A recent post on the Kaizan Blog, “Does Telling Everyone About Your Goals Make You More Likely to Achieve Them?” passes on the results of an interesting study about what happens when you make your goals public. Do people feel more motivated to achieve them? In this particular study, the answer was a resounding “No!”, and the Kaizan post delves into the why of that with some useful ideas.

It’s worth noting that this was a small study of a very limited population in a very limited situation, so there might actually be a lot of value to announcing your goals under other circumstances. For instance, I expect announcing a goal is much more motivating if you are going to have to go up and demonstrate how you did on your goal in a certain amount of time, whether you succeeded or not. But I’ll post more on that when I dig up some solid information on that particular point. I’ll be curious to see if what research or other information might be out there.

Wednesday’s post talked about what it means to have a bad day and how that kind of day can often be turned around, even in really difficult circumstances, by changing our thinking. Today’s post goes into some practical approaches for using our thoughts to improve our mood on all levels. Here are some specific strategies.

Idea repair: Our emotions are profoundly influenced by what we tell ourselves. If we’re coming up with thoughts that are misleading and destructive, we can break through that interference and feel relief quickly with idea repair.

Emotional antidotes: Emotions tend to keep themselves going, while going out of our way to think of things that make us happy or inspire compassion or love tends to counteract negative thoughts.

Mindfulness meditation: Meditation can relieve stress and give us more emotional resilience. If you haven’t tried mindfulness meditation and want to, you might take a class or look up materials by Jon Kabat Zinn.

Music: Music can be a direct path to emotional responses. Listening to exactly the right kind of music can turn your mood around quickly and powerfully.

Changing the environment: Opening the curtains, going to a place you enjoy, sitting in a garden … anything that tends to make you happier or to remind you of what’s good in the world can get you out of a negative mental rut.

Writing things down: Problems are easier to deal with if they’re clear instead of vague anxieties. Listing things that are bothering you or that you need to do can create clarity and a sense of purpose in place of general stress. More generally, writing freely about your thoughts can accomplish the same thing when you’ve got a bad mood going on and are not sure why.

Talking things out: Like writing, talking things out with a friend who’s a good listener can help clarify the situation and relieve stress.

Changing facial expressions: As silly as it sounds, research seems to show that changing our expressions–especially smiling–can help change our mood on a chemical level.

Working with a good therapist: If anxiety, stress, or bad moods come up for you a lot more than you’d like, a good therapist can make all the difference. Unfortunately, a lot of people associate therapy with mental illness, but it’s clear from recent research that psychology has a lot to say about how even an entirely healthy person can become happier and more effective in the world, and there are some therapists who are very good at helping make that happen.

Photo by Today is a good day (again)

I’ve been delving recently into how people make life changes in many different spheres, for instance in diet, work habits, organizational habits, relationships … and so I’ve begun listening to an audiobook called Stop Clutter From Stealing Your Life by a man named Mike Nelson. I’m not sure I can recommend it unreservedly (even apart from having not finished it), because some of it sounds a lot like an infomercial, but Nelson really does seem to get to some very meaningful information.

The most interesting thing Nelson, formerly a terrible clutterer himself, has brought to my attention so far is the difference between attacking the problem of clutter organizationally versus attacking it emotionally. As he describes it, clutterers will learn new organizational techniques and yet make no progress with their clutter because they’re running into emotional obstacles that have to be dealt with first. If a person is too afraid to tackle their clutter problem, it doesn’t really matter how many great techniques they have for cleaning out their closets.

So it can be useful, when we look at things that we’re not doing but want to be doing, to figure out whether our obstacles are emotional ones (like being afraid of what will happen if we start the task, or ashamed that we haven’t done it already), mental (like telling ourselves we’re doomed to failure without even trying), organizational (like not knowing where the time will come from to get the job done), or some mixture.

This is not to say that there aren’t external obstacles too, like not having the resources needed or having others who oppose us, but in terms of self-motivation, generally speaking all obstacles wind up being emotional, mental, or organizational.

And in an important sense, all three kinds of self-motivation obstacles are really mental obstacles, in that they can be tackled using cognitive approaches–that is, by changing our thinking. But that’s a topic for another time. For today, it’s worth just asking ourselves: what’s really standing in my way? To get past this obstacle, do I need support from a friend? Help working out fear or anger or guilt? More confidence? A better way to think about things? Time? Better planning? Once we know what kinds of obstacles we face, we can understand better how to overcome them.

Photo by code poet

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

Writing–especially writing and trying to sell large projects, like novels–is a clear-cut example of an area where self-motivation is essential. While this post is written especially for writers, the techniques I’ll talk about can be applied to practically any kind of project where self-motivation is needed.

Motivating ourselves to write can be hard: blank pages stare at us implacably, or we get 75,000 words into a novel and then realize there’s a basic flaw that will require a huge rewrite, or we’ll get dozens of rejection letters for every acceptance.

Writers generally need enthusiasm for a story to do a really good job of writing it, need to sustain their involvement in a project for months or often years, and need to be able to face rejection after rejection without giving up. Even very good writers typically see many rejections before they sell their work (Stephen King, when he started his career, put a big nail in his wall and spiked each of his rejection letters on there as he went. Fortunately, it turned out well for him in the end, although he collected hundreds of rejection letters before he really got off the ground). Self-motivation is tough in this kind of environment. Here are some tools for maximizing it. These notes can be useful to any writer, but they’re mainly written with fiction in mind.

Pick Your Project Very Carefully
A certain kind of writer tends to write whatever they’re most passionate about, regardless of length, genre, marketability, and so on. Another kind of writer tends to write whatever seems to be the most salable, whatever the market seems to be crying out for. A third kind of writer tends to follow some particular pattern dictated by their writing practices, being propelled neither by passion nor by saleability but by process. All of these approaches have their good points, and each can have real drawbacks under certain circumstances. The approach I would suggest is different from all of these: it’s to put extra effort into brainstorming, then making a careful selection from the possibilities.

What I mean by this is that when it’s time to start a new project–say the last project is finished, or has been scrapped, or needs to sit in a drawer for a while before you can get any perspective on it, or this is your first novel–instead of looking for an idea for a new project, you look for a lot of ideas for new projects, using a variety of methods to come up with them. Review ideas you’ve jotted down or the ones that have been in your head. Look at some of your favorite books and see what you like most about them. Sit down and brainstorm at least two or three ideas out of the blue.

But why go to all this trouble when you have an idea you already know you’re burning to write, or that you think will sell well? Because our first ideas are often not our best ones, and a little time spent picking the right goal can save a huge amount of time working on the wrong one. It’s well worth slaving away at this brainstorming phase for a few hours even if at the end of it you opt for the idea you were interested in in the first place, if for no other reason than to understand deeply and clearly exactly why that idea is the best one for you to work on. And many times careful consideration of possibilities will yield a much better idea than anything that would have come up on its own.

Then comes the choosing. Passion counts for a lot: it’s very difficult to make a reader passionate about a book that the writer wasn’t passionate about when it was written. But other factors should probably figure in too, unless you’re only writing for yourself. Marketability? If you really want to sell your work, it would be ill-advised to ignore this unless you’re of the opinion that it’s impossible to tell what will sell. So writing a vampire novel because you love writing about vampires isn’t a bad idea, and writing a vampire novel because they’re in demand (let’s suppose) can work out well, but by far the best reason to write a vampire novel is that you’re passionate about it and someone’s clamoring to buy that kind of thing.

This applies to any decision: we often try to make choices based on one overwhelming factor, like buying something because it’s the cheapest or because we’re enchanted with it. But any of our priorities we put aside when making an important decision will come back to haunt us later. If the cheapest item breaks long before the more expensive version would have, or if the thing we’re enchanted costs so much that we end up short on the rent …

But what does choosing well have to do with self-motivation? There are two key things: first, it’s not that helpful to motivate ourselves toward a goal we don’t actually want to reach. While even working toward a wrong goal can be educational, the same can be said of working toward the right goal, and the right goal has the additional benefit of paying off, which is an educational experience in itself.

Second, if we are working toward a wrong goal, sooner or later we will realize it isn’t something we really want to achieve (or we’ll achieve it, and the expected payoff will never materialize), and then we’ll be back to zero, with the sense that work gets us nowhere.

Always Keep In Mind What Excites You
Whatever gets you excited about writing a book is worth thinking about regularly. If you find your writing has turned into drudgery and you’re just trying to slog through until the end, you’ll have a lot of trouble motivating yourself and may not produce particularly great writing either (though there can be exceptions to that last part). If you hit this point, one approach that can propel you forward is to ask yourself “What would really get me excited about this project right now that I’m not already doing?” Kill an important supporting character, cause a disaster, give the protagonist what they’ve been striving for and see them realize that it isn’t their real goal at all, add a new character who churns things up … this is another case where more excitement for the writer tends to mean more excitement for the reader. All of this has to be kept in balance with your vision for the story, but if you can’t think of anything that keeps you excited about the writing and is consistent with your vision, maybe it’s time to rethink the vision.

The exception I know of in which drudgery can yield good writing is when you know your story much better than your reader, and so what feels like old hat to you is new and fresh for the reader.

If You Stop Feeling Motivated, Retrace Your Steps
Here’s a question that can be handy in projects that seem to have lost their drive: where was my motivation when I last saw it? Sometimes feeling like you’ve lost your enthusiasm means that you took a wrong turn somewhere. Maybe your interest in the story was being kept up by a minor character who according to your outline (if you use outlines) needed to leave the story a little while ago, but the story hasn’t interested you as much since. If so, it might be worth rethinking that decision. Maybe a character did something that violates who you were hoping for them to be, or made a choice to serve the plot instead of doing what they would really want to do if left to their own devices. Maybe you’re writing a section of the book that isn’t really needed.

Regardless, always be ready to take advantage of this great advantage of writing, that you can make a complete mess of something, but then go back and do it better and get full credit as though you had written it perfectly the first time. There’s a post on this subject on my writing blog: Avoiding Your Story

Use Support, Encouragement, and Deadlines
One of the best motivators for a project is to have a real deadline, with a real person is waiting to see your results. This can be accomplished through joining an active writer’s group, blogging about your writing and including planned deadlines, getting one or more writing buddies and reading each others’ work, signing up for a writer’s workshop for which you’ll need something to be completed by a given date, working on a project for a contest or market that has a firm deadline, or getting truly interested friends or family members to read your writing as you go. It’s powerfully motivating to realize that someone is waiting breathlessly for the next chapter of your book.

If you use this last approach, by the way, you may want to ask the person to write down any feedback they have, but only to give that feedback to you right away if it’s absolutely crucial. The rest can be collected at the end so you can consider it for the second draft. Getting constant feedback can cause constantly reworking what you have, which … well, let’s just make that subject a section to itself.

Don’t Spend All Your Time Reworking
Yes, often writing can be improved by editing or rewriting, but only to a certain point. After a while, more work on the same project will begin to suck the life out of it. Make your story as good as you can make it at the moment, then send it out without spelling errors or major problems. You can set it aside and revisit it once you have perspective, or rewrite it after a rejection if you have a major new insight about it, but don’t just keep fiddling with it it’s perfect: nothing ever is, to the best of my knowledge.

Writer’s Block Is Just Fear of Writing Something That Isn’t Good Enough
On my writing blog I have a lengthy post about writer’s block, which I’ll summarize here as it applies to motivation: it’s always possible to write something, even if that something turns out to be meandering gibberish. So writer’s block doesn’t prevent a person from writing: it makes them hesitant because they might write something bad. Since everyone writes something bad sometimes, this isn’t as dire a situation as it may feel like at the time. Screwing up is an appropriate thing to worry about with surgery or disarming bombs, but it usually just gets in the way to fret about it with something like writing. Remember, you can always fix it in the next pass, and sometimes bad writing ends up being an exploratory draft (a great term I first heard from Orson Scott Card) that will reveal exactly what you need to do to write the really great draft you’re going to put together next.

Don’t Get Too Attached
It’s hard sometimes to look at something you’ve put a lot of work into and decide to scrap it, whether it’s plans for a new business venture that isn’t going to work out, a relationship that turns out to be between the wrong two people, or a brilliant passage in a novel that doesn’t belong there. When you’re faced with these problems, take a step back and ask yourself what will really give you the best result in the long run, then keep the thing or remove it based on that choice (and if applicable, whatever responsibilities you may have taken on).

This doesn’t quite add up to “kill your darlings,” as writers are often urged to do, or as Samuel Johnson put it “wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” That’s overstating it. Some things you do that you love will just not fit in the project you’re working on, and it’s important to focus on making that project as good as it can be instead of on justifying all the great things you did along the way. Doing great things is its own justification, and it tends to be instructive as well, whether or not they work out in the end. Fortunately, contrary to Johnson’s point, sometimes great passages are doing exactly what they’re supposed to and ought to be left in.

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There’s more I could say on this subject, but I’ve covered the main recommendations I set out to cover, and future posts will have more. In the meantime, how do these recommendations work for you? And writers, what particular self-motivation issues do you run into in your writing?

Writers group photo by ShellyS.
Writing desk photo byBright Meadow

 

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.

A note: Most of my posts are based directly on findings from psychological research or other tried and proven sources. This post, while it owes a lot to these kinds of sources, has much more of my own ideas and observations than usual. It’s also missing the funny parts, for which I apologize.

In most cases where we want to cultivate willpower, it’s possible to make progress a little at a time, and a certain amount of failure is a natural part of the learning process. But what about when losing the willpower battle even once would have dire consequences, like an alcoholic who is struggling to stay sober?

Major temptations that keep cropping up may point to unmet needs, and ultimately the answer to getting over such a temptation is a matter of finding a constructive way to address those needs.

Before we continue, I should explain what I mean by a “need.” A “need” is a basic requirement that leads to suffering if it is not met. We shouldn’t confuse this with a desire, which is some specific thing that we think (sometimes rightly) will give us pleasure or help us avoid pain. Having enough food to eat, keeping the children safe, and having fulfilling work are all needs of one kind or another. Having a piece of the world’s best cheesecake, getting a child into a prestigious school, avoiding a conversation with someone unpleasant, or becoming a movie star are all desires. Desires can generally be dealt with by looking at the underlying need, which means that the cheesecake or the school itself isn’t necessarily the only answer.

Long-term temptations often seem to arise when a major underlying need is not being met. Unmet needs are also the drivers behind interpersonal conflict (see www.cnvc.org for information on an approach to solving interpersonal conflict that is successful specifically because it focuses on underlying needs). In a way, we can look at long-term temptation as a serious conflict within a person. The ways to address such a conflict are similar to the ways we address conflicts between people: both sides in the conflict need to be able to express their needs and then get their needs met. Until this happens, the conflict cannot be resolved.

As an example, let’s say there is a man called Don who is constantly tempted to spend a huge chunk of his and his wife’s retirement fund on an expensive sports car. (Let’s say he and his wife have agreed that they each have full control over their respective retirement funds.) Don daydreams about the car, looks at models online, and has gone for test drives. Deep down he knows that he doesn’t want to screw up their retirement just to own a sports car, but he can’t stop thinking about it.

If Don wants to resolve this problem, he has to dig deep and fully and truthfully answer the question of why he so desperately wants the car in the first place. Maybe it symbolizes a level of financial accomplishment that is strongly associated with having proven himself–in other words, Don believes that having the sports car means that everyone will see him as successful. Or maybe Don associates having the car with being young, and is scared to death of becoming old.

But let’s say instead that the sports car represents to Don a kind of indulgence for himself that he has never experienced before. All day, every day, he’s putting his time, attention, effort, and money into taking care of customers, superiors at work, family members, friends who need help, and so on. He has felt for a long time that he doesn’t really have any opportunity to focus on himself and do things that he would like to do.

At this stage, it’s essential for Don to untangle his needs from his desires. The car is a desire, but his need is to feel as though he’s had a chance to explore who he is and do things that are important only to him.

So what does Don do? The details are complicated, but the most promising way to deal with the problem is at least simple in concept: Don needs to find a more constructive way to meet his needs. This might involve him taking early retirement or stepping down from some of the responsibilities he’s taken on, or taking a vacation by himself, or blocking out time for some new activity in his life that’s driven solely by his own inclinations and doesn’t directly benefit anyone else.

The other thing that may help Don (in addition to understanding his needs and finding a constructive way to meet them) is to put his desire in perspective. An expensive sports car would definitely represent doing something just for himself–but would it meet his underlying need to feel like part of his life is his own, or would it just give him a short-term burst of satisfaction that would soon fade as he realized his life was exactly the same as it had been, just with a cooler car? The things we are often most tempted to do, if they are harmful to us, are very often not successful in even meeting the need that gives rise to them. Addiction to a variety of drugs falls under this heading, as a desire for satisfaction or pleasure drives a person to use a drug, but the drug provides only temporary relief. Gaining material things, however appealing they may seem, very often supplies a limited amount of pleasure over a short period of time. Pleasure is not a need, though happiness can be. (See my recent post on the difference between the two for more information on that.)

Understanding the need underlying a powerful temptation is a nearly unavoidably important step, but as to addressing the need, there are some alternatives. One reasonable alternative, as undesireable as it might sound to most of us, is becoming resigned to suffering. It’s not as passive as it sounds: in the example above, Don could decide that though he has a deep-seated need to have some part of his life for himself, his obligations are too important for him to make enough room to really answer that need. In that case he could spend his effort in becoming reconciled to his situation through avenues like support from his family, therapy, and meditation. It’s even possible that over time his needs might change and his old need to have some part of his life for himself could go away: after all, the human mind is capable of many kinds of adaptation. If this change didn’t happen, though, Don could still find ways to adapt to the continuing pain of not addressing his need, and if he did a very good job of managing those needs, his feelings of temptation would be likely to wane. This approach is similar to approaches one can take to deal with chronic physical pain.

Yet another approach is to change some part of the situation so that the object of desire is no longer a destructive goal: it becomes either neutral or positive. This generally means some kind of sacrifice or at least great change. In Don’s case, the car is a pretty questionable goal: research seems to suggest that material goods aren’t very effective at making people happy. But we could imagine a situation where Don could get a job that paid better but involved a lot more local travel, and so not only allow him to get the car without wrecking the retirement fund, but also give him more of a chance to drive in it. More realistic situations where a life change might help address a deeply-felt need might include giving up a good income to work in a job that offers more personal satisfaction or ending a relationship that has been stable but ultimately doesn’t provide the support someone needs.

In all of these cases, the important thing is to recognize the temptation as a symptom of the problem and not the root problem itself. Translating that temptation into the need that is driving it opens up possibilities and provides much-needed perspective. In some cases this alone might be enough to suggest a solution, and in others, it’s at least a step in the right direction.

Green grass picture by Dawn Endico.
Ferrari picture by Simon Lieschke.

If we think about how our friends influence our willpower development, the common sense assumption would be that the more virtuous our friends were, the more we’d be inspired to follow their example, and the better off we’d be. And it’s certainly true that it can be very helpful to have a real-life example right in front of you, especially one who can talk to you about how they achieved what they did, and very especially one who developed the thing you admire during the time you’ve known them. But there are also some compelling benefits to having friends with flaws.

More specifically, a friend who has and would like to change some of the same flaws you have and would like to change can be an enormous help.

The reason for this is that someone who has the same flaw as you do really can’t judge you on that flaw. For instance, I often try to pack productive activity into every moment of my day, which sometimes mean that I try to do much and end up being late for something. I have a friend who also has issues with lateness. Whenever I’m meeting my friend, there’s a strange lack of anxiety about either of us being late. If this happens, neither of us feels judged by the other one, because after all, the role is often reversed.

What this means for us is that we can easily and comfortably discuss our issue with being late, including the situations that led up to it. We can throw around practical ideas for what’s going on and how to fix it. Sharing a problem with someone can, under the right circumstances, take a lot of the anxiety out of having the problem in the first place.

Another benefit of a friendship with someone who shares a problem with you is that you can see that problem from the outside, without it being connected to you. This can yield new insight and new resolve (commonly known as the “Dear god, I don’t do that–do I?” effect).

While it might be tempting because of this to try to encourage new shortcomings in your more perfect friends, people who consistently do well at something can be annoyingly set in their ways. So if you have an issue you’re working on and want to be able to talk about it with someone who is in no position to judge you but might have some really useful insights, it can often be constructive to go out and find new people who share that same issue, whether it’s through a group that meets in real life, cultivating a friendship, or joining a discussion group on the Web. The point isn’t so much to cultivate a new, lifelong friendship as to connect with someone who understands where you’re coming from.

And if you’re having trouble finding people who share your specific concerns, you can get some benefit from just looking at how other people work with their willpower and self-motivation issues. Virtually everyone has some bad habit or some goal they haven’t managed to motivate themselves toward as much as they’d like, and as we see from this site, the basic tools of self-motivation are very similar regardless of what that self-motivation is used for (while understanding that attaining a goal takes a bit of a different approach from changing a habit).

This is just one way in which you can draw support from other people to improve your life; we’ll look at other ways in future posts.

Photo by caffeinehit.

Use these individually or in combination. You’ll find more details about every one of these subjects in past and future Willpower Engine posts.

1. Write down exactly what you want to accomplish and why
2. Figure out where the time is going to come from to work on your goal (don’t wait until you “have free time”!)
3. Make a list of the things you’ll need to know to succeed
4. Find one way to make the environment in which you work on your goal more enticing or comfortable
5. Picture yourself having achieved your goal and getting the rewards (even for just a minute or two) as often as possible until you’re actually there
6. Whenever you’re doing something that furthers your goal, find at least one thing to enjoy about that effort
7. When you start feeling fearful or avoidant, ask yourself what you’re scared of or avoiding and whether it’s really that terrible
8. Make yourself accountable to someone: find a buddy, blog about your intentions, join a group, etc.
9. Keep a journal of your progress
10. Whenever you start feeling resentful of the things you have to do, remind yourself that you personally are taking full responsibility for seeing it through
11. Take the first step, however small, within 24 hours of the moment you read this
12. Figure out what your biggest motivation problem is and talk about it with someone–or post it as a question right now in the comments box!

Photo by Darcy McCarty

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.