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Self Motivation TipsHow To Motivate Yourself
Why do you need help on how to motivate yourself? Why can't you just decide to do something and then just do it?
What's stopping you?
Identify and deal with whatever it is that is stopping youThe internet is awash with "self-help" materials - articles, books and courses on "how to motivate yourself". Endless advice, tips, tricks and lists of "self motivation tips". However in my view, and based on my own direct lived and observed experience, most of this completely misses the point. There is an "elephant in the room"! If you can identify and deal with whatever it is that's stopping you then you won't need self motivation tips.
A matter of life and deathThe "self-help industry" generates $billons per year, and many of us buy books and attend courses on how to "improve" ourselves and on self motivation tips. Yet most of the time we don’t change. We can’t change. We have unconscious - and thus hidden - resistance. To change you have to do some work on yourself - rather more than just reading up on self motivation tips – test and experiment and engage with change processes. You have to be prepared to let go of old ways of being, thinking and behaving. In my experience, the vast majority of people who say they want to change don’t change. Most people reading this won’t change because they don’t really want to change. They may on the surface – consciously – believe that they want self motivation tips to change, but there is usually another hidden belief or assumption that will resist their apparent desire to change. Most of us are so attached to how we are – at an unconscious level we feel safe with how we are (even when it so obviously isn’t working) – that in practise we would rather die than change (and we usually do). The "knowing doing gap" There is a "knowing doing gap", and this is: "The gap between our intentions, things we actually want to carry out, and what we are actually able to do." [Kegan - "Immunity to Change"] A dramatic and poignant illustration of the "knowing doing" gap can be seen in research in the US healthcare sector. "Another study showed that if heart doctors tell their seriously at-risk heart patients they will literally die if they don’t change their lifestyle, only one in seven, on average, is actually able to make the changes..." "These are the kind of stark reminders which show us that the usual explanations for why people don’t make changes are pretty weak..."[Kegan] Before we go any further, I do recommend that you take a quick look at these pages on this site and some of the resources listed here for a deeper insight into why you resist change and an overview of the whole business of managing personal change: Immunity To Change - Why Is Personal Change So Difficult?
The 3 fundamental reasons why you resist change and are looking for self motivation tips
The simplest and easiest metaphor for explaining this is to think of your desktop PC (or your laptop or blackberry):
[1] The hardware of your brain - the simple physiology and neurology of how your brain functions
This is also the case with other 2 major brain centres popularly known as "the emotional centre" and "fight/flight brain" responsible for our survival instinct. The level of communication between these 4 major brain centres, is sometimes referred to as " brain balance". A lack of brain balance is arguably at the root core of human behavioral dysfunctionality and is the underlying evolutionary and neurological reason why we experience life the way we do; why we suffer so much, and as a species why we inflict so much suffering on each other. Anything that can improve this balance is a signifcant route to a more harmonious life and less resistant life. Self Motivation Tips For Your Brain's Hardware Meditation Techniques - For Developing An Adaptive Mind and Managing Personal Change Brainwave Entrainment - Binaural beat meditation Meditation Programme - No more BOREDOM + no more YEARS of training!
[2] The software running inside your head
We are all the product of our own ethnic, national, social and religious backgrounds. We have an inbuilt inner map that sees life from the perspective of that background. This inner map applies a whole range of filters related to the characteristics and profile of our broad environmental background. Here’s the big picture of how your internal map of reality operates to generate your feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. First, you experience something through your senses. You see something, hear something, touch or feel something, smell something, or taste something. In other words, you have an experience. These sensory impressions first pass through a number of filters, which delete huge amounts of it, distort it in various ways, and create generalisations. These filters are hugely important in determining how you create your reality. With what is left after this filtering process, which happens almost instantaneously and almost totally unconsciously, you then create some sort of internal representation of reality. This internal representation is really a pretty impoverished copy of reality, because much of what came in through your senses has been deleted, distorted and generalised in a number of ways. You’ve made a map that represents reality, but it isn’t reality, and it isn’t really very accurate - which is partially why you feel the need for self motivation tips. Based on this brief overview, here is a summary of how inner resistance to managing personal change develops and why, and how it manifests:
If you can take charge of these things, and choose how you do them instead of having them just run on automatic pilot, you can make huge changes in how you experience life and what kind of outcomes you get. Self Motivation Tips For Your Brain's Software Change Your Self-Talk ... Change Your Life! NLP - Achieve and sustain peak performance Developing self-awareness via mindfulness practise Who and How Do You Think You Are? [And Why?]
[3] The operating environment - struggle and suffering
There are many people who see suffering and struggle as things to be resisted, that "shouldn't" happen and that are "wrong". At the personal level this is often expressed as "if only" or "why me" or "it isn't fair" etc, and is another form of resistance - based around our refusal to accept how things are when things don't happen as we want them to or feel that they "should" - and this then creates the desire for yet more self motivation tips! Without getting too philosophical in what is intended as a brief instructive article, in my view all of the evidence suggests that: Suffering and struggle are inbuilt into the way the universe runs - not by accident but by design. If we can drag our attention beyond the horror, unfairness and sheer "unacceptability" of it all and: Focus instead on the intention behind all this inbuilt suffering and struggle - we eventually and paradoxically find that its true purpose is constructive and transformative, it unmasks the true nature of "who we really are and why we are here" and it reveals a path to real and permanent personal change and transformation. In the natural world, there would seem to be extensive evidence for the transformative and evolutionary processes conventionally understood as "natural selection" via a competitive process of "survival of the most adaptive". As Darwin put it: "It isn't the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones who are most responsive to change" An adaptive response to our "operating environment" of imposed change, struggle and suffering is possible when we either have evolved and developed the personal capacity to do this, or at least when we have the resources to help us. Self Motivation Tips For The Operating Environment Relaxation + Meditation Music + Guided Meditations Higher Awareness - Personal development and spiritual growth programmes Guy Finley - Life of Learning Foundation
Further ResourcesHere are 4 free PDF downloads and a number of links. I am acutely aware of the staggering amount of "self motivation tips" material sloshing around out there in the ether, but here are 4 documents that are worthy of your time and attention. The first document - Why People Fail - is easy to read and absorb but nevertheless challenging and quite provocative. It is written by Dr Ken Evoy a brilliant inventor, entrepreneur and internet pioneer who has guided thousands of people (including myself) through the pitfalls of building a commercially successful website. The Power of Frustration is written by Catherine Pratt - who is known to me "electronically" - and is an extremely practical look at how to how to deal with frustration and learn how you can actually use this emotion as a valuable tool. It would be very easy to dismiss The Science of Getting Rich and Think And Grow Rich by their titles - BUT please don't. These books are classics and were written many years ago. You will need to filter some of the language and translate into a more modern context, but the principles outlined in these books about how the mind works, and the power of thought, are universal - so universal that they form the basis of most of what all the self-help gurus charge you a lot of money for! For the bigger picture - take a quick look at this short presentation: Links worth looking at: Life With Confidence - this is Catherine Pratt's site and she has some excellent material. The Science of Getting Rich Network - this is the "backup site" for the "The Science of Getting Rich" book, and is run by Rebecca Fine. She runs an excellent site, talks an enormous amount of sense and provides a lot of resources. Articles by Charles Burke - I have been a reader of Charle's material and occasional email corresponder with Charles for many years. He is another person who is practical and talks a lot of sense. And finally you could always sign up for my free email series on "Managing Personal Change" below - in which I develop the themes touched on above, in far more depth.
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Let's cut straight to the chase - why do you need self motivation tips?. 
At the current stage of the evolution or development of the human brain the "left brain" [responsible for language, analysis and logic] and the "right brain" [responsible for spatial awaremess, visual recogition and creativity] do not connect or communicate easily.
For the sake of brevity let's call this your "inner map" of reality - aka your "operating system".
At the "bigger picture" level there are those who believe that mankind is moving towards a "new era" of peace and goodwill and raised consciousness etc. That may or not be true, but the present lived experience of reality is that struggle and suffering are unavoidable and integral aspects of life on this planet.
