started with (though it’s likely to take a lot of effort to master). Here’s the method: enjoy doing the things that you would need to do to reach your goal.

I know that may not exactly sound like the wisdom of the ages, but it’s worth digging into a little more to see its value: most self-motivation involves making it easier or more desirable to reach our goals, since it’s very hard for a human being to do something she or he doesn’t want to do, short of threats. Since threatening ourselves into self-improvement doesn’t work very well (you’ve probably tried it in the past; I know I have), that means that we are most likely to attain goals if we find ways to make the actual attaining more attractive.

But even assuming a person has already figured out both a goal and the steps that would be needed to reach it, without taking some preventative steps, actually doing something that one has avoided in the past can seem daunting, painful, or ennervating–especially just before one begins.

For instance, let’s posit someone named Marsha (not Marsha Brady: some other Marsha) who is badly backed up on paperwork at her job. Let’s say Marsha (who prefers to be called Estelle, but at work they still call her Marsha and thus so will we) has allotted time to do that paperwork and even gone so far as to stack up the paperwork in priority order. But when she actually reaches for that top sheet and lifts her pen, or even thinks about doing so, she’s immediately awash with memories of all the anxiety she’s had in the past about doing the paperwork, whatever problems that started her on avoiding it in the first place, the embarrassing moments at staff meetings when she’s had to admit her paperwork isn’t done, and so on. Trying to even start on her paperwork makes her feel queasy and afraid, and she tends to suddenly think of several non-paperwork things that really need to be done right away and can’t wait. So Marsha’s paperwork sits there until she’s fired, and it gathers dust, is eventually shoved into a nook, is neatly preserved under a collapsed formica countertop when the building is demolished, and is excavated eight hundred years later by excited archaeologists. Which helps Marsha (and us) not at all.

So, this is an example of not enjoying the steps. An example of enjoying the steps would go like this: before starting the paperwork, Marsha puts on some music she really likes, asks Jimmy Lee in the next office to cover if someone needs something, shuts the door, and puts her phone on Do Not Disturb. She pictures herself handing the completed paperwork to her dumbfounded boss. When she picks up the first page, she still begins to experience those memories and anxieties, but she was expecting that and allows herself to be conscious that this is happening. She uses idea repair for the worst of the thoughts that are distracting her, and as she fills out the paperwork she enjoys the music, the scratch of the pen on paper, and the idea that she is (however slowly) getting through the mountain of formerly dreaded paperwork. There are some annoyingly difficult parts to fill out, but whenever she gets to these she reminds herself that they are completely doable and just take some time. She feels on top of things, and even brave.

It may take a dozen sessions before Marsha catches up on her badly neglected paperwork, but the first time she goes out of her way to enjoy the process,  a lot of the anxiety about the project will be relieved–because it turns out that not only can she do the paperwork, she can even enjoy doing the paperwork. She has had to set up her environment to help her, enlist the support of a coworker, deal with negative thoughts, use visualization, and focus on minor things about the process that she enjoys, but it has worked. The more she does this, the more doing doing paperwork gets reinforced in her brain as something that she can enjoy. Eventually she’s likely to need fewer and fewer of the assisting techniques, and may start doing her paperwork by habit. Instead of her pile of undone paperwork, the future archaeologists discover a DVD of Harold and Maude, which is of immeasurably greater cultural value.

You’ll notice that the slight discomfort of this process is probably less than the discomfort Marsha would experience if she didn’t do the paperwork–but it’s an approach that requires mindfulness, effort, thought, and insight into our goals and hangups, which is one reason everybody doesn’t do it all the time. Another reason is that we have some deeply ingrained responses to certain kinds of experiences. For instance, a person who is eating less to get in better shape may eat in response to feeling hungry because of the built-in anxiety we have about starving (after all, remembering to eat is what keeps us alive, so under ideal circumstances hunger is a very handy reminder). Yet if you’re trying to get in better shape by eating less, a little hunger is a good thing–we’re just not used to experiencing it that way, and have to be mindful enough and deliberate enough to fight both habit and instinct in order to actually enjoy it. But it can be enjoyed. For someone who wants to lose weight, hunger (as a result of a healthful change in diet) is the feeling of victory. Savor it while it lasts, since our bodies get used to changes in our diet and the feeling is likely to go away.

Even if you’re not convinced by this idea of enjoying the exact things that you tend to avoid–and I hope you will become convinced, sooner or later–please reflect that at the very least, difficult steps can be made less unpleasant with a little attention to setting up our surroundings and awareness of our own mental states. Give it a try! Or don’t–but in that case it’s on you that our distant descendants will never see Bud Cort fake his own death.

Phone photo by itselea; digging photo by Wessex Archaeology.

As a rule, our culture tends to think of emotions as things that well up inside us in a way that’s more or less completely outside our control. We can avoid emotional situations, this point of view goes, or we can suppress them, but they are what we are, and thinking doesn’t enter into it.

I’d like to demonstrate some very useful ways this is completely wrong. I’ll do it using, of course, a mime.

Let’s say our mime–for convenience, we can call him Raoul–is on his way to the park to do a little street performance on a sunny May afternoon. For his performance today, Raoul has purchased three dozen imaginary eggs, which he plans to juggle, balance on his nose, perform magic tricks with, etc. He is carrying the imaginary eggs in mime fashion when he slips on an imaginary banana peel on the sidewalk and crashes to the concrete, right on top of his eggs. Now Raoul is a mess, covered with imaginary egg. All of his eggs are ruined, so there go his performance plans for the day, and to top it off, the people in his otherwise fair city are so rude and thoughtless that they leave imaginary banana peels lying all over the place. Oh, and to make it worse, since it was an imaginary banana peel, clearly it was another mime who did it!

We would expect Raoul to get upset in one way or another. He could sit there, covered with smashed eggs, weeping, or he could fling the gooey, imaginary cartons around in fury, shouting silent curse words. And we probably wouldn’t blame him for this, because through someone else’s carelessness, he’s a mess and his day is ruined.

Now, it’s true that immediately when this happens, Raoul’s brain will start making associations, and brain chemicals will start influencing his behavior–notably adrenaline in response to the unexpected fall and the problems that it has suddenly caused. That helps set the stage, but at the same time Raoul’s brain is likely to be generating what are called “automatic thoughts”: emotionally laden and potentially misleading judgments about what has happened. They might include things like:

“I’m screwed! I needed those eggs for this performance, and if I don’t perform I won’t have enough money to pay the rent tomorrow, and then I’ll probably get kicked out of my apartment!”

“What kind of sick #$!(@ leaves imaginary banana peels lying around all over the sidewalk?”

“This is a disaster!”

These kinds of automatic thoughts are also called “cognitive distortions,” because they are a kind of thinking that encourages belief in things that aren’t true. I’ll use a different term for them, though: “broken ideas.” A broken idea is anything you think up that misleads you. But what’s misleading about the above? Isn’t Raoul just silently telling it like it is?

In all honesty, he isn’t. Raoul’s broken ideas are broken only subtly, but they’ll lead him down a path he doesn’t want to take. For instance, his predictions about being evicted are very likely wrong, even if he isn’t able to come up with every penny of the rent money on time, and the fact that he’s trying to predict the future rather than just evaluate his options is a major red flag. We can’t predict the future in most cases, so basing our actions on assumptions about what will happen tends to lead to badly-chosen actions. Anyway, even in the worst case scenario he can always show how he’s trapped in a box and unable to leave the apartment. This is one of the powers mimes have.

He’s also telling himself he needs the eggs for the performance, when in fact he probably just wants the eggs for the performance, and can either buy more eggs or do a different routine.

And he’s also labeling the banana peel leaver as a (please pardon me for repeating this bad language) “sick #$!(@,” which dehumanizes the person and could lead some real interpersonal problems (like being hit over the head repeatedly with an imaginary stick) if Raoul decides the perpetrator must have been a particular someone he knows and acts toward that person as though they were purposely going around and leaving imaginary banana peels for people to slip on.

So what’s wrong with these ideas is that they’re inaccurate, and more to the point, they tend to lead Raoul in the direction of making bad choices, like going to drown his sorrows in imaginary beer, or marching off to throttle a colleague who is a known banana afficianado. What would make Raoul happiest at the moment would be to somehow find a way to free himself of his anxiety and frustration at the incident, get him to think through what he’ll need to do to go ahead with his performance, and as soon as possible to get him to the park to charm half the passersby and infuriate the other half with his mimetic ways. This way his day could very rapidly get back on track, and no other trouble would need to come of the banana peel fiasco.

How does Raoul do this? We’ll tackle this in much better detail in other posts, but the basic steps are:

1. Relax, step back from the situation, and breathe
2. Use idea repair
3. Get on with your life

Idea repair, which takes some practice to learn but can be wonderfully effective once you have the basics down, is the process of reworking broken ideas to reflect the truth of the situation. For instance, “What kind of sick #$!(@ leaves imaginary banana peels lying around all over the sidewalk?” could be repaired to something like “As much as I wish they didn’t, sometimes people will leave imaginary banana peels on the sidewalk, so I’ll be better off if I’m on the lookout for them.”

Similarly, “This is a disaster!” could be repaired to “This is inconvenient and embarrassing, but if I take the right steps, I can get my day back on track.”

You might be amazed how much stress and distraction idea repair can sometimes clear away. I certainly have been ever since I first learned about the technique a decade or so ago.

Of course there’s much more that could be said on the subject, but that brief summation will have to do for now. I’ll leave you with this final comment from Raoul:

“”

Huh. Well, that’s what I get for trying to quote a mime.

Mime photo by thecnote; banana peel photo by Black Glenn.

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Postscript: As you may have noticed, I’m experimenting with a lighter writing style for posts. Up until now I’ve been making efforts to write seriously because I’m dealing with serious subjects, but I’ve come to think that a little humor might do more good than harm. I’d appreciate any comments you might have on this style of post.

LATER NOTE: I followed this article up in October with How to Detect Broken Ideas and How to Repair a Broken Idea, Step by Step.

In recent posts I’ve talked about willpower, but there’s another kind of self-motivation a person might want to develop: the motivation to complete a particular project.

Willpower is the kind of thing you need if you want to quit smoking or resist making snarky remarks at staff meetings or to make the effort to memorize names when you meet new people. Project motivation is the kind of drive you need to finish a novel, learn a foreign language, or make major home renovations.

Many insights and techniques apply to both these kinds of self-motivation, but it’s worth knowing whether which habit or a project is more important to you at the moment so that you can focus on the approaches that will be most useful to for that particular goal. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, we have a limited amount of time, energy, and attention to change our behavior. If we try to do too much at once, it’s like trying to carry a bunch of bowling balls in our arms: one bowling ball is manageable, but trying to carry four or five is a disaster. Fortunately, once we master one kind of self-motivation, it’s often possible to move ahead and add others, one at a time, mastering each before we proceed (like carrying the bowling balls separately).

So what’s your biggest priority, right now, the one thing that self-motivation would help you the most with? If it’s a willpower issue, like losing weight or being a better listener, focus your efforts on being aware of your own mindset and recognizing opportunities for making good choices. If it’s a project, begin by choosing a very specific goal–for very big projects, perhaps a waypoint rather than the big end goal–and lay out the specific steps you’ll need to take. Then, figure out what changes you need to make to be able to take those steps–for instance, where the time to do them will come from.

Takeaway:

• Which strategies will help you most depends on whether you’re working on willpower or creating a push to complete a project.

Photo by Rick Kennedy

One of the most encouraging pieces of information I’ve turned up lately about self-motivation is that willpower can be strengthened by practice. However, the exact kind of practice is important if you want good results.

Photo of a parrot exercising admirable restraint by Maria Gonzalez

Some articles I’ve read liken willpower to a muscle, and suggest that all you have to do to strengthen willpower is to exercise that muscle. A New York Times blog entry makes the recommendation as an example that you try strengthening willpower by making yourself brush your teeth on the wrong side.

The problem with this kind of view is that it assumes willpower is the same thing as self-control, ignoring the other pieces of the puzzle.

Willpower usually involves overcoming ingrained habits we don’t like (like staying up watching television too late every night) or developing new habits that we do like (like taking ten minutes to straighten up at the end of every work day). And while building or breaking habits can be done with self-control to some extent, trying to increase your self-control in general in order to build or break a particular habit is like trying to build a brick wall by lifting weights: sure, you’ll get a stronger over time, and be able to lift the bricks a little more easily. But why not concentrate on the wall? You’ll build up muscles that way anyway.

Concentrating on building the wall means

• having clear goals
• understanding what kinds of decisions are going to help get us to those goals
• recognizing the times when we have such a decision to make, and
• making the right call at those times.

General self-control only helps with that last piece, and it’s not the only tool we can bring to bear even for that.

The other pieces have a lot to do with self-awareness (mindfulness) and self-understanding, and there are some good techniques to help those things along that I’ll discuss in other posts.

For now, here are some simple guidelines for practices that help build willpower and get you some immediate results at the same time:

1. Begin by choosing one area of your life where you want to make progress
2. Figure out what kinds of decisions you want to see yourself making in that area
3. Put special effort into noticing when those decisions come up
4. Pay attention to your mood and what’s influencing it. Are you more likely to make bad decisions when something’s bugging you? What kinds of distractions keep you from paying close enough attention to your decisions?

The more aware you become of your own mental processes, the more automatically you recognize the chance to make good decisions and can take advantage of them.

There’s a particular technique I’ve been experimenting with called “decision logging” that seems to be very promising in terms of building up willpower and clearing away mental obstacles; I’ll take the opportunity to blog about that in the near future.

Takeaways:

• Exercising willpower can help make willpower stronger
• To make good decisions, we have to first figure out what kinds of decisions we want to make
• Good decisions come in part from understanding ourselves and being aware of our moods and reactions