How To Motivate Yourself

Sample

(from Video Transcript)

What You’ll Learn and Do in this course:

In Section One you will learn what motivation is and what it isn’t, why most things that are supposed to motivate you don’t, why what you think about yourself defines what you do. And in Section One you’re going to discover the single statement that drives all successful writers and you are going to claim your right to be motivated.

In Section Two you will learn how to define yourself in ways that will motivate you, how to define exactly what you want to do in ways that will motivate you, and how to walk away from false goals. And in Section Two you will define yourself via answers to several essential questions, you will define your exact goals and you will eliminate goals that aren’t helping you.

In Section Three you will discover exactly why you want to achieve the goals you want (and people blow this off but it’s the single most important key to motivation) and then you’ll also learn exactly how to achieve those goals. In Section Three you will figure out why you want each goal on your list and what’s keeping you from doing it, and you’ll create your step-by-step, workable plan to make your goals a reality.

So let’s get started with ‘“Rah-Rah!” Is NOT Motivation.’

Here’s the false premise: people have been taught that if everybody gets together and jumps up and down telling each other how great they all are, everyone will leave “motivated.” This is the corporate meeting ‘hoo-rah’ and it is NOT motivation. This process is a band-aid that produces short-term, ever-decreasing results. It’s garbage.

You can encourage someone else but you cannot motivate him and neither can someone else motivate you. Motivation does not come from the outside. It’s the motor that runs inside you and nobody but you can touch it. Or break it. Or fix it.

Here is the sad, sad little definition of motivation:

Motivation. It’s a noun. Number one: the act or an instance of motivating. Number two: the state or condition of being motivated. Number three: something that motivates; inducement; incentive.

I hope you see the problem with this; this is a crap definition. Defining a word by using the word means the idiot writing the entry didn’t know what it really meant.

The closest Defining Dude here gets to the truth is in tipping toward the concept of “inducement” and “incentive” in entry three and that’s not even close. That’s more like bribing someone.

The truth about bribery is this: if you can find the thing someone wants, you can bribe him with it in order to get him to do something you want. But you did not motivate him. He motivated himself by wanting the thing you had.

What happens if you bribe yourself with a cookie after each time you get your words written? Eventually you’ll skip the words and just eat the cookie.

You cannot bribe yourself. It’s not possible. Bribery, like “Rah-rah” meetings and slogan-chanting corporate clowns, is a lot of noise that gives the appearance of motivation. But it does not deliver ongoing results.

Real motivation is perpetual. It is, in fact, a little bit like magic. People who are genuinely motivated to do something simply do it. They… we… I do not need to be cheered on. They don’t need to be bribed, they don’t play mind games with themselves, nor to they lean on little tricks or triggers to force themselves to do things they otherwise didn’t even want to do…

(continued in the class)

Where to buy

Holly’s Writing Classes