Imagine it’s morning, and you’ve got a few minutes when you can really relax. Maybe you’re just sitting down with a cup of coffee, or your commuter train has left the station and you’ve got your headphones on, or hell, I don’t know, you’re taking a short break before work to sit in the dark with your collection of antique textiles. The point is, here is a time when your mind can be serene and undisturbed. It’s a perfect time to motivate yourself–just not a perfect time to actually  do anything.

This means you have an opportunity for some motivational groundwork–visualization, for instance–that can make good decisions during the rest of your day easier and more enjoyable, because most of the time when we actually need to motivate ourselves, serenity and lack of distractions are hard to come by.

Now, you may be thinking of visualization as one of those flaky pseudo-spiritual things where you tell yourself things that aren’t true or visualize money sneaking out of people’s wallets to come stay with you, its true master. Those are emphatically not the kind of visualizations I’m talking about. So what kind am I talking about? Daydreams, dear reader. Sitting there are making yourself happy by picturing a situation you might be able to get yourself into in the future. For instance, you might picture yourself burning a copy of your mortgage (because it’s completely paid off, not because your heat has been shut off), or doing a job you would love that you aren’t yet qualified for, or accomplishing amazing acts of physical fitness.

You might also be thinking “Forget that! I don’t want to spend the one serene moment of my morning slaving away on mental improvement!” But why not? Visualizing your goals is an exceptionally pleasant way to spend time. What’s more serene than daydreaming that something wonderful has happened (apart from reflecting on something wonderful that has already happened, that is)?

The glories of visualization are threefold: first, you can do it at any convenient point in your day. Second, the better you visualize the thing, the more enjoyable it is. And third, visualizing things makes it a lot easier to be motivated to accomplish them.

After all, if you’re trying to get your finances on track and have a choice of spending $38 on an attractive geegaw or not, it’s a lot easier to feel good about not spending the money if you can easily associate that decision with something pleasurable, like the image (still fresh in your mind from visualization earlier that day) of you paying off the last dollar of your credit card debt and being able to tweet “Debt free at last, debt free at last!”

The expression “you have to see it to believe it” applies here. If we aren’t picturing the futures we’re trying to create, they have only a weak and theoretical pull on us. The more time we spend in those futures, reminding ourselves of why we’re trying to shake ourselves of problem habits or to take difficult steps that will really help us, the more naturally motivated we’ll feel to actually follow through.

For effective visualization, honestly try to do it every day. Leave yourself a reminder in the spot where you’d be most likely to have time to do a little visualizing, if that helps. And if you experience an odd sense of déjà vu when the wonderful things start happening, it’s a small price to pay.

Photo by *PaysImaginaire*.

This New York Times blog entry had at least two interesting pieces of information in it for me, echoing ideas I’d seen elsewhere. At the same time, it seemed to take a very narrow view of the subject of willpower: the studies they talk about look at body chemistry only, and while that’s an important part of the picture, it doesn’t offer nearly as many opportunities for improving self-motivation as the psychological parts of the picture do. After all, they’re about studies where groups of people are asked to do tasks they don’t care about, then either are or aren’t given some lemonade. These are very useful studies, but any time we look at this kind of information, it helps to remember that there are a lot of habits and thought processes going on that we’re not even touching.

So with that disclaimer, here are the things that might be most useful to us directly in understanding self-motivation:

First, we have a limited amount of energy and attention to give to self-motivation or changing habits at one time. If we try to push in too many directions at once, we’ll rapidly become fatigued and usually lose our grip on all of the pieces. This is why, generally speaking, self-motivation works best when we work on one and only one kind of goal at a time. This can sometimes include mutually supportive sub-goals, like working on both diet and exercise or physical organization and time management, but two very different goals will suck attention and energy away from each other unless at least one of them has already developed into a habit. Fortunately, we can develop a new habit and then move on to a new goal, so that over time we can address many goals.

The second useful point is that self-control draws energy from our body in the same way physical tasks do. It helps to be aware of this to understand when we’ll be capable of better self-motivation (which is to say, not when we’re hungry, distracted, or tired) and to understand that eating habits can directly affect how much we can motivate ourselves at any given time. For anyone working on weight loss, this is a point in favor of the “smaller meals, more often” approach.

The Times has several other interesting pieces on willpower that I’ll delve into in the near future.

Takeaways:

• Self-motivation is influenced both by our thinking and by our physical state
• A little food energy can help boost self-motivation in the short term
• We have a limited capacity for reversing our habits, so to be effective, that effort has to be focused rather than used to try to change everything at once