Day 1 – understanding motivation

Many people attend motivational talks and seminars to get motivated. All kinds of people attend my motivational events and I always ask them, by a show of hands, "How many of you think I can motivate you today?"

All the hands go up in the air.

Then I tell the participants that they are in the wrong room, because I learned a long time ago that I cannot motivate anybody.

Let's understand that only I can motivate myself and only you can motivate yourself.

As a motivational trainer, all I can do is provide you with the ideas, concepts, and tools you will need, but the final decision of what you do with these things is up to whom?

You! Only you can motivate yourself! Would you agree?

If you do not agree, it is because you are focused on external motivation, which is only a temporary solution. Personally, I do not want to waste my time on temporary solutions.

The same holds true for motivating your team. You cannot motivate them, but you can inspire them and create an environment in which they motivate themselves.

Success is defined as the progressive realization of a worthy goal or idea. It is desire and the envisaging of success that creates self-motivation. When you can see, feel, and hear the outcome of your desire, you create the belief that it will happen. These expectations motivate you toward those images of success.

Motivation is a desire held in the expectation that it will be accomplished. It all starts with desire—having a burning passion for something. Without desire, you cannot be motivated.

Once the desire has set in, you must see, hear, and feel your dream—and be able to visualize it in detail as if it already exists. This is the only true form of motivation because it comes from inside you. This is known as internal or permanent motivation.

Motivation is a motive for action. We are motivated towards images of success, which we expect to provide us with pleasure and gain. At the same time, we are motivated to avoid failure, pain, and loss.

If we keep images of success, pleasure, and gain in our mind, we will be motivated towards them. However, if we keep images of failure, pain, and loss foremost in our mind, we will be motivated merely to stay away from them, or just not be motivated at all.

Unfortunately, so many people rely on external motivators, for example, lottery tickets and incentives. These types of external motivators have a problem—their effect doesn't last. As soon as you acquire an incentive, you'll want a bigger and better one. This is the carrot and stick approach.

As soon as you face up to a threat, the threat will no longer stop you. The only true form of motivation comes from you, for you. This is internal motivation—the only everlasting motivation.

Motivation is the ability to see, in the present, a projection of the future that you want. To do that, you will have to answer the questions in the following exercises.

Self-motivation

My goal in writing this book is to help you help yourself; to connect you to the most accurate central processing unit there is—you! To do this, I will provide you with a step-by-step approach, complete with exercises to help you understand you. Only when you go inside to find answers will you find the truth. Once you write it out, you take ownership and your commitment levels increase.

In most organizations, management devotes enormous energy to setting work objectives and conducting performance reviews for individual employees. Corporations go through this time-consuming and costly exercise to ensure the most favorable results for their firm.

In contrast, how much time and energy do you expend discovering your own needs and desires, and then consciously setting objectives, developing action plans with measurable performance standards, and finally reviewing your own performance?

By engaging in such an exercise, you will be doing something with your life. You will be going to work on yourself, for yourself, and then you will be in a better position to help motivate your team.

Please find a notebook that you can use to take notes and answer the questions in. This notebook will serve as a reference as well as your map moving forward.

The simple act of completing these exercises will help you discover what makes you self-motivated. Please note the answers for the following questions in your notebook:

• What do you want for yourself (personally) in the future?

• What do you want for yourself (professionally) in the future?

• What do you want for your team in the future?

• What motivates me?

• What demotivates me?

• What are some conditioning influences that affect me?

• What are some negative messages that motivate me? (For example, "You can't do it!")

• What are some positive messages that motivate me? (For example., "You can do it!")