Get Motivated!

Motivation Secrets; how to uncover them and use them.

“You can’t put a price on motivation.” That's what the best salespeople used to say when I worked as an investment broker in the City of London. They were right. Being highly motivated is the best thing that can happen when it comes to getting what you want and living the life you want to live. It also helps you close a lot of sales and make a lot of money.

Unfortunately, very few people understand motivation. The real go-getters seem to be born with it. They decide that they want something, then they do whatever they need to in order to get it. Everyone around them looks on in wonder, envy, or self-loathing, wishing they could do the same thing, and swearing they could if they could just muster up enough motivation.

There is hope for the onlookers. They can get motivated. Thanks to advances in psychology, hypnosis, neurolinguistic programming, and other fields that seek to understand what makes us tick, there are several exercises that you can use to get yourself motivated. In this article, I’m going to give you one of those exercises.

This might sound like hyperbole, but I’ve tried it, and it works. There are simple processes you can use to understand what makes you tick, then you can apply what you discover to areas of your life where you’re not getting the results you want.

Goals and Discipline Don’t Work

Goals are essential if you want to improve your life, and may be just as important if you want to be happy and fulfilled. The biggest factor in happiness is control. If you feel that you have the ability to control and influence your life and to move towards your goals through the actions you take, you will feel happy and fulfilled. Conversely, the feeling of having no control over your situation or life can lead to learned helplessness, depression, raised blood pressure, and other serious illnesses. In order to move your life in the direction you want to go, you must first know what that direction is, so you must have goals. Goals are ineluctable in the attainment of happiness and fulfillment.

But what does all of this have to do with motivation? Without motivation, your chances of hitting your goals are about zero, so you can forget about being happy or fulfilled. We’ve all been told we cannot hit our goals without self-discipline. But without motivation, discipline is useless. Discipline has been described as doing what you want to do as if you love doing it. That’s a terrible definition. The brain prioritizes survival; the avoidance of discomfort. If you see attaining your goals as doing something you don’t want to do, you are working against the most powerful organism in your world; your brain. You’re setting yourself up to fail if all you have is discipline. You’re going to lose. The only way to ensure you’ll like doing the actions you must take to achieve your goals, is to get motivated. Then you will be working in concert with your brain.

Uncovering Your Motivation Secret

Everybody does something well. Whatever a person does well, they do well because they are motivated to do it. Conversely, we all do some things very badly. The good news is that it’s possible to quickly and easily uncover why you are motivated to do the thing you do well, and then apply the same motivation to the things you don’t do well. I call this uncovering your motivation secret. Once you know your motivation secret for the things you excel at, you can use it to motivate yourself in the areas of life you’re not so good at, and you will improve.

Let’s start by going through the process of discovering your motivation secret. To make things easier I’ll give you my own example.

The thing I’m good at is going to the gym. I’ve been doing it since I was a teenager, and I’ve only taken breaks due to injury or serious illness. When gyms were closed due to the coronavirus, I did pull-ups, dips, squats, and other bodyweight exercises. A lot of people have commented that I’m extremely disciplined with my physical health over the years, but I’m not disciplined at all, I’m just motivated.

To discover my motivation secret when it comes to exercising, I simply wrote down what goes through my mind when I think about going to the gym. This is transcribed directly from my notebook, so it’s a real-life example.

‘Something I’m good at. Going to the gym. What do I imagine? Being stronger on all my exercises. How good I’ll feel when I finish the workout and I’ve set new personal bests on each exercise. The body I’m going to have. Good-looking girls at the gym. Enjoying the drive home. Having a good time with my training partner. The sense of achievement and the satisfaction I’ll feel when leaving the gym.’

The paragraph above reveals my motivation secret template. When I read it through I see pictures and videos of all the things I’ve written down in my head. It makes me feel good, and it makes me want to get to the gym and work.

Pick something you are good at, then make a list of all the things that go through your head when you are about to do it. That is how you uncover your motivation secret template. Once you have the template you can apply it to the area of your life where you are not motivated, and you are not doing as well as you want to. Before you do that, you must write down what goes through your head when you are about to do the thing you are bad at.

Once again, I’ll give you an example, taken from my notebook. The thing I wasn’t motivated to do was making cold calls for my business. Here’s what I wrote in my notebook.

‘Something I’m bad at. Making business calls. What do I imagine? People blocking my number. People thinking it’s a scam. People thinking I’m a scam. People thinking I’m a pain in the arse. Being told I haven’t done things properly by my business partners. Having my calls dissected and criticized. Having to relearn all of the scripts and processes. Not succeeding and being told it’s just a waste of time and another one of my stupid ideas. Being told to get a proper job. Being a flash in the pan.’

Reading the second list back to myself was embarrassing and painful. With thoughts like that going through my head, it’s no wonder I wasn’t motivated to make calls!

Before I did the exercise described in this section, I had no idea about the difference between my motivation secret, and my demotivating thought process. I’d never ever imagined there was such a thing as these mental processes. That’s because these mental processes are invisible and run on autopilot, so we are normally unaware of them. We live our lives letting forces we are ignorant of exert an enormous influence on our motivation, our actions, and ultimately the quality of our lives.

These forces are our mental representations, and we have different ones for every area of our lives. You can become aware of your mental representations and take control of them by performing the exercise I have described.

The next step is to replace the demotivating mental representations with new mental representations that will get you motivated. Use your motivation secret template. Write out your new mental representation for the thing you have not been motivated to do, basing it on the motivation secret associated with the area you excel in. Once you have written out your new mental representation, read it to yourself. It should make you feel good. It should make you want to do the things you were previously not motivated to do (and therefore did poorly). Read your new mental representation every morning, it is your new motivation secret. You will quickly have it memorized. Every time you think about the thing you used to do poorly, go over your motivation secret. You will realize that you are in fact motivated because your brain now has a mental representation that it does not see as a threat. Consequently, your brain will want you to perform the task and you will do it well. That means you will start getting good results. When that happens, your motivation will increase further.

When you are getting the results you want, you will start controlling the direction of your life in one more area, and you will feel happier and more fulfilled. That’s why motivation is priceless.

Takeaways

You will never achieve meaningful results without motivation.

When you are motivated to do something, your brain will work with you. If all you have is discipline, you will be working against your brain, and you will lose.

Motivation or lack of motivation is dictated by the mental representations your associate with taking certain actions. The mental representations associated with actions you are motivated to take are what I call motivation secrets.

You can uncover your mental representations by asking questions like “what do I imagine? (when I think about taking this action)”

Once you have uncovered your motivation secret it can be used as a template for building mental representations that motivate you in any area of your life.

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