Motivation – The Fire Within!

You’ve been through the pain of seeing lesser mortals achieve the heights that you should’ve scaled!

You’ve asked yourself some questions again and again – but often the answer has eluded you.

You’ve asked yourself –

• Which is that mysterious difference that makes one person achieve more than another?
• Why is it that the most intelligent people on this planet end up working for those of average intelligence?
• What is that magical potion that transforms a person from a follower into a leader?

You’ve probably then lapsed into attributing the success of those others to chance or some other nefarious skills. If you’ve done all this, you are probably not alone. We all do attribute negative factors to other people’s success and positive factors to our own – at least, according to the Attribution Theory.

At a conscious level, most of us would agree that there is something to be learned from every success or failure. Thus, I too try to see the positive factors that could’ve contributed to the success of others where I failed. (This attempt does take a great deal of effort.) I think that among others, there is a factor, which I lacked whenever I failed, and which I experienced when I succeeded! And then I begin to see the success of others in the light of that important factor – the self-motivation factor!

Many have spoken about motivation. They’ve said -

“Motivate yourself! Self-motivation is the most important ingredient in the recipe of success! Motivation is an internal force!”

It isn’t easy to count and reproduce the numerous statements that have been made about the excellent concept of self-motivation. I also don’t intend to. These statements, by themselves are meaningless combinations of words. When left alone, they don’t say much. They simply speak of the importance of motivating oneself. These statements don’t tell us the “how” of motivation!

Speaking about the how of motivation –

“Go through success-stories with happy endings! Read about successes! Think positive!”

These too don’t help much. They don’t because motivation is a personal phenomenon, and also because attribution theory always works. Even when we read about successful people, we often continue to attribute their successes to factors that are completely absent from our environments. Thus, attributing the cause of the successes of others to external factors, we are effectively able to create a comfort-zone around us. We tell ourselves that our external factors are different from theirs and because we can’t manipulate the environment – there isn’t any point doing anything! We would fail anyways!

How do we overcome this and motivate ourselves? How do we become competent in the skill of motivating ourselves? Is there a way out?

I don’t intend to write about why self-motivation is a great art; I also don’t wish to rehash the importance of self-motivation/motivation! My intention is to discuss motivation with a very practical viewpoint, and arrive at some cognitive tools that can help us create and sustain self-motivation. Most of what I intend to write here, comes from my personal experiences and my understanding of motivation.

I understand motivation as a strong urge to act and remove the discomfort caused due to an unfulfilled need. If we analyze this statement, we see three important constituents of motivation emerge.

• The existence of an unfulfilled need
• The existence of a discomfort
• The urge to act

The unfulfilled need causes discomfort and the discomfort galvanizes us into action. It is clear that if we don’t have an unfulfilled need we will never be motivated. A man who is born with a silver spoon, will never experience the need for food, shelter, security; and shall be motivated to undertake a venture only if the need to enhance self-esteem is felt. Lord Carnarvon would probably have never undertaken the quest for Tutankhamun’s tomb; had it not been for his unfulfilled need to be known as someone else other than one of the Carnarvons!

The Seven Rungs of the Motivational Ladder

If I were to list the steps to self-motivation, I would list them as follows:

1. Identify an area of growth for yourself (What I want?)
2. Identify and accept the lack of motivation (I am not doing anything to get what I want!)
3. Identify attribution (Why don’t I act?)
4. Generate a need (If I acted, I could…)
5. Determine the cognitive/affective obstacles in fulfilling the need (What am I not doing?)
6. Remove the obstacles (Do what I wasn’t doing.)
7. Fulfill the need and grow (I get what I want.)
   

1. What I want?

   If I say that I don’t want anything, I cheat myself. The reason behind my living here, in the thick of society, and not in an inaccessible cave in the Himalayas is that I want things. While some of things that I want are material, some are spiritual. I want love, growth, respect, admiration, recognition, happiness; the list can go on and on. We all want something. Find out what you want?

   An easy way to determine what you want is to identify what hurts you. If something hurts you – a thorn, a cut, a look, a dialog, a position, a situation, or a relationship; you can identify it easily. I remember that I was motivated to re-orient my career, when I realized that what caused me pain was omnipresent in the industry I worked for. I knew that a change of job wouldn’t change anything. And so I was motivated to re-orient my career and select a new path.

   Once you’ve discovered what you want to get rid of, you’ve simultaneously discovered what you want to achieve. Here are some examples:

   • I don’t want to die of a disease; so I want an operation.
   • I don’t want to be abused by my boss; so I want to change my job.
   • I don’t want to accept orders from those who are not my intellectual superiors; I want to freelance.
   • …

   Thus, what you want to do is your preferred way of getting out of what you don’t want to do.

   If you are satisfied in your current situation, you probably need to look harder to figure out what you want but lack.

2. I am not doing anything to get what I want!

   Acceptance of the fact that you are not doing what you should do to get what you want, is the first step towards self-motivation. Are you prompted to say that this isn’t difficult? You are right, it isn’t. Yet we seldom do it.

   Think about it. When the pain of seeing a 10% increase in your salary sears through your heart, what do you do? There is a high probability that you feel sick in the pit of your stomach, you tell your boss that you aren’t happy; and then you go to your office-friend’s work-station and request him or her to accompany you to the cigarette shop or the vending machine! You then huff and puff; stomp and snarl; and then you go back to work. One becomes habituated to pain, and begins to live with it. After a while any pain becomes a part of our lives! It begins to live with us, and then we forget its existence.

   The point is – we become habituated to accepting pain, and we don’t act to remove it. In this manner, habituation is the enemy of motivation!

   I don’t go to the dentist, though both my lower wisdom teeth have been giving me periodic problems. I’ve become habituated. I have accepted the pain, and I’ve also accepted that I can’t eat those succulent sweets (Jalebis, Imarties, alas!) Will I ever go to the dentist, if I don’t accept my inaction and try to find the reason behind my inaction?

3. Why don’t I act?

   The next question that we need to ask ourselves is – if there is a pain that should be removed, or if there is something to be gained; why don’t we act?

   The reasons can be painful. They can be self-deprecating. However, the crux of self-motivation lies in determining the reasons and then consciously weeding them out.
   Let us reflect some more.

   In our previous example that discussed the post-piteous-salary-hike-habituation; we decided that the pain was at its height immediately after the “encounter”. Imagine this. While you stood at the cigarette shop/vending machine, someone approached you with a job opportunity. Would you explore the opportunity? I think you would…because of the painfully raw wound.

   Over time, we rationalize. We become comfortable again. We feel that the discomfort experienced if we acted would be more than the pain experienced if we accepted the current state of affairs. I don’t go to the dentist because I feel that the pain/discomfort that I would experience if I got my tooth pulled would be more than that experienced if I stayed put.

   We don’t act because we are afraid of the unknown and because we don’t want to take risks! Acceptance of the fear to act is our next step to motivate ourselves.

   A few months ago, I watched “A Beautiful Mind”. It is an awe-inspiring movie about the Nobel Prize winning mathematician, John F. Nash (currently working as Senior Mathematics Researcher at Princeton University), played by Russell Crow. Nash was a schizophrenic, who had delusions about being a code-breaker for the government. He reasoned with himself and accepted his schizophrenia by determining that the people who appeared to speak with him during his schizophrenic bouts (including a little girl called Marcee), didn’t age at all in the many years he kept seeing them. Self-recognition of the problem; resulted in self-motivation to live constructively despite the psychological problems he faced.

   • I don’t go to a doctor, because I fear more pain that I am experiencing at present.
   • I don’t apply for a new job, because I fear leaving my comfort-zone.
   • I don’t give up my job to freelance, I fear giving up my regular income.
   • …
     
     
4. If I acted, I could…

   After accepting your reasons for not acting, think of the good things that may happen if you acted. Daydreaming is a wonderful device to help you do this. Slip into your most comfortable chair, close your eyes, and lose yourself into the wonderland of fulfilled desires. Would you like those desires to be fulfilled in reality? Of course, you would.

   Think about it:

   • I go to the dentist and get my tooth pulled…then I never have to say no to my favorite sweet.
   • I apply for a new job; I get interviewed. The interviewer decides that I should be given double my current salary.
   • I freelance… I don’t have to work 9-8; I decide what I do with my time, and I am the most sought-after content writer in India.
   • …

   Daydreams show you the best possible scenario. They tell you what you can achieve if you overcome your fear and act. If you want to do anything, daydream about it. Remember the time when you were in love for the first time? You were motivated through the gap that existed between your daydreams and the reality. You wanted to turn your daydreams into reality, thus nullifying the gap, and so you “acted”. You sent flowers, you went on dates, you “engineered” chance meetings…

5. What am I not Doing?

   Now zero on the specifics of the actions that you’ve not taken and think what would really happen if you took those actions. Heavens don’t fall if you apply for a new job. One doesn’t die for a tooth that was pulled. You won’t starve if you resigned from a job and spent six months looking for freelance opportunities!

   List the specific actions that you should’ve taken and list the fallouts. Are the fallouts devastating? In most cases you will find that they are not. In fact, you may even laugh at the microscopic side effects!

6. Do what I wasn’t doing.

   Check the physical and mental obstacles in your path. Remove them, to generate small packets of tension, and use that tension to propel you into action.
   Thus,

   • Throw away the painkiller pills. Don’t take medicine, when the toothache hits. The pain will generate discomfort and you will be motivated to go to the dentist.
   • Take leave from office to visit consultants/call them up. When you stay home, you continue to tell yourself, “I took leave, to meet/call a consultant; and now I don’t do it. Am I a fool?” Then you will be prompted to make the call.

   I also call this stage, “burning my boat.” When you’ve taken the first physical action, which has resulted in a certain cost and some commitment, it is difficult for you to track back into your earlier comfort-zone. Then there is a tussle between justifying the newly incurred cost vs. the existing state of affairs.

   Thus, you get the things moving by taking your first physical step in the right direction.

7. I Get What I Want.

   This doesn’t need explanations… does it?
   However, it is important for us to remember that when we get what we want, we begin to sink into our respective comfort zones once again. We need to sustain our self-motivation. Fulfillment of one need isn’t the end. There are many other unfulfilled desires, waiting to be discovered and fulfilled.

   The self-motivated individuals are those who resist the fatal attraction of their comfort-zones, and continuously identify what causes them discomfort; and who then systematically set about eliminating their discomfort through directed actions.
   

I’ve seen these steps to self-motivation work for me. Whenever I experience demotivation, I consciously begin to apply the steps that I’ve just outlined here. These steps ensure that my demotivation doesn’t last long, and that I don’t become habituated to purposeless inaction. These steps help me swing myself out of the quagmire of demotivation, by handing me the rope of daydreams and giving me the strength of purpose! I’ve seen myself becoming more adept at thwarting demotivation and embracing self-motivation; as I continue to apply these steps again and again!

They work – try them out!

Author: Shafali R. Anand