You’re Not Unmotivated: You Need a New Self-Concept

Build habits by re-calibrating your identity at its root.

When people use willpower to meet their goals, they either fail or operate from a place of frustration.

You know this loop. You want to change your life: write a book, build a business, or clean the paint off your floor.

These activities are fun to think about (kind of), but when you try to take action, you feel hungry, you yawn, you retreat, and finally, you grab onto your willpower and miserably bulldoze your way through a sloppy first attempt.

Later, when you’re feeling motivated again, you realize you’re caught in a vicious cycle.

Let’s look at a framework that lets you bypass the parts of the brain most likely to trap you in the motivation-retreat loop.

We can intervene on our levels of motivation by modulating something straightforward: our inner conversations. These are doorways leading directly into your identity as long as you know how to use them.

When you change the nature of your inner conversations, you’ll find it natural to perform the actions critical to getting what you desire.

This strategic modification of your inner conversations will bridge the gap between who you are and who you want to be.

The Failure of Willpower

Your subjective experience of willpower is a consequence of a myriad of habitual patterns, beliefs, and environmental cues already in motion. The degree to which a person has willpower is a downstream effect of their identity.

So, when you rely on willpower, you’re picking at the very surface layer of your personality. You’re attempting to suppress the symptoms of your lack of motivation rather than correcting its source, your identity.

This is like putting a bandage over a wound filled with glass. It momentarily stops the bleeding but doesn’t solve the problem.

There are so many factors that precede your subjective perception of will (or its absence). Therefore, relying on it alone is a great way to burn out and destroy your self-trust.

Lovers of willpower often find themselves in this conceptual trap: they allow feelings of guilt, fear, and obligation to overshadow the original desires that inspired their goal.

For instance, when a person decides to exercise daily, at some point, they forget they were inspired to exercise because of its stamina- and cognition-improving qualities. They overlook these benefits, and let force compel them to the gym every day so they don’t waste money. Their exercise routine feels painful and contrived.

When we feel threatened, there’s a good chance we’re being hijacked by the survival-oriented, fear-based part of our physiology, understood as the reptile brain (more on this below).

When we become defensive, we stop focusing on the value of what we’re intending to do and instead ruminate on what’s difficult about it. We lose motivation because focusing on fear and obligation is draining.

We convince ourselves we’re spineless, will-less creatures who can’t be trusted.

But really we’re just not skilled in talking to ourselves in a way that automatically penetrates our motivational systems.

You Are The Reptile

In the 1960s, neuroscientist Paul MacLean proposed the Triune brain model, which describes a hierarchical organization of the brain based on its gradual evolution.

According to the model, brain regions operate distinctly and can be divided into three parts, beginning from the region evolving a millennia ago to that which evolved more recently:

• Reptilian or Primal brain (basal ganglia): Responsible for fight or flight, instant, “survival mode,” self-preservation responses. This is the region that helps you jump back when you nearly step in front of a moving train.
• Paleomammalian or emotional brain (limbic system): In charge of emotional responses, this is the region that first evolved in mammals. Active when you feel jealous, worry, or receive a fraud notification from your bank.
• Neomammalian or rational brain (Neocortex): The zone of decision making, problem-solving, and reasoning. You’re using it when writing a song or outlining an informative guide.

While this model is an oversimplification, it’s intriguing to think of the Triune brain as a map of consciousness. When you can recognize and classify your state of mind, you’re getting the opportunity to respond, instead of reacting, to an event. This is where paradigm shifts, hunches, and wake-up calls happen.

The limbic and reptile systems promote rapid, thoughtless reactions. This feature is lovely when you’re about to step in front of that train.

But it’s reacting, rather than responding, that’s at the source of so much of our suffering: the primal parts of our brain play host to things like involuntary defecation, becoming offended, or aggravating political tensions.

In other words, most people don’t like to linger here for long. Remaining in the reptile or limbic systems means we’re not engaged in things we really care about: writing, gardening, connecting with others, and so on.

In charged emotional states, we need a way to alter the direction of our inner conversations. But we all know the eerie hollowness of phrases like Think Positively. We need something else.

You Don’t Become a New Person Until You Enter a New Trance

Hypnotic language patterns can help us formulate affirmations that remove psychological defenses and liberate us from limbic and reptile-level thinking.

Milton Erickson was one of the most effective hypnotherapists of all time. The co-founders of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), Richard Bandler and John Grinder, assessed the way Erickson conducted therapy with his clients.

Based on his conversational strategies, they came up with a model that covertly induces hypnosis, known as the Milton Model or hypnotic language patterns.

These patterns invoke trance by bypassing the analytical strictures of the neocortex. This effect remains even if you intellectually recognize that you’re listening to hypnotic patterns.

When you read hypnotic affirmations, you can’t understand them without entering the state they evoke, so they alter you at an unconscious level.

Although these patterns will certainly make you a more persuasive, conscious communicator, I want to focus on using them as a motivating force and replacement for willpower.

Unlike conventional ways of negotiating with negative thoughts — whether it’s taking a psychiatric medication, snapping a rubber band against your wrist, trying not to think of “pink elephants” etc.— hypnotic patterns don’t try to change the downstream effects of causes already in place.

They don’t ask you to suppress or control your thoughts.

Hypnotic patterns are frameworks that help you reliably impact the trajectory of your inner conversations, giving you more control over your responses.

As trance inducers, these patterns modulate your unconscious, which is why they’re great tools for creating deep-rooted change, unlike willpower which functions only at the surface level.

With repetition and strategic use, these patterns will change the way you relate to yourself. As a consequence, your self-concept will also shift. Building and maintaining desirable habits will become automatic.

Four Self Talk-Altering Language Patterns

While there are many hypnotic patterns, let’s focus on four that are particularly powerful for modulating inner conversations. Think of these structures as tools for reprogramming your unconscious mind in real-time.

This list isn’t exhaustive. It’s meant to give you a taste of the kinds of words that fit within these patterns. As you practice using them, you’ll recognize other words not listed below.

The temporal/ordinal pattern:

Examples: before, each day, during, after, while, first, every day;

The awareness pattern:

Examples: recognize, know, discover, affirm, realize;

The cause and effect pattern:

Examples: if/when, because, as a result, as a consequence;

The complex equivalent pattern:

Statements that presuppose one thing means another.

Example: This article is a software update for your personality.

Change Your Trance, Change Your Life

These patterns are blueprints for affirmations you can re-visit during motivational valleys.

While they’re not quick fixes, affirmations built with hypnotic structures will impress upon your unconscious mind, the precursor to all conscious thought. With repetition, these affirmations will subtly alter your interpretations of yourself.

We can thank the Reticular Activating System (RAS) for the power of consistently recited affirmations. If you’ve ever bought a new pair of shoes and later noticed them on every foot in your city, you’ve witnessed your attention tuning to a salient feature in the environment.

Similarly, by repeating hypnotic affirmations every day, you’ll find it more natural to think and act in a way that aligns with what you desire.

I invite you to create affirmations around your predictable motivation killers and repeat them two to four times a day.

Remember, the goal isn’t to erase your negative thoughts. Instead, you want to allow these ideas to work their way into you without forcing anything.

For instance, let’s say you’re struggling to floss your teeth. Using hypnotic language patterns, you might write and repeat an affirmation like this:

Each morning (time), I realize (awareness) that flossing my teeth is fundamental to my well-being (complex equivalent). As I continue, it becomes easier (awareness) to motivate myself to floss because (cause and effect), my desire to floss is aligned with my core values of vitality and consistency (complex equivalent).

You can change who you believe yourself to be. It’s simple when you learn to strategically minimize the reptile and limbic influence on your thinking.

To even make sense of a hypnotic pattern, you have to momentarily shift your unconsciously held assumptions.

When consistently used, these patterns help you restructure your inner conversations so you automatically bring forth what you desire to create.

Evolution becomes automatic when you change your point of view, rather than only the consequences of it.

These patterns give you direct control over your interpretations of reality, and as a result, your self-concept. This is how you inspire change at the root of who you are rather than toy with the symptoms of who you’re not.