Just before Thanksgiving, I posted How Not to Blow a Diet Over the Holidays, which contained the best information I had to offer about holding to a difficult course of fitness and weight loss during a time of year crammed with distractions, temptations, and surprises. Toward the end of the post I said, “Today I weigh 182 pounds. I’ll update this post in early January to let you know how it came out for me: I expect to have lost at least a few pounds.” Was my prediction sound? And just how useful did I find my own recommendations?

What worked
Well, my rash declaration definitely helped me focus my attention and reminded me to use the best knowledge I have. (After all, just knowing something isn’t the same thing as making active use of the knowledge), and the self-motivation skills I’ve been researching and writing about seem to have done the trick: my scale this morning tells me I weigh 177, five pounds less than I did a few days before Thanksgiving. I’ve lost roughly a pound a week over that time, most of it in the beginning of December, and am very close to my goal fitness level. (Exactly how close, I can’t be sure, as I’m not aiming for a number on the scale, but instead for a level of visible fitness.)

Did my pre-Thanksgiving strategies help me? Absolutely. I made a point of bringing food I could eat to celebrations and meals, planned what to eat ahead of time (including limits), took special care to track what I was eating, and talked freely about what I was doing to get support and to increase the potential rewards of sticking with it.

Unexpected complications
So did my own pre-holiday advice eliminate all trouble for me? Definitely not. The two problems I wasn’t expecting seem obvious in hindsight, but when I was making my plans, all I was worried about was the food that would be available to me.

The first of the surprise problems was time for exercise. I generally try to exercise as close as possible to every day. Over the holidays, there were a number of days when I would be with friends or family in all of my available time, and the idea of getting everyone up after Christmas dinner to go for a family run somehow didn’t seem very appropriate to me. Also, my habit of taking 3-5 Taekwondo classes a week was interrupted by holiday closures of the dojang (Taekwondo gym). So I squeezed in exercise when and where I could, more than once getting on the elliptical trainer or doing home Taekwondo practice well after 10:00 at night. In future, I’d want to plan better for these scheduling challenges, probably getting in some morning exercise instead of following my usual evening schedule–but I will also know to expect that I’ll get less exercise over the holidays, and to a limited extent, that’s OK with me.

The other problem I faced was a one-two punch: I would arrive home tired (though cheerful) after having eaten at irregular hours and spent the day with family or friends. I don’t know about you, but for me the combination of being tired and being off my normal eating schedule is a very bad one: it tends to make me feel hungry and inattentive, which means I’ll often just take whatever I think of first and eat it–hardly a recipe for weight loss success. A day like this broke my winning streak of keeping under 1700 calories a day and logging everything I ate, which had gotten up to 42 interrupted days. I’m now in the early days of a new winning streak, and have high hopes that it will carry me across my personal finish line as I rack up the days.

One good holiday season may be the most I’ll ever need
As I write this and do my best to extract knowledge for future (an example of keeping a feedback loop), I’m realizing that if all goes well, it’s very, very likely that when the 2010 holidays come around, I’ll have been on maintenance for quite a while, and while I’ll need to continue to be careful, I won’t need to be nearly as careful as I am now. In other words, losing weight over this past holiday season together with continued effort may mean I’ll never have to be quite so careful over the holidays again. Even if I had done no better than maintain my weight during that time, the same result would probably apply. For many people who are getting in shape, one really successful holiday season may be the make-or-break period for the entire process.

How did things go for you over the holidays? Any special difficulties or unusual accomplishments?

Regardless of how the holidays came out for you in terms of your health, we’re now at a time of year that is probably better suited to renewing commitment and redoubling efforts than any other, and we can use it to launch ourselves forward. Here’s to a powerfully motivated New Year.

Photo by oh_candy

 

In my previous article, I offered four ways to make self-motivation easier, and talked about stacking up advantages ahead of time instead of waiting to come face to face with a difficult situation. Here I’ll cover five more ways to make self-motivation easier: building up enthusiasm, being more mentally and physically prepared to face challenges, getting help from others, learning, and minimizing temptation.

Visualize and find your enthusiasm
When things are going well, I’m not distracted, and I have time to think about what I want to do, I’m often in a good state of mind to improve my motivation, but by definition these low-demand times tend to be ones when not much motivation is needed. I can build up motivation for harder times by using these opportunities to visualize where I’m trying to get and by otherwise spending time thinking about and especially enjoying my goal, whether I’m reflecting on successes so far, enjoying progress, envisioning future payoffs, or planning ahead. The more time I spend thinking positively about my goal, the more accessible positive thoughts about it will be when I really need them. For instance, if I’m trying to learn to play a musical instrument, I can visualize myself playing it and remind myself why I’m putting in all the hard work.

Take care of yourself
When we get enough sleep, exercise regularly, eat well, and use techniques like meditation to aid mood and mental focus, we’re much more capable of being proactive in our lives than when we are tired, inactive, badly nourished, overstuffed, or carrying around a lot of stress. Mood and physical well-being have an important impact on making good decisions, so everything we can do to improve them will tend to improve  motivation, too.

Get support
Connecting with a friend or family member to talk about your goals, the problems you’re running into, your plans, and your successes is a good way to keep your goal more in mind and to process your thoughts about it. Having someone in your corner can also make it more important to to do well and provides more options if something starts going wrong. A person trying to quit a bad habit can go talk to a supporter when temptation seems particularly strong. Someone trying to get a better job can talk through their plans and strategies if they have a sympathetic ear.

Read, learn
Reading about subjects having to do with our goals serves several purposes at once: it gives us more information to use when making plans; keeps our goal more in our mind; lets us try on others’ ideas; and serves as a physical reminder (whenever we see the book) of what’s being accomplished. Someone trying to get fit can learn a lot from books about nutrition and exercise, like The 9 Truths About Weight Loss. Anyone trying to change habits and running into emotional resistance can benefit from books like Emotional Alchemy, The Feeling Good Handbook, or A Guide to Rational Living.

Minimize temptation
Finally, minimizing temptation can be a real boon, at least in the short term, for anyone who’s really struggling with making the right choices. If you’re working on spending money wisely, you can take any savings you have and put it in a CD or some other instrument that makes it difficult or impossible to withdraw for a time. Someone who’s trying to quit playing video games can actually sell the games rather than hanging on to them to play just a little bit now and then.

This approach is a bit of a crutch, and the problem with relying too much on it is that when a situation comes up where there is temptation–for instance, when the person working on spending gets a tax refund, or when the former video game player is staying with a friend who has a top-notch video game system–the strategies to deal with the temptation may not be very well developed. But like all of these strategies, minimizing temptation–if not relied on absolutely–can help make everything simpler.

Photo by James Jordan

Changing habits, making good choices, or really pushing hard toward a goal can get very difficult when it comes time to act. Probably you’ve had experiences, like I have, where good intentions beforehand weren’t enough to force a good choice when the time came. Continuing to try despite not always succeeding is key in developing good habits, but it’s not the only way to be more successful with self-motivation. In fact, there are a lot of things we can do to make self-motivation easier. While you might already know some of these ways, especially if you’ve been reading this site, the reason for this article is to ask the question, “Are you doing everything you can to make progress toward your goal easier?”

To help provide a good answer to that question (and to offer some areas to look at in case the answer is “no”), here’s a list of many ways to make willpower and self-motivation easier. After all, making the task easier usually means getting better results for less effort: it falls into the category of the time-worn advice “Work smarter, not harder.” There are limits to how much willpower we can summon up on a moment’s notice, but there may not be limits to the advantages we can stack up beforehand.

Decide what to do and make plans
Probably the single most important thing any of us can do to facilitate good choices is to understand what those choices should be ahead of time. If the task is studying, then how much studying needs to be done, and when should it happen? If the task is some kind of daily upkeep, like following up on e-mails within the day or keeping the dishes from piling up, what’s the exact plan for how these things will be handled?

Anticipate problems
If you ever find yourself explaining away self-motivation problems by saying “I was going to ____, but ____,” this may be a sign that you need to work on anticipating problems. Someone who’s trying to eat more healthily will be much more successful if they figure out what the options and dangers are before they walk into a party or a restaurant, for instance. Someone who’s self-employed and is trying to get in more work time will want to figure out ground rules for situations like when friends visit from out of town or for how much time–if any–it’s OK to spend doing things like volunteering or socializing during the work day.

Improve your tools and environment
In other posts I’ve gone into some detail about the value of choosing the best tools and setting up an encouraging environment for work on your goal. For example, a more welcoming environment can help a writer write more; having the right software or paper system can help another person organize much more easily.

Prepare
It can help sometimes if we think of ourselves as our own assistants. We have large, important goals, but often moving toward those goals is much easier when we do some grunt work ahead of time. To help facilitate a study session later in the day, try laying out books and other study materials on a table or desk so that starting requires just sitting down. To eat better, shop better.

On Monday I’ll continue with Part II and five more ways to make self-motivation easier.

Photo by Somewhat Frank

Have you ever listened as a friend talked excitedly about a new goal–a diet, an organization system, a new way of talking to their kids–and worried that they might not make it? Since it’s easy for motivation obstacles to derail even the best initial efforts, often someone working on a new goal will soon give up or lose their way.

But motivation is easier when there’s someone supporting you. This post talks about a few effective ways to provide that support.

Work Alongside Them
One of the most helpful things anyone can do to help another person make progress toward a goal is to work alongside them. You’re offering a variety of benefits when you go out and exercise with someone who’s starting an exercise program, or sit down and read or study along with someone who’s trying to learn a new skill or subject, for instance. Doing these things with the person you’re supporting provides more structure, heightens awareness of how much and how often they’re working on their goal, offers someone to talk to if things get difficult, creates expectations they can aim to fulfill, and shows sympathy and support.

Share Goals and Progress
If you’re working on a completely different kind of goal than the person you’re supporting–for instance, they’re trying to declutter their house and you’re trying to start up a part-time consulting business–you can get together regularly to talk about how you’ve each been doing–your successes and failures, insights and questions. In addition to being an excellent way to establish a feedback loop, these kinds of conversations provide a low-pressure way each of you can talk frankly about how you’re doing to someone who understands how much work it can be to change your life.

Ask Them About It–Often
Simply asking about someone’s progress and listening uncritically, not offering advice unless asked and encouraging them to build on any successes or good ideas, can be of enormous value. When someone asks me about a project I’m working on, it forces me to ask myself how I’m doing with it, reminds me of my own priorities, makes it clear that other people care about my goals (usually because they care about me), and helps encourage me to make progress so as to be able to have positive things to report the next time I’m asked.

Help Make it Easier
Particularly if someone has good morale but limited resources, it can be helpful to assist them by providing necessities. They might appreciate help getting space to work in; some uninterrupted time; healthy foods; access to exercise equipment; helpful resources from the library, bookstore, or Web; or even just items that make the effort more pleasant. If they work in a particular area, you could provide something that makes that area more efficient, comfortable, or appealing, like a better chair or some art you know they’ll like, which can help support their motivation by increasing the appeal of their day-to-day work on their goal.

Learn More About What They’re Doing
Especially if you already talk with the person you’re supporting about what they’re doing, it can help to study up on the subject so as to be able to have meaningful conversations, ask good questions, know what kinds of support they might need, and point them to good information. Depending on what their goal is, there are good materials available on the Web, in the library, from people who are already successful doing what they want to do, and in many cases on this site (like my eBook on Writing Motivation if you want to help support someone with their writing, or my posts on weight loss for people working on fitness).

Photo by Photo Gallery

It’s one thing to maintain willpower in normal circumstances, in an environment you can control, after a lot of practice. It’s usually much more difficult to stick to your chosen path when circumstances change: travel, holidays, restaurants, vacations, celebrations, moves, new jobs, and so on. Thanksgiving through Christmas is like a parade of these kinds of issues, at least for anyone working on weight loss. Yet some people get through the holidays maintaining or reducing their weight, in the same way some people can go to restaurants full of unhealthy foods and find the good choices there. How does this happen?

The information in this post is specifically about weight loss, but these tactics work for any kind of challenge to willpower, and apply to sustaining any habit through a hard time. The tactics are 1) commit yourself, 2) get informed, 3) make a plan, 4) throw away illusions, 5) enlist help, and 6) resist attacks.

Commit Yourself
You can either let yourself go on the one hand, consuming huge quantities of food, feeling overstuffed, gaining weight, and possibly feeling unhappy about it; or you can commit to eating modestly and expending a lot of effort, avoiding a lot of foods you’ll probably really want to eat, being conspicuous, feeling much better than everyone else after the meal, and then maybe marveling at your success.

If you do want to eat a lot, probably no one will stop you–but if you’re deciding to eat healthily, you’ll need to commit yourself completely. Habit and tradition are generally too strong to be overcome without real resolve.

Get Informed
What foods will be at the event you’re going to? Which ones might be good choices for you to eat? Find out the calorie counts (or exchanges, etc.) for each one. Whatever system you use to track what you eat, apply it to the things you expect to see at the event you’re going to, so that you know for certain whether or not a sliver of pumpkin pie fits in your plans, or whether the potatoes or the cranberry sauce are a good idea. If you don’t have a system for tracking what you eat, you’ll almost certainly need one.

Make a Plan
If you expect trouble over the holidays, that’s an immediate indication that the habits you already have probably aren’t up to the challenge. So you’ll need to make specific plans for behavior–plans more advanced than a general intention to eat less. Willpower is not a vague energy that you can draw from the æther to apply to different situations by “just doing better”; it’s using mental tools to steer yourself into acting differently than you usually would.

What will you eat? How much will you eat? What will you do if the food you’re expecting to see isn’t there? What will you not eat? What will you say when someone tries to urge you to eat it, since after all, “it’s a holiday” or “it’s just this once” or “Martha made it herself” or “it doesn’t count”? What anti-hunger techniques will you use? (See “24 Ways to Stop Feeling Hungry” for some options.)

If you want better choices for food, considering making or bringing them yourself. Eating separate food from everyone else takes a little courage and makes you stand out. But it also demonstrates that you’re serious and committed.

Remember that you’ll need to plan for each event you go to, or else make rules that will keep you on the path for all events. It especially helps to have an emergency plan for unexpected events, like when someone brings cake into the office or you’re invited to dinner on short notice.

Throw Away Illusions
You may not need to hear these things, but in case you do: when you’re trying to lose weight, everything you eat “counts.” Your biology won’t care that it’s Thanksgiving. If you don’t get to eat something that looks good to you, you’re not owed any compensation. You don’t get any do-overs except that you can try again the next time an event comes up. Some people at the event may try to make you feel guilty for not eating; if they don’t have to haul the resulting fat cells around, though, they don’t get a vote.

Enlist Help
If you tell people in advance that you’re losing weight and really don’t want to gain it back over during the holidays, they have more of a chance to prepare themselves and to assist and support you. Walking in the door with your own meal in Tupperware when some one’s already gone to the trouble of making your favorite pie can cause trouble both with your relationships and your eating habits. Giving notice in advance can make it easier for others to help.

Not that everyone will necessarily want to help. Some people may feel that your work on your weight is an implied criticism of their own weight. Others may mistakenly think that trying to lose weight means that you think you “need” to lose weight to be a valuable person rather than that you’re just a valuable person who just wants to lose weight. Some people may be offended that you don’t stick to traditions or don’t eat what they’ve prepared. You’ll have to decide whether it’s more important to have their approval or to stick with your own priorities. It’s very easy to go with the approval; that’s the popular choice.

Resist Attacks
It’s very likely that someone will offer you food that doesn’t fit your plans–and maybe even try to insist. In addition, foods have a nefarious and evil way of offering themselves. Plan how you will resist these attacks and remind yourself that they are attacks when they occur (not in the sense of someone else intending to cause harm, but in the sense of posing immediate and real danger to your well-being). It sometimes helps to recognize the attraction before fighting it, for instance saying mentally “Yes, I could have some more mashed potatoes with gravy, and I would probably enjoy them. I ‘m just choosing not to.”

Specific ways to resist attacks are listed in that article on hunger I mentioned.

Holidays and special events aren’t easy to navigate. If, like me, you’re walking into the den of the beast with the intention of coming out lighter on the other side, good luck! Today I weigh 182 pounds. I’ll update this post in early January to let you know how it came out for me: I expect to have lost at least a few pounds. (Added later: want to know how it went? Read the follow-up post.)

Photo by Donna Grayson

You would think a garage sale wouldn’t be difficult to figure out. You prepare a little, you advertise, you put things on card tables, you wait. I’ve been wanting to help my son set up a garage sale of a lot of things he’s outgrown, where he could be in charge and receive the profits, but I’ve been stopped by the idea that I can’t. I live in a fairly rural area, on a dirt road that doesn’t get any traffic. I’ve been held up by this idea that we should have a garage sale, but I don’t know how to set it up so that people will actually come.

I was thinking about the garage sale this morning and once I really turned my attention to it, I realized the idea that I didn’t know how to make it work was ridiculous. We will either have a garage sale or we won’t. If we do, we’ll either have it here or have it somewhere else. If we have it somewhere else, we just have to figure what lucky friend is going to get us taking over their porch or garage soon, and ask permission. The only reason I’ve been thinking “I don’t know how” is because I haven’t been wanting to face it. Garage sales take preparation, which I don’t feel like I have time for, and they last a whole day, which I definitely don’t have time for, and what if no one shows up and all of the effort is wasted and we still have the things left over? It’s not that I don’t know how to do it, it’s that the idea has been making me anxious. Dealing with anxiety has a lot to do with facing things and answering questions. A few simple answers sorted my situation out. We should have the sale, because my son will enjoy earning the money and will learn about money from it, and because we need the room the old things are taking up, and because it’s a waste to have them here if we can get them to someone who will actually use them. We should have it here so that he can mind the sale and I can do the other things I need to do, checking in with him regularly. And we’ll attract traffic as well as we can by putting signs out on the main road right near us, which will probably give us more custom than we would get in a suburban neighborhood.

Your something may not be as easy to figure out, but there are several useful ways to do something you don’t know how to do. So, what are they?

1. If you really can’t do it, move on
If you really have no way of accomplishing the task in front of you, even after reading the rest of this article,  then the problem isn’t doing the task: if you honestly can’t do it, then it’s not your responsibility. Instead, the problem is facing the inevitable consequences of not doing it. This requires a difficult but powerful tool: surrendering to reality.

The same situation applies if the only way you can do the thing in question is to not do something more important. For example, if the only weekend we could do the garage sale was the only opportunity we’d get for some time to see family members visiting the area, then we’d need to give up on the garage sale. Fortunately, there are often more options than there seem to be at first, which is what the rest of the article is about.

2. You don’t have to do it if it doesn’t need to be done
Sometimes we resist doing things because they really don’t make sense for us to do. If it were for me instead of my son, I probably wouldn’t have the garage sale at all, because the amount of money it brought in wouldn’t justify the time. Instead I’d donate everything to a local recycle shop, which would sell the items to lower-income people for very affordable prices. If you feel concerned about how you’re going to tackle a problem, make sure first that it makes sense for you to do it at all before you start worrying about how.

3. Do it differently if there’s a better way
Sometimes difficult problems become much easier if they’re approached in an unexpected way. If you have something you’re worried about doing, consider whether there are other approaches you could take that would simplify things. If my son had a few major items and otherwise mostly things that would sell for next to nothing, he could sell the major items on eBay or Craigslist, still learning about money and reaping the rewards, and we could give the rest away to the recycle shop.

4. If it can wait, improve your position and then do it
Some tasks need improved skills before they can be done well, in which case a combination of practice and patience will put you in a much better position to get the thing done, provided it can wait. Keep in mind that research overwhelmingly supports the idea that practically anyone of at least average intelligence can excel at almost anything if they get in enough deliberate practice. If I were worried my son wouldn’t do a good job of running the sale, we could spend some time doing pretend sales and finding educational computer games about buying and selling to help him learn. We’d have to decide whether the sale was worth the effort and whether we could wait that long to get the unneeded things out of the house, but it’s possible the effort spent learning about money would be more than worthwhile.

Other tasks benefit from a change in situation. If I were going to move in the near future to a location that’s better for a garage sale, I might store the sale items away and have the sale there once we’d moved.

5. If it would work better with help, get help
Sometimes a little advice or active assistance from a friend, family member, mentor, or even a hired professional can go a long way. This might be as simple as getting a better idea of the task from someone who’s done it already, or as involved as finding and hiring a business manager for your new venture if you’re great at the core activity of the business but not so great at marketing, accounting, and the other general business tasks. For example, I probably have friends who have things they’d want to sell too, and a two- or three-family garage sale might attract more people.

6. If it works best to do it now, just do it the best you can
If it needs to be done, if there aren’t good alternatives, if others can’t really help, and if it’s best to do it now (due to ongoing problems, limited opportunity, a deadline, etc.), then you’re in the same place I was: face things and provide answers. If you don’t know the answers to the questions, get the best information you can and answer them as well as you can. If you’re having trouble facing things, it’s probably due to broken ideas, which means it’s fixable.

7. If you know what to do but don’t feel motivated, get in touch with your reasons
Of course, it might be that when you think about it, you realize you really do know how to tackle this goal, and it really is an important one, but you don’t feel inspired to get in motion. If that’s the case, it can help a lot to get in touch with your real reasons for accomplishing the goal. If they’re someone else’s reasons, or if you’re just trying to fulfill expectations or fit some role, then it may be that it’s not such a good goal for you after all. But if the reasons are your own, get in touch with them: write down what made you decide to do the thing in the first place, or visualize what it will be like to do it–or to have gotten it done.

Regardless of what approach you take, remember that “I have to but I can’t” is a logical impossibility. If there’s really no way to do it, you’re off the hook: no one can make you do something you truly can’t do. If there is a way to do it, all you have to do is figure out whether you’re going to decide to, and if so what the best way is. There’s not always a good way, but there is always at least one best way. I hope you find yours. As for me, I have to help my son go sort through some old toys.

Photo by m.gifford

Here is part II of excerpts from my interview with 6th dan black belt Gordon White, where we pick up with him traveling to Korea during college to push his Taekwondo training to the limit. You can read part I here, or read the full interview on this page.

 An all-you-can-train buffet
So, I landed in Seoul, Korea in late summer, 1991. I got set up in the dorm, and I attended practice 4 and sometimes 5 days a week (20 – 30 hours a week) [in addition to academic work].

I woke up every morning in Korea ready to hit the ground running for whatever Taekwondo experience I could get . It was hard. I got homesick, and some cultural things freaked me out (it was not uncommon for the coach to discipline the students with a baseball bat across the back of the legs), but these obstacles were squashed by desire to work and excel at Taekwondo. I guess it’s like being hungry and not feeling like there is enough food in the house–and then you go to an all-you-can-eat buffet, your eyes get big, and you dive in, knowing there is more food here then you are ever going to be able to eat, but you still want to get your money’s worth: that is what my year in Korea was like. There was more Taekwondo there then I could ever consume in a year, but I tried.

When the stakes rise, so do the expectations
I started to feel some pressure to perform, however–it was completely unintentional–but I got loads of letters from the Blue Wave. Everyone was very proud of me being in Korea and training hard, but the expectation was that I was going to come back and mop up the competition at the Nationals. I came home from Korea to attend 1992 nationals, there was a big fundraiser to get me there, and everyone expected me to do well … but I didn’t. I fought OK, but lost my second match of the day. It was very disapointing, and while I knew that no one was disappointed “in me,” many people were still disappointed for me. I headed back to Korea to finish out my final months at Yonsei–interestingly, still very motivated and excited to be there …

Simplifying … and winning
When I got back to Vermont, I was happy to be home but anxious about the upcoming year. I needed to focus on school again, but I still had my heart set on doing well at nationals and attending Team Trials. I had set a goal for myself to attend a world-level event and place. Considering I had only placed at nationals once, this was a pretty big step.

Some changes in how I was living helped: I moved back home, I didn’t re-open my Taekwondo School, and I only worked weekends. The following year, I placed at Nationals, and went to Team Trials and placed second, earning a spot on national B Team, and was picked to represent the US at the World Games in The Hague, Netherlands.

My goal was to make the US Team, but that was not all I was motivated by. I loved Taekwondo, loved how it made me feel, loved the people in it and the relationships I had with them. All these things played into my motivation to continue to train, get better, and simply do my best, had there been no competitive aspect to Taekwondo. Had my only real motivation been competitive, I don’t think I would have been so involved in the Blue Wave Association. I was very close with Master Twing. When he got sick with cancer, he asked that I become president of the Blue Wave Association, not because of my physical ability, but because he knew that I wanted the Blue Wave to be successful, to grow and continue to be a positive influence in people’s lives.

From competitor to teacher
[Lately] I have been busy getting the Taekwondo fall schedule up and running, attempting to solidify a new working relationship with an equipment supplier, getting the details straight for the Black Belt Conference taking place in November, and trying to secure a location for Winter Camp 2010. So “why” I do it is something I often ask myself and I am not sure I have a good answer for.

Transition from competitor to teaching was a natural process for me. As I said, I always imagined myself teaching, and teaching was something I did for a long time. Grandmaster Lee and Master Twing worked with me and expected me to help spread the information, and I think from the start it was very rewarding to teach, and I also felt responsible, Taekwondo was something (I felt) had given me so much, and this was my duty to give back.

In 1998 I fought at the Massachusetts State Championships. I had 3 fights to win the division. It was a lot of fun, I fought well, and when it was all over, I told Calvin (my wife) that I was pretty sure that I was done competing. I knew what it took to get to a high level of competition, and also what it took to stay there. It has to be your priority, your job to train and compete, and something inside me said that I’d had enough. It was around the same time, however, that I was getting very excited at the prospect of teaching and having my own school. I felt ready to teach: I felt like I had a lot of experience and depth and could be a good instructor. Having Master Twing’s overwhelming vote of confidence simply reinforced what I was feeling. Teaching, running a school and building the Blue Wave was the next place for me to place my passion for Taekwondo.

It’s interesting: you often hear that teaching is such a selfless job, you have to put the students first, but honestly it’s not entirely selfless. Teaching has made me understand Taekwondo far better then if I had just remained a practitioner. I think this is what is part of the motivation for me. I still get something from it, so there is still a selfish element. The satisfaction comes in seeing the school grow, watching the student progress and the competitor’s performance improve. There is a certain amount of pride in knowing that you have something to do with it. You share in the success and failure of every individual in the gym. The ups are wonderful, and downs equally disappointing.

Find more videos like this on The Blue Wave Taekwondo Association

Master White demonstrating a kicking technique to students in 2007

What keeps the fires burning
I often wonder if I should give up some Taekwondo–have more time to relax, more time with my family, etc. Right now, this is what I am doing, and as long as I get up in the morning and more often then not am looking forward to the Taekwondo tasks ahead, I will probably keep doing it.

So the point is that yes, teaching is about the students, building the Blue Wave is about the members, and coaching is about the athletes, but it is impossible to give these things 110% without it fueling you back, keeping you excited about what you are doing and giving you knowledge and experience that adds to the person you are. I don’t know, some day I might have the same type of revelation that I had in 1998, and it will be time for what is next, but right now, I have to finish this email: Junior ATP [Athlete Training Program] starts up tonight, and I’m excited to work with my students.

Photos and video courtesy of Gordon White.

Gordon White holds a 6th dan black belt in Taekwondo Chung Do Kwan, a rank that takes upward of 20 years of hard practice and constant study to attain. He has sparred and won medals both nationally and–as a member of the U.S. national team–internationally, teaches Taekwondo on his own time four or more days a week, and serves as President of the Blue Wave Taekwondo Association, a New England group with hundreds of members.

It’s through Blue Wave that I know Master White: I’m in training to test for my 1st dan black belt in March of 2010. Having long been struck by Master White’s passion for Taekwondo as well as by his drive to teach, I asked to interview him for The Willpower Engine. When he agreed, I received some unexpected and enlightening answers to my questions.

Following is part I of excerpts from the interview in Master White’s own words (except for the headings I’ve added), with part II available here. To read the full interview, unedited, click here.

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It started with bullies
I started  Taekwondo May 13th, 1983. I was in the eighth grade. The 6th and 7th grades were tough on me: I was picked on and beat up a lot, and now was nervous about being a freshman in high school the following year. My older sister had a boyfriend who practiced Taekwondo, and he invited me to visit his school.

So my parents brought me over on Friday night. We talked to the instructor, who had me fill out a form. There was a list of about 20 different “benefits” of Taekwondo training. Self confidence, physical fitness, self defense, competition, etc. I checked off all but 1 or 2….(I think weight control was one that I left off). I signed up that night, and was hooked. For the next 2-1/2 years, my parents drove me to Winooski 3 to 5 times a week. While I had other interests (drumming, skiing, BMX biking …) which I continued to be involved in through High School, they quickly became a second priority to Taekwondo.

Self defense is what motivated me to walk in the door of a Taekwondo school, but what kept me there were number of things. I was good at it, but I also felt like belonged there. I was surrounded by 5 men in their twenties who were black belts, and in my eyes were like having 5 Bruce Lee’s to practice with. I wanted their physical skills, strength, and confidence, and my instructor made me feel like I was capable of achieving it. I was made to feel that I had tremendous potential, and that by practicing Taekwondo and dedicating myself to it, I would be successful in anything I wanted to pursue. While my motivations and goals changed–instructing, competing, etc.–I guess once I started Taekwondo, NOT doing it was never an option.

Parents’ and instructors’ expectations
Part of my motivation was driven by my desire to to live up to someone else’s expectations. My parents, instructor, and coaches all played a very important role in me staying motivated and dedicated to continue with Taekwondo. Those that come before you have the experience to know what is possible–so they set high expectations for you, higher then perhaps you can imagine on your own. It’s fantastic, because it helps you do more than you would most likely accomplish otherwise. However, with it comes pressure. I see parents all the time who don’t think they are putting pressure on their kids, coaches who have a “low pressure” philosophy, but as long as there are caring instructors there will be pressure on the students.

From the time I started Taekwondo and got my yellow belt [an early beginning rank], I intended to be a Taekwondo instructor. I was fortunate to find the Blue Wave and Master Twing–but if I had not, I don’t think it would have stopped me. I think I would have continued to search until I found an instructor that I could connect well with.

The pressure to perform vs. enjoying a thing for its own sake
Luc, in reading Keyna’s favorite movie list, I was reminded of one of my all time favorite movies Searching for Bobby Fisher. The main character, Josh Waitzkin, (this is based on a true story) has supportive parents and coaches, [who all] see his potential (he’s considered a gifted chess player) and are driven to support and push him, thus creating tremendous pressure for him. The conflict he feels between wanting to just enjoy chess and excel to the point that he thinks his coaches/parents want is very well portrayed in the film.

By the time I was in college, my desire to do well in Taekwondo was driven almost entirely by my own motivation. I think the trick with motivation is that if it’s a chore, it’s not really motivation: real motivation has to come from within. External influences can help, but I think this can turn into a feeling of responsibilty, or a fear of disapproval. No one was telling me to get up early to run–or give up social events on Friday night because I was traveling to a training session or tournament. I did these things on my own, because I wanted to. It never felt like a sacrifice for me.

College as a goal–and as an obstacle
College got in the way of Taekwondo … My first two years of college were done out of responsibility–not motivation. All I wanted to do was Taekwondo: studying was not high on my list, but my feeling of responsibilty to my parents to “get a four year degree” had me putting in minimum effort to get by. It was a bumpy road – 6 years for a four year degree including some time off and a year abroad, but in the end, Taekwondo is what provided the real motivation for me to finish school. I FINALLY claimed a major, “small business management,” which allowed me to link what I was learning, to what I eventually saw myself doing, owning a Taekwondo School.

Another obstacle for me was the lack of training partners and travel distances. When I started Taekwondo in 1983, I was able to train 4 or 5 days a week. But in 1986, I began training with Master Twing in Randolph, Vermont, a 100-mile round trip. I was only getting down 1 or 2 times a week–when Grandmaster Lee arrived in late 1987 and came back again in 1988, I would often spend weekends at Master Twing’s house, training with Grandmaster Lee in the basement.

A montage of board breaks and sparring by Gordon White from 1987-1990

The missing ingredient
By 1990, I had failed to place at Nationals after 3 attempts, 1987, 1988, 1990. I missed 1989 due to knee surgery–another obstacle, I suppose. I felt like I should be on the podium, but something was missing–the people that were placing had something I didn’t, and it wasn’t physical skill: it was confidence. While I spent all of my training time sparring with people that were not as good as I was, the best players were from big cities, training with teams of national level competitors. This was the difference. The only time I had experienced this was in 1987: Grandmaster Lee took myself and one other black belt to Korea for 6 weeks. We traveled around the country, training at different schools and getting our butts kicked on a regular basis. The dramatic increase in skill and confidence I gained just in these 6 weeks was something I needed much more of.

I headed to the International Education office at UVM and asked what my options were for a year abroad in Korea. I was given information for attending Yonsei University, and started making plans for it. In order to go, I needed to get my grades up at UVM (I did); I needed to close my Taekwondo School (one of my students, Tim Warren, wanted to open a school in Milton, which gave me a place to send my students); I needed to continue to train as hard as I could–I still had nationals to attend and if I hoped to keep up in Korea, I wanted a good foundation–and lastly, I needed to earn as much money as I could, because I would not be working for the year there. I waited tables at the Peking Duck, picking up extra shifts.

Click here to read part II of the interview, following Master White to Korea, back to the U.S., and to the heights of competition.

Photos and video courtesy of Gordon White.

It can be truly humiliating. Maybe it’s never happened to you, but it certainly happens to a lot of us: you’ve been grappling with something for years–your weight, organization, starting a novel, getting the house in order, changing how you act with other people–and a day comes when you’re inspired to do something about it. So you do it! You change your eating habits or start running or create a strict rule for dealing with all incoming e-mails. Then a week or two pass, and you find you’re gone off the rails: your eating habits are worse than ever, or a busy day put you behind on your organization and you never caught up, or the trick you were going to use to remember people’s names has been forgotten itself. What happened?

There’s a simple answer to this and a more detailed answer. The simple answer is that we start things in different circumstances than we continue them in. A New Year’s resolution made at a party with friends on a full stomach (for example) turns into a thankless, lonely grind week after week, and it loses a lot of its sparkle that way.

Don’t worry: the detailed answer is much less depressing than the simple answer. But the simple answer reminds us of something essential: inspiration may drive us to start new things, but it’s our own efforts to rise above obstacles that get us through in the end.

Certainly there is such a thing as a badly-chosen goal, or a good idea for a goal that’s not practical at the moment. But for goals that are worthwhile, there are at least seven ways something that started well could run into trouble. Here’s what those seven kinds of problems are, and how to get past them.

1) The novelty wears off
Annoyingly, somewhere in our evolution we acquired a built-in trait that only allows us to enjoy something for a little while unless it changes. A dish that tastes “amazing” on the first bite and “really good” when we have it again in a few days continues to wane in amazingness as long as we keep eating it regularly. This is known as “hedonic adaptation,” and it means that anything that was delightful and new and exciting eventually becomes old hat unless there’s something renewing that excitement. When we first take on new goals, it helps a lot to understand that we need to not only take the steps to reach our goal, but to keep actively renewing our enthusiasm.

2) Our mood changes
Everyone has better and worse days, days when we feel we can do more and days when we’re mainly just trying to keep things from going wrong. What may seem easy to do on a good day can be the last thing we care about on a bad day. Fortunately, we can stop having bad days if we try, but it also helps to use tactics like rule-making and decision logging to keep ourselves happy with our goals.

3) Things get harder; complications arise
Sometimes we’ll start pursuing a goal when things are going well, but then things get harder: there are new demands on our time or finances or attention, for instance. It may become harder to find time to follow our goals. When the going gets tough, the tough organize and prioritize so they won’t lose track of what’s most important. Goals that aren’t nurtured through busy times tend to get lost in the shuffle.

4) We begin to forget
Goals and new habits need to be nourished and maintained by a process of regular feedback. If we don’t regularly remind ourselves of what we were doing and review our progress, our goals become vague, distant, and easy to forget. Once we’re no longer actively thinking about what we want to achieve, we’re sunk: those habits aren’t going to change themselves. Focusing on our priorities consistently can save them from being forgotten.

5) Just when we start flying, someone shoots us down
There will always be naysayers, whether they’re people who feel threatened by another person’s success or people who genuinely want what they think is best for you but aren’t ready to support your choices. If any of them get to you, figure out what it is they’ve told you that has sunk in and use idea repair to pull it up by the roots. Recruit them to your cause or harden yourself to their criticism: we’re each responsible for our own lives, so while it makes sense to consider good advice, if we’ve considered it and decided to go a different way, we don’t need to consider that same advice again: we’ll need our energy for other things.

6) A new interest takes over
Since things we’re getting used to become less exciting through hedonic adaptation, we human beings are seekers after novelty. This can be fine in a lot of circumstances, but not when it repeatedly derails us on old projects by tantalizing us into taking on new ones. We generally have the resources to undertake only one new thing at a time. After we’ve been in the groove on one goal for a long time, we might consider adding something else, but add something else too early and like it or not, the old goal will very likely go by the wayside. When you’re tempted by a new direction, think carefully about what you’ve invested in the goal you’re already working on and about why it’s important to you in the first place. Of course we have to keep some flexibility, but guard your progress jealously against all but the most important replacement goals.

7) Just announcing it was enough
One interesting psychological study with law students found that students who announced a study goal tended to do worse at achieving that goal than students who kept their goals private. One of the reasons this may be happening is that sometimes, a person can get enough positive feedback for just committing to something that they don’t feel the need to actually follow through–and very often the people who are there to encourage us when we start something aren’t going to be looking over our shoulders to make sure it gets done. Not following through under these circumstances isn’t so much a character flaw as it is a logistical error. Who knew that we would feel so much more satsified and resolved with our current situation just by announcing the intention to change? The enthusiasm for the actual change leaks away, and we may not even realize it’s happening.

If you might be in danger of falling prey to the announcement trap, the safest course is to only announce your goals to people who will be holding you accountable to them. Note that this is hard to do over the Internet; it’s too easy to avoid the subject, or the place where you announced it, or to say vaguely that you’re working on it. Someone who’s going to greet you in person every morning and say “Hey, how’s the novel coming?” is going to be much more help than an online friend who asks the same question, and someone who doesn’t listen to the answer isn’t going to be helpful to you regardless of where they are.

Starting new things and failing at them is so common in human experience that we tend to mark it down as a character flaw, to think that we “just don’t have the willpower.” Fortunately, willpower isn’t so much something you have as something you do. By anticipating the efforts we’ll need to make to move forward with our goals and by proactively handling the kinds of problems we’ve just talked about, we can keep ourselves on track and find ourselves just as committed on day 100 or day 1,000 as we were on day 1.

Photo by greekadman

I’ve mentioned in other posts how important feedback loops are to self-motivation, but I haven’t described in detail what I mean by a feedback loop or why they would be so essential. It’s high time to take care of that.

Whenever we’re talking about self-motivation, our intention is to make progress toward a particular goal and/or in toward aquiring certain habits. For instance, I might have a goal of starting a business that provides me with a living wage, or want to change a habit of being late, or be trying to lose a certain number of pounds while changing my eating and exercise habits so that I keep that weight off. A feedback loop is a system that monitors progress toward a goal or progress in acquiring habits and provides information to improve that process. In it’s simplest form, a feedback loop is made up of information about how a process has been going in the recent past, some thought about what that information says about the process, and ideas from that thought for maintaining or improving the process in future.

Why is this important? Because it’s a very common thing to start working toward a goal and then lose momentum. A feedback loop catches us when we’re losing momentum and helps us redirect so that we build momentum back up. Or in the best cases, we find nothing wrong with what we’ve been doing so far but come up with an idea to make things even better. Maintaining a feedback loop means keeping control of our own progress. Not maintaining a feedback loop usually means failure, unless there’s some powerful and regularly-occurring thing in our lives to remind us how important our goals are and keep us on track with sheer energy. As an example of one of those unusual situations where no feedback loop was required: when I was in college I met a very pretty French exchange student who spoke hardly any English. Within a few weeks, I had learned enough French on my own to hold halting conversations in it, urged on by my desire to spend time with this girl. (By the way, I didn’t get anywhere with the girl, but I still use the French). Another example: a woman who “couldn’t” lose weight for years suddenly lost weight quickly when she needed to donate a kidney to her very ill son but couldn’t because of her obesity. But most things in our lives aren’t as compelling as pretty French girls or seriously ill children, so feedback loops come in handy a lot.

Feedback loops need to occur often enough that we stay on top of our process, usually at least once or twice a week. It’s often best to schedule regular days or times to do the feedback work, so as to avoid the danger of always  pushing back feedback “just until tomorrow.”

What forms do feedback loops take? There are a lot of options:

• Writing in a journal
• Meeting or talking on the phone with a friend (preferably one whom you’re helping  to work toward their own goal)
• Participating in online forums or chat groups
• Attending meetings (Weight Watchers, Alcoholics Anonymous, writers’ groups, etc.)
• Talking out loud to yourself (preferably not in situations where it will make you look like a crazy person)
• Meeting with a professional (a coach, personal trainer, nutritionist, mentor, therapist, etc.)
• Blogging

The best feedback loop options are ones where someone or something will be waiting there for you to provide an update. If you participate in an online discussion group without promising to check in on a regular basis and without having online friends who are regularly checking on your progress, it’s easy to just not post when something goes wrong, as it inevitably will. Always try to find ways to box yourself in to delivering on your feedback. The minute that process becomes optional, a huge danger opens up of it going completely out the window.

Each time you work on feedback, start by making observations about your recent progress (or lack of progress), then move on to reflecting on what could go better, and finally decide whether there’s anything specific you should be doing differently–and if so, exactly what that is. These ideas for improvement, which can seem wonderfully clear and unforgettable when they come out, can easily be lost in the shuffle of a busy life, so I highly recommend writing them down. It can be very helpful to temporarily post them somewhere that you’ll see them regularly to help you keep them in mind.

There are two particular traps I hope you’ll avoid when working with feedback loops. One is beating yourself up: the past is absolutely unchangeable; all we can do is learn from it and find ways to make better choices in the future, which is exactly what you’re doing if you’re using a feedback loop. There is very rarely any need to take yourself to task other than to recognize how you feel about your choices and actions recently.

The second trap is the infamous phrase “I’ll just have to do better.” “Doing better” is not a plan for improvement: it’s a vague wish that gets us nowhere. Yes, we often want to improve how we’re working toward our goals, but if what we’ve been doing so far hasn’t been good enough, that’s an indication that we need to do something not just better, but differently. Perhaps you had planned to get two chapters written in the past week for a book you’re working on, and you actually only got about a quarter of a chapter down. Resolving to “just do better” in the coming week ignores the fact that some very real problems seem to have occurred and will need solutions. Perhaps you haven’t set aside specific times to write and need to do so now. Perhaps you have set aside times to write, but you’ve let yourself be distracted by e-mail and the Internet at those times, in which case you need to focus on ways to prevent distractions. Perhaps you’ve avoided working on your book because you’re worried that it’s gotten off to a very bad start, in which case you need to decide what it is you really want to do next. In all cases, a problem with motivation is not a moral failing or an indication that you’re a weak-willed person: it’s always some kind of specific complication (or more likely, a cluster of complications). Address the complication, and motivation will improve.

That’s a quick view of a large and important subject. I hope you’ll take away not only an understanding of what feedback loops are, but also a willingness to use them in parts of life that are important to you, anywhere that you want to improve or make progress. You’ll need something to keep motivation going, and while it’s ideal if you have something along the lines of a pretty French girl to inspire you, in a pinch, a feedback loop will do.