I came across an interesting post today on a blog by Ross Hudgens, which talks about managing his immediate environment to aid his willpower in losing weight: for instance, he takes only a set amount of cash with him when he goes out to bars, leaving his ATM and credit cards at home, making it very difficult to go out and binge eat. He also keeps his cupboards bare of junk food so that unhealthy snacking requires a separate trip to the store. (There are other interesting posts on Hudgens’ blog, although I can’t recommend all of them. While Hudgens turns up a number of good ideas, I think some are more useful than others.)

Modifying our immediate environment can be a useful tactic: it not only helps support good decisions in the moment, but helps foster habits and expectations of good decision-making. However, I think Hudgens goes too far in referring to these strategies as willpower itself: it seems to me that unlike “self-control,” “willpower” refers solely to our decision-making mindset, not to the limitations of our environments (even if we set up those limitations ourselves). In other words, not having the opportunity to easily do something you’d rather not do is not the same as deciding to do it despite having the opportunity.

And I think there are costs to this kind of approach, just as there are costs to any kind of external approach to self-motivation: depending on external factors can cause our success in moving toward our goals to vary wildly when externals change–for example, someone interested in weight loss who is depending on not having junk food available may have little or no self-control in a situation like a party where junk food has been set out. And just as successes can add up and boost mood and confidence (one of the benefits of setting up our environments), failures of the kind I just described can quickly erode confidence and enthusiasm.

Fortunately, some kinds of external modifications can help both with immediate behavior and with long-term attitude, for instance when a person helps encourage progress on a project by making the work environment for that project more inviting. Over time, this can lead to more pleasant and attractive ideas about working on that project and about applying oneself in general. In short, controlling the external environment can be a positive factor and is usually worth some effort, but depending on that over other approaches sidestesp the real issue, that of changing our mindset.

Photo by smallestbones.

The term “self-help,” while it’s accurate and useful and descriptive, drives me nuts. Even though we definitely help ourselves when we use self-help resources, neither word in the term is very appealing: “self” implies that we’re doing something “selfish” or “self-centered,” and “help” implies that by ourselves, we’re damaged or insufficient to the task. Taken together, it kind of sounds like a combination of personal weakness and lack of concern for other people. The reason this drives me nuts is that this is the exact opposite of what good self-help does. Really good self-help does help the person who’s doing it, but it’s often even more beneficial to the people around that person.

Sounds like a weaselly self-justification, doesn’t it? Well, if I do my job well in this post, you’ll feel as comfortable as I do that it’s anything but.

First, we all probably realize already that anyone who’s having a lot of personal trouble tends to require help from those around them. If we want to be a positive force in the world, the first task is to not be a drain on it, which means taking care of our own most pressing personal issues so that we can contribute something rather than requiring other people to contribute to us.

It’s also useful to realize that “self-help” is for the strong but imperfect. Perfect people, none of whom I have ever met, don’t need any kind of improvement. The rest of us can either help ourselves, wait for somebody else to help us, or never improve.

With those things established, let’s turn our attention to the people we spend the most time with. For most of us, that means family, coworkers, and friends.

What do family members need from us? Good communication, care and concern, love, united purpose, sometimes financial support, that kind of thing.

How about coworkers? Productivity, good communication again, responsibility, reliability, focus, and more.

And friends? Some of the same things we need from family: good communication, care and concern, happiness.

If we look at these lists–and I admit, they aren’t anything like exhaustive, but they’re a good start–most of these things that other people need from us have to do with us having our @$?! together. Giving other people what they really need means not being preoccupied with our own problems, being aware of what’s going on around us, and being able to focus. And to do all those things, unless we’re naturally gifted in serenity, willpower, enthusiasm, and kindness, we generally need to train ourselves–to help ourselves, if I may say it. We can extend ourselves more and have more to offer if we have done a good job of managing our own anxieties and hang-ups.

And random strangers? These people, too, are most likely to benefit if they come across us while we’re in a good mood, focused, non-defensive, positive. If you’ve ever had a waiter or waitress who was having a really lousy day and managed to get a smile out of them through just being patient and friendly, you’ll understand what I mean when I say that good moods spread from person to person.

But what about the wider circle: our communities, the groups we’re a part of, the world at large? Here the situation is a bit different at first glance, because starving children in far-off countries are not going to get any direct benefit from me being cheerful and serene. These larger and more basic problems in the world are solved through volunteering time, putting in effort to advance causes we believe in, donating money, and these other kinds of external activities.

But the trick here is that being ready to do these external things requires an internal attitude that supports those actions. I can’t donate much money to charity if I don’t have my own finances in order, and I can’t have my own finances in order if I’m full of hangups and damaging beliefs about money. Volunteering time or otherwise helping out a cause I believe in requires me to be available, focused, effective, and clear about my goals–and all of those things are easily complicated by anger, depression, anxiety, trouble organizing or prioritizing, lack of drive, and the other kinds of negative states that effective self-help (among other things) battles against.

So we end up with the same answer no matter whom else we want to help: if we don’t start with ourselves, we’re not going to have much to offer people outside of ourselves. There’s a balance, clearly: it would be possible to sit around trying to improve our state of mind all day and never get up to actually help anyone else. But then, truly improving our state of mind has a lot to do with being aware of what’s going on both inside us and around us, so that any really effective self-improvement sooner or later compels us to get up and turn our attention outward.

Having written all of this out, I still don’t feel entirely at ease with the term “self-help,” or the way self-help is sometimes viewed (the phrases “self-absorbed,” “self-indulgent,” and “navel gazer” unfortunately come to mind). And not everything that claims to be “self-help” really does help anyone at all (I’m looking at you, The Secret!).  But actions, as one of my favorite cliches goes, speak louder than words, and in the end people I meet will understand on some level what good self-help really is because the better I do with it, the more likely it is they’ll walk away from me happier than they came.

Rescue picture in the public domain; original photographer unknown.
Picture of volunteers working on house by FirstBaptistNashville.

I’m interested in connecting with more people who are interested in self-motivation and willpower, so I’ve begun to make a more concerted search on the Web for people who write personal blogs on subjects like organization, changing habits, weight loss, writing, difficult personal projects, better working habits, addiction, quitting smoking, exercise, improving personal relationship skills, and anything else where self-motivation or willpower play a big part, so that I can invite people to guest blog here and/or offer guest blog posts for their sites.

Any suggestions for me of people I should approach, blogs I should read, or places where a guest post from me (whether on a particular requested subject or not) would be welcome? One thing that I’d particularly love to be able to have here from time to time is posts from people who have achieved goals or made changes in habits, describing what they did, what challenges they faced, and how things went–but I’m also interested in many other kinds of posts.

You can contact me through the contact form on the right (just scroll down to find it) or by commenting here.

A note: Most of my posts are based directly on findings from psychological research or other tried and proven sources. This post, while it owes a lot to these kinds of sources, has much more of my own ideas and observations than usual. It’s also missing the funny parts, for which I apologize.

In most cases where we want to cultivate willpower, it’s possible to make progress a little at a time, and a certain amount of failure is a natural part of the learning process. But what about when losing the willpower battle even once would have dire consequences, like an alcoholic who is struggling to stay sober?

Major temptations that keep cropping up may point to unmet needs, and ultimately the answer to getting over such a temptation is a matter of finding a constructive way to address those needs.

Before we continue, I should explain what I mean by a “need.” A “need” is a basic requirement that leads to suffering if it is not met. We shouldn’t confuse this with a desire, which is some specific thing that we think (sometimes rightly) will give us pleasure or help us avoid pain. Having enough food to eat, keeping the children safe, and having fulfilling work are all needs of one kind or another. Having a piece of the world’s best cheesecake, getting a child into a prestigious school, avoiding a conversation with someone unpleasant, or becoming a movie star are all desires. Desires can generally be dealt with by looking at the underlying need, which means that the cheesecake or the school itself isn’t necessarily the only answer.

Long-term temptations often seem to arise when a major underlying need is not being met. Unmet needs are also the drivers behind interpersonal conflict (see www.cnvc.org for information on an approach to solving interpersonal conflict that is successful specifically because it focuses on underlying needs). In a way, we can look at long-term temptation as a serious conflict within a person. The ways to address such a conflict are similar to the ways we address conflicts between people: both sides in the conflict need to be able to express their needs and then get their needs met. Until this happens, the conflict cannot be resolved.

As an example, let’s say there is a man called Don who is constantly tempted to spend a huge chunk of his and his wife’s retirement fund on an expensive sports car. (Let’s say he and his wife have agreed that they each have full control over their respective retirement funds.) Don daydreams about the car, looks at models online, and has gone for test drives. Deep down he knows that he doesn’t want to screw up their retirement just to own a sports car, but he can’t stop thinking about it.

If Don wants to resolve this problem, he has to dig deep and fully and truthfully answer the question of why he so desperately wants the car in the first place. Maybe it symbolizes a level of financial accomplishment that is strongly associated with having proven himself–in other words, Don believes that having the sports car means that everyone will see him as successful. Or maybe Don associates having the car with being young, and is scared to death of becoming old.

But let’s say instead that the sports car represents to Don a kind of indulgence for himself that he has never experienced before. All day, every day, he’s putting his time, attention, effort, and money into taking care of customers, superiors at work, family members, friends who need help, and so on. He has felt for a long time that he doesn’t really have any opportunity to focus on himself and do things that he would like to do.

At this stage, it’s essential for Don to untangle his needs from his desires. The car is a desire, but his need is to feel as though he’s had a chance to explore who he is and do things that are important only to him.

So what does Don do? The details are complicated, but the most promising way to deal with the problem is at least simple in concept: Don needs to find a more constructive way to meet his needs. This might involve him taking early retirement or stepping down from some of the responsibilities he’s taken on, or taking a vacation by himself, or blocking out time for some new activity in his life that’s driven solely by his own inclinations and doesn’t directly benefit anyone else.

The other thing that may help Don (in addition to understanding his needs and finding a constructive way to meet them) is to put his desire in perspective. An expensive sports car would definitely represent doing something just for himself–but would it meet his underlying need to feel like part of his life is his own, or would it just give him a short-term burst of satisfaction that would soon fade as he realized his life was exactly the same as it had been, just with a cooler car? The things we are often most tempted to do, if they are harmful to us, are very often not successful in even meeting the need that gives rise to them. Addiction to a variety of drugs falls under this heading, as a desire for satisfaction or pleasure drives a person to use a drug, but the drug provides only temporary relief. Gaining material things, however appealing they may seem, very often supplies a limited amount of pleasure over a short period of time. Pleasure is not a need, though happiness can be. (See my recent post on the difference between the two for more information on that.)

Understanding the need underlying a powerful temptation is a nearly unavoidably important step, but as to addressing the need, there are some alternatives. One reasonable alternative, as undesireable as it might sound to most of us, is becoming resigned to suffering. It’s not as passive as it sounds: in the example above, Don could decide that though he has a deep-seated need to have some part of his life for himself, his obligations are too important for him to make enough room to really answer that need. In that case he could spend his effort in becoming reconciled to his situation through avenues like support from his family, therapy, and meditation. It’s even possible that over time his needs might change and his old need to have some part of his life for himself could go away: after all, the human mind is capable of many kinds of adaptation. If this change didn’t happen, though, Don could still find ways to adapt to the continuing pain of not addressing his need, and if he did a very good job of managing those needs, his feelings of temptation would be likely to wane. This approach is similar to approaches one can take to deal with chronic physical pain.

Yet another approach is to change some part of the situation so that the object of desire is no longer a destructive goal: it becomes either neutral or positive. This generally means some kind of sacrifice or at least great change. In Don’s case, the car is a pretty questionable goal: research seems to suggest that material goods aren’t very effective at making people happy. But we could imagine a situation where Don could get a job that paid better but involved a lot more local travel, and so not only allow him to get the car without wrecking the retirement fund, but also give him more of a chance to drive in it. More realistic situations where a life change might help address a deeply-felt need might include giving up a good income to work in a job that offers more personal satisfaction or ending a relationship that has been stable but ultimately doesn’t provide the support someone needs.

In all of these cases, the important thing is to recognize the temptation as a symptom of the problem and not the root problem itself. Translating that temptation into the need that is driving it opens up possibilities and provides much-needed perspective. In some cases this alone might be enough to suggest a solution, and in others, it’s at least a step in the right direction.

Green grass picture by Dawn Endico.
Ferrari picture by Simon Lieschke.

Among my current reading material is The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living, in which Howard Cutler interviews the Dalai Lama on the subject of human happiness and comes away with some profound information to pass along.

Although ... there is such a thing as TOO happy.

For anyone who may be tempted to stop reading now on the idea that happiness isn’t important to studying how we successfully motivate ourselves, stick with me for a moment or two! (Anyway, it’s a short post.) In the same way that a discontented workforce gets much less done than a contented group of workers, a discontented mind has a much harder time staying on task than a content mind. There’s much more to say about happiness and its powerful effect on self-motivation, but we’ll leave that for other posts.

So if we do want to pursue happiness, whether for its own sake or to support stronger motivation and willpower, it’s important that we distinguish between happiness and pleasure. This is the distinction that the Dalai Lama makes in the book I mention above, and it’s both a meaningful and a practical distinction.

Pleasure is by definition a short-term thing. We can get pleasure from enjoying an activity, enjoying someone’s company, from food, from sex, from success, or from a wide variety of other sources. Happiness, by contrast, is a lasting state that most often is achieved through positive, constructive actions. While it’s not impossible for someone to feel genuinely happy about doing something destructive or cruel, this is the exception instead of the rule, and anyway we’re not saying that making ourselves happy is a flawless approach to living a compassionate or ethical or commendable life. What we can say is that constructive decisions tend to lead to greater happiness, and destructive decisions tend to lead to decreased happiness.

In terms of helping immediate motivation, we can harness this connection whenever we’re concerned that we’re not acting in accordance with our goals and priorities–that is, when our motivation is failing–by asking ourselves “Will this contribute to my happiness?” There are many things we might point to that can bring pleasure but not happiness (though thankfully, there are also many that bring both). By asking ourselves this question, we can put these actions in perspective so that we see what we’re doing to ourselves over a bit of a longer period of time. Having that clear view of how our choices affect our lives can be invaluable, because our worst choices are made when our judgment is clouded.

Photo by Niffty..

If we think about how our friends influence our willpower development, the common sense assumption would be that the more virtuous our friends were, the more we’d be inspired to follow their example, and the better off we’d be. And it’s certainly true that it can be very helpful to have a real-life example right in front of you, especially one who can talk to you about how they achieved what they did, and very especially one who developed the thing you admire during the time you’ve known them. But there are also some compelling benefits to having friends with flaws.

More specifically, a friend who has and would like to change some of the same flaws you have and would like to change can be an enormous help.

It's easier being a statue with no legs when you have a friend in the same boat

The reason for this is that someone who has the same flaw as you do really can’t judge you on that flaw. For instance, I often try to pack productive activity into every moment of my day, which sometimes mean that I try to do much and end up being late for something. I have a friend who also has issues with lateness. Whenever I’m meeting my friend, there’s a strange lack of anxiety about either of us being late. If this happens, neither of us feels judged by the other one, because after all, the role is often reversed.

What this means for us is that we can easily and comfortably discuss our issue with being late, including the situations that led up to it. We can throw around practical ideas for what’s going on and how to fix it. Sharing a problem with someone can, under the right circumstances, take a lot of the anxiety out of having the problem in the first place.

Another benefit of a friendship with someone who shares a problem with you is that you can see that problem from the outside, without it being connected to you. This can yield new insight and new resolve (commonly known as the “Dear god, I don’t do that–do I?” effect).

While it might be tempting because of this to try to encourage new shortcomings in your more perfect friends, people who consistently do well at something can be annoyingly set in their ways. So if you have an issue you’re working on and want to be able to talk about it with someone who is in no position to judge you but might have some really useful insights, it can often be constructive to go out and find new people who share that same issue, whether it’s through a group that meets in real life, cultivating a friendship, or joining a discussion group on the Web. The point isn’t so much to cultivate a new, lifelong friendship as to connect with someone who understands where you’re coming from.

And if you’re having trouble finding people who share your specific concerns, you can get some benefit from just looking at how other people work with their willpower and self-motivation issues. Virtually everyone has some bad habit or some goal they haven’t managed to motivate themselves toward as much as they’d like, and as we see from this site, the basic tools of self-motivation are very similar regardless of what that self-motivation is used for (while understanding that attaining a goal takes a bit of a different approach from changing a habit).

This is just one way in which you can draw support from other people to improve your life; we’ll look at other ways in future posts.

Photo by caffeinehit.

A friend posed this question:

“What do you do when you have two conflicting things to get done? For example, for me it’s writing vs. studying.  Both take the same amount of focus, time and activity level.  One is more pleasurable, and one is more necessary.

“So when I have a block of time in which I could EITHER write or study……….I end up surfing the web for hours.  In that web-surfing loop where you don’t really look at anything, just go to the same sites over and over to see if they’ve been updated since three minutes ago.  To be honest, it makes me feel like that story in I, Robot: Runaround.  I experience this practically every time I schedule writing-and-studying time for myself.”

It’s a good question, and one I definitely identify with in my own experience. When I have more than one important thing to do, all of the important tasks are weighing on me at once. If I undertake one of them without making special effort to handle this problem, the fact that I’m not doing the others will distract and upset me. For me, this gets worse when there are more things to do, because then it’s hard to even identify all of the things that need doing, and the other priorities will plague me without my even being fully aware of what they are.

One of the reasons we often turn to something completely self-indulgent in these cases is that we hope it will take our mind off all of our other concerns. For example, what if I have the option of writing or studying or watching a good movie? If I do the writing, the fact that I have studying to do might continue to bother me. If I do the studying, the ignored writing might be the pain in my neck. But if I watch the movie and like it, I might be so swept up in the story that I don’t think about either writing or studying–so that the only solution that gives me any relief is the only one that in the long term doesn’t help me at all.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this. Actually, there might be a bunch of solutions to this, but there’s one solution that I know (and that I’ve recently been using more and more). It has three parts: listing, prioritizing, and resigning.

Listing: If you have a lot of things to do, it helps to list them out. If a lot of things are bothering or distracting you, list them all–but if there are only a couple or a few major issues to tackle, don’t bother with all of the lower-priority ones, and instead just list that couple or those few.

In this way the part of your brain that has been devoted to keeping track of them all can rest, because you now have them all on paper and aren’t in danger of forgetting. Listing also allows you to start

Prioritizing: Looking at your list, you decide what one or two or ten things are really the most important for you to tackle right away. Some might call for a quick action but not be of desperate importance (for instance, calling your friend back and confirming that you’ll be at a party tomorrow), but most of your top items should be chosen for importance, whether or not they would need to be done immediately. Try to avoid prioritizing things that are in your face but that don’t matter much in the scheme of things. For instance, you might have noticed for the hundredth time today that you have a little trouble finding any CD in your CD collection, and it may occur to you to organize your CDs. This idea could be very much on your mind, yet not really at all important in the scheme of things. This shouldn’t “float to the top” unless you really have nothing more important to do (in which case your life must be far, far more peaceful than mine!)

Keep in mind that it’s not remotely necessary to prioritize all your tasks: just figure out which are the top ones, and then of those, make sure at least the top few are in priority order. If two things are exactly as important, choose whichever one you’re more enthusiastic about. If a task is very large, try to break it up into sub-tasks and then prioritize those. For instance, if you have three years worth of personal papers to file, break the list item “File all those papers” down and start with a task “Spend 15 minutes starting in on filing.” You can take the rest and make it a task, “Continue with filing,” which can spawn other tasks in future.

I know I’m getting into organizational techniques instead of obvious motivation techniques here, but among the elements of motivation are knowledge of what you need to motivate yourself to do and goal-setting. The listing step covers the knowledge, and this step covers goal-setting. When you’re done with prioritization, you should have a sub-list of Important Things and single thing at the top of that list. This now allows you to begin

Resigning yourself to the idea that you can only under normal circumstances do one thing at a time. (Note: a later post of mine goes into more detail about resigning ourselves to making good choices.) If you decide to study, for instance, your brain may pipe up “But … I have to do some writing!” This is a broken idea, a lie that you’re telling yourself. In fact, you don’t have to do some writing right then. Writing will come later, and as good as it might be to get some done now, you can’t write at the same time as you’re studying, and for the moment you’ve chosen to study. If you’ve broken up your large studying task into chunks, then perhaps what you have decided to do is study one particular chapter, or study for one hour. And you know that when that hour or chapter is over, if you are still on discretionary time, you’ll be able to switch over to writing then. Get at peace with the idea that nothing is going to get done right away except your top priority. When you catch yourself manufacturing broken ideas, repair them one by one until you feel calm and ready to begin. It’s not an easy thing, but once done, the need to do anything other than what you’ve chosen to do goes away, and you can get to work without distraction.

TV picture by Qfamily; writing picture by Ed Yourdon .

Here’s an issue Merrie Haskell, a writer, mentions in a comment to an earlier post: “I’ve noticed that I go through periodic surges of willpower. (I guess that’s what I mean.) I will be in a rut for months, and really feel stuck; then wake up one morning, and like a switch has been thrown, go into hyperdrive.”

Merrie’s hyperdrive clearly works for her: she’s sold well over a dozen short stories, including sales to two of the most demanding science fiction and fantasy markets, Asimov’s Science Fiction and Strange Horizons. Clearly doing something well isn’t the same as feeling motivated to do it all the time. So what’s happening?

The short answer is that self-motivation–whether for writing or for any other project–is complex, and there are a number of factors that can influence it. The longer answer names some of those factors, and as we name them, we can begin to see that they influence each other, so that one advantage can turn into a lot of advantages, and one obstacle can turn into a lot of obstacles.

We won’t be able to look at all of the elements of motivation in this one post, or go into any in depth, but we can see some of the more prominent pieces and how they fit together.

Motivating ourselves has some basic requirements. For instance, we usually need to believe what we are trying to do will provide the result we want, to care about the result, and to believe we’re capable of achieving it. In addition to those basic requirements, there are some pieces that can really support and enhance self-motivation, like the support of others, feedback loops, and recognition. Lastly, to consciously pursue a goal, we need to take certain steps, like clarify what the goal is, gather the information we’ll need to make good choices, and figure out where the time will come from to achieve our goal.

If any of these pieces falters, the others can be disrupted, or at least slowed down. For instance, if I’m in the middle of writing a novel and lose faith that anyone will ever be interested in reading it, my enthusiasm is likely to crash. This is a crisis of believing that the goal will achieve its purpose, one of those prerequisites I mentioned.

What makes this worse is that even if I regain that confidence soon after, it has already had a chance to influence other elements. For instance, losing confidence that the novel will be read makes me stop writing, and when I can’t get up the enthusiasm to write, I could lose the belief that I can finish the thing at all. Losing these beliefs can cause me to stop feeling enthusiastic about the goal I picture myself achieving. I stop having writing to show to friends and downplay the importance of the project, which could cause the friends to decide I’m not interested in it any more and withdraw their support for it, which deprives me of the feedback I’d been getting that helped keep the project going. And so on.

So what do we do about these insidious slides? Tackle them one piece at a time. Fortunately, we have an advantage in getting back on track, which is that just as the failure of one element tends to lead to the failure of others, getting one element working encourages the others to work, too. For instance, seeking out someone who’s been enthusiastic about pieces of my novel that they’ve read so far can help rekindle my enthusiasm for the project and my belief that it’s worthwhile, at the same time that it brings in the support of others and provides me with feedback. Clarifying my goal for the book (say, a novel in a given genre of a given length, finished by a given date) and making a plan to meet that goal can get me writing regardless of whether I feel enthusiastic or not, which moves me closer to the goal, which tends to make me more enthusiastic.

This process may sound familiar: it has a lot in common with mood congruity, which I discuss in another post. In either case, the solution is the same: if you break out of the pattern you’re in to do one positive thing, you’ll be going in the right direction.

Takeaways:

• Strong self-motivation means a number of elements are working together to move the project forward.
• Problems with one element of self-motivation can cause problems with other elements.
• If you find yourself losing momentum on a project, find one motivating thing you can concentrate on and focus on doing that, regardless of whether you feel enthusiastic about it at the moment or not.

Photograph by V’ron

My older sister, Su, was a mystery to me in one particular way for many years. Here’s the mystery: all the time we were growing up, Su had a modest weight problem that, I think, really bugged her. The year she graduated from college, she moved to New York City and took an administrative job at Cooking Light magazine (she has since moved up through the ranks to become an editor of a sister magazine).

Four or five years after Su moved to New York, there was a change in her: she started eating differently, getting more exercise, and from what I could see, thinking differently. I remember, for instance, how enthusiastic she was about a particular brand of popsicle that fit in really well with the kinds of meals she was planning.

And in due time, her weight problem was gone. Su became downright svelte–and has continued in an extremely healthy lifestyle ever since.

The great mystery to me was how Su became so powerfully motivated: she acquired focus, discipline, and enthusiasm for her goals that she hadn’t had before. This has always struck me as impressive, even a little heroic. How do people do that? I wondered for a long time. And although I learned what some of the pieces to that puzzle were and years later even made my own fitness transformation, for a long time it was just a hypothetical question. It didn’t occur to me for quite a while that there might be a real answer to it, if I broke the question down into its key elements.

But in doing research on a book project, it became clear to me that I needed an answer for this question, the question of how people become motivated to achieve what has always been beyond them in the past. And there must be an answer, because people like Su did it. So I started researching, and thinking, and taking notes, and rapidly pieces of the puzzle began to become clear, some of them pieces that I had already turned up over 8 years of reading and studying about cognitive psychology and related topics but just hadn’t realized had to do with self-motivation. Soon I decided I needed to put aside my previous book project for a while and instead begin shaping a book about self-motivation.

Each insight led me on to more clues, and I began investigating tangental subjects–neuropsychology, schema therapy, even body language–that yielded more answers. I began working systematically on my own self-motivation with goals that were important to me, and later began doing a little bit of coaching for friends who wanted to work on their own self-motivation.

And since I think about this subject every day, and am turning up more information than I’ll even be able to fit in that single book, I started this site.

This site is not about motivating others; that’s a different topic, a question of management and communication and strategy and interpersonal relations. And it’s not about inspiration. There are any number of people who can offer inspiration or experiences that will charge us up for a day or a week, to help give a motivational push.

Instead, this site is about the specific mechanics behind how we become motivated, and about what specific techniques we can use to make those mechanics work in our favor. It draws on many books, on psychological studies, on personal experience, on my coaching work, and on my discussions with other people about their own lives. And because I hope to show the inner workings of self-motivation, how the parts fit together, where the power comes from and how it’s transmitted, I’m calling this “The Willpower Engine.”

I’m always looking for comments: questions, ideas for research, contact from people who are interested in the subject, post suggestions, and so on. Willpower is a complex subject, but it’s one that’s well worth mastering, and for me, one that’s well worth talking to people about.