It’s a common idea in our culture that we can do better if we just try harder. And it’s true that the more times we try something, the more likely we are to succeed, so that’s useful. It’s also true that sometimes a person’s point of view can change, and they can find themselves much more driven to accomplish something they haven’t been able to do before, like the smoker who has a heart attack and finds her attention focused on getting healthy in a new and powerful way. Yet usually, “just trying harder” is worse than useless. Here’s why.

The idea of “just trying harder” assumes that a person wasn’t trying as hard as they were inclined to already. “Trying harder” is based on the idea that we have some power, some reserve of will, that we’re holding back and have simply not deigned to use, even though we could use it at any time we wanted. For most of us, in most situations, that’s not the case: we’re using all the motivation we can muster. Trying harder is a nice idea, but not something that is really going to emerge, because the next time we’re presented with the same situation, we’re likely to be about the same person with about the same priorities and about the same resources, following about the same habits for about the same reasons. All of which means that we can expect our results to be about the same.

Fortunately, there is another option. Instead of trying harder, we have the option of trying differently.

Trying differently means paying attention to different aspects of our situation, choosing to think different thoughts, and following different procedures. Here are some specific ways in which we can do things differently:

• Mindfulness: When the problem situation comes up again, we take a moment to reflect on what we’re thinking, on what our values are, and on patterns we’re following.
• Idea repair: This one goes well with mindfulness, and involves detecting and then repairing misleading and destructive thoughts when we allow ourselves to think them.
• Planning: Planning how to act in advance, like setting aside extra time before leaving for an appointment to avoid running late, can provide options that under normal circumstances aren’t available.
• Redirecting: When a problem situation comes up, instead of putting our efforts into trying to resist the behavior we don’t want, we can focus our attention on the behavior we do want, especially the positive things about it.

These aren’t the only approaches that can empower us to act differently, although they are some of the most useful. The key thing to take away here is that failure is often not so much a sign of weakness or limitation or of not trying hard enough as it is a sign that next time, another approach might make all the difference in the world.

Here’s a common idea of what willpower is. Does it sound familiar?

You’re faced with a choice, like french fries versus carrot sticks or cleaning the house versus dropping onto the couch and watching TV. One of the choices is the one you’d like to actually do now, and the other one is the one you know you’ll wish you had chosen later. So a battle commences between the good choice and the bad choice, and according to this line of thinking willpower means using plain force of character to conquer the bad choice and make the good choice win.

The problem with the idea that willpower as a struggle against bad impulses is that it lines the situation up so that a lot of the time, we lose. People who successfully make the good choices, the choices that lead to long-term happiness instead of short-term pleasure, are not fighting those same fights and winning: they’re pulling the situation apart and preventing the fight from ever occurring.

Just how this works begins to come clear when we look at the kind of thinking that goes into each approach. Let’s take the example of cleaning the house versus watching TV. With the fighting approach, some typical thoughts might be “I really should clean the house, but I don’t want to. I just feel like flopping down on the couch and watching TV. But I need to clean the house! Then again, I’ve had a lousy day, and I deserve at a little rest …”

These kinds of situations lend themselves to generating broken ideas, which tend to derail good choices. Also, thinking about a good choice vs. a bad choice as a struggle tends to lead to focusing on the negatives of the good choice, which is exactly the reverse of what we want, because it makes it harder to care about the good choice.

What’s the alternative? Focusing on small steps toward and attractive things about the good choice. An example of a small step: “Maybe I could just start by putting the books away. That should only take a few minutes.” Something attractive about the good choice might be visualizing how it would feel to wake up the next morning to a clean house or thinking about what kind of music to play while cleaning the stove. Anything that makes the good choice more appealing, interesting, or absorbing, and anything that launches us down the path of starting to act out the good choice, makes the good choice noticeably easier.

It’s clear that as humans, we like to think about pleasant things and don’t like to think about unpleasant things. If we direct our energies toward thinking up pleasant things about the smarter choice rather than toward brainstorming the reasons we don’t want to take that smarter choice, not only are we much more likely to take the smarter choice, but it will be easier and less tiring to do so. This is part of what I talk about in my article “Does Willpower Really Get Used Up?” Willpower seems finite if it’s a force we have to bring to bear in fight after fight. If instead it’s a different way of looking at things, why should it ever get used up or diminished? In fact, the more we use willpower in the sense I mean it here, the better we get at it, and therefore the stronger the willpower gets.

In other words, instead of likening willpower to a muscle we tire out with use but build up over time, we might want to think of it more as a language we learn, as a skill that gets stronger the more we use it, without having to fight ourselves. After all, if we’re fighting ourselves, who is there to lose the battle but us?

One of the current books I’m reading is David Allen’s excellent guide to task management, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I’ll certainly have more to say about this book in future posts, but Allen makes one particular point that’s immediately useful: if you want to be relaxed and focused, it makes all the difference in the world if you capture the things you’re concerned about and get them out of your head–that is, if you type them out or write them down.

One use of this principle is in dealing with a thought that’s nagging at you or upsetting you. To use this idea, you write out everything that’s in your mind about the problem: your concerns, possible solutions, fears, and so on. Doing all of this stops these thoughts from swirling around in an incomplete state within your head, leaving a more peaceful, constructive and resolved state of mind.

Allen himself doesn’t really go into why this process works, at least not in what I’ve read so far, and he isn’t really concerned with how it can be applied in areas other than task management. It’s enough for him to say that to handle tasks, it’s important to have a system for collecting all tasks needing to be done as they arrive and getting them on paper or onto the computer so that you can prioritize and deal with them instead of fretting about them. But some of the reasons capturing your responsibilities in writing can work so well are clear from other things we know about motivation and mood. For instance, we know that the human brain is designed to focus on only one thing at a time, so having multiple responsibilities or concerns knocking around mentally is stressful and not very constructive.

Similarly, we know that mindfulness–conscious consideration of what’s going on in our own brains–helps nourish constructive behaviors and opens up the possibility of detecting and repairing broken ideas. Broken ideas can’t really be tackled unless they are laid out explicitly, and writing is often the easiest and most effective way to do this. As long as a broken idea is floating around inside a mind without being fully detected and named, it can cause damage while the person is having it may not even realize it’s there.

For task management, of course, there are more steps to go through after writing things down. But for some of the other useful applications of this idea, writing down can sometimes be all that’s needed. And even when there’s more work to be done after, writing down stray thoughts instead of letting them roam is the first step in many complete solutions.

Photo by tnarik

With fellow Blue Wave students after earning our black stripes (last rank before black belt), October 2009

After flirting with consistent exercise for two decades, in 2005 I took advantage of being in Florida to finally start running regularly. That experience, which I talked about in a 2006 radio commentary for Jacksonville, Florida NPR affiliate WJCT, completely changed my understanding of exercise. It turned out that the very beginning of exercise, getting into the groove, was much harder than continuing–and that far from being unrelenting torture, regular exercise could actually be enjoyable.

I ought to have recognized this already: after all, soccer had been fun in grade school, ultimate frisbee entertained me during college, and I’d enjoyed fencing classes in my twenties. But neither running nor any of these other activities prepared me for what would happen when I took on a new kind of exercise in late 2006. For me, getting involved in Taekwondo was to running as April in Paris is to June in Cincinnati.

Martial arts as a family sport
A little background: I studied Uechi Ryu karate for about a year at college and had enjoyed it enough that for years I had it in the back of my head that I’d eventually want to pursue martial arts again. By 2006, my son had gotten old enough that we were looking for a program for him as well. I had assumed we’d study karate, in different classes, but when my son was invited to a friend’s birthday party at Blue Wave Taekwondo in Burlington, Vermont (the town where we lived), it was immediately obvious that this was the place for us to try. For one thing, they taught classes that parents and kids could attend together, a possibility I hadn’t even thought of. For another thing, my son’s friend’s family couldn’t say enough about how friendly, well-organized, and instructive the school was. To top this off, the school was (and still is) run by Master Gordon White, a personable sixth-dan black belt who had fought on the U.S. National Taekwondo team and won medals in international competition.

I’m not suggesting Taekwondo is every person’s ideal exercise. It’s social, very energetic, rigorous, formal, demanding, and a little rough. My older sister loves spinning and rollerblading; my younger sister loves dancing; and my father prefers canoeing, kayaking, and cross-country skiing. So I’m not so much suggesting you run out and start taking Taekwondo (although it’s not a bad idea for a lot of people), but that if you don’t yet love the kind of exercise you’re doing, there’s a good chance you just haven’t found the right kind of exercise yet.

Why Taekwondo works for me
Taekwondo offers some unusual benefits that fit my needs well. I like the people I spend time with at the dojang (Taekwondo gym), which helps. Taekwondo as practiced at Blue Wave is rigorous interval training (probably the best general kind of exercise for weight loss), and it builds muscle as well as providing a lot of aerobic exercise.

Some of the greatest benefits for me, though, are mental instead of physical: the need to always improve my fundamentals (kicks, strikes, blocks, stances, and so on) exercises parts of my brain that I suspect would otherwise be neglected. And while we’re in class I’m usually so engrossed at trying to master whatever we’re working on that the time flies by. As I talk about in my post on getting into a state of flow, some of the basic elements we need to become engrossed and driven in what we’re doing are challenge, specific goals, and constant feedback. All of these elements are available when a good instructor is teaching a complex physical skill, like martial arts, dancing, or fencing. Not everyone will connect with those activities in the ways that are needed to establish flow, but the opportunity is there.

To put the same thing more simply: Taekwondo keeps me so interested, I don’t greatly care how much work I’m doing to practice it.

Why Blue Wave works for me
Not all martial arts–or all Taekwondo schools–are created equal. Different martial arts offer different advantages, such as the directed force of Aikido; the intense focus of karate; the powerful physical grappling of judo; or the flow and speed of kung fu. Different martial arts will attract different kinds of people, although it’s important to understand that different martial arts also provide different kinds of workouts: for instance, not all martial arts are very helpful for weight loss.

Blue Wave teaches forms and fundamentals as well as Olympic Style sparring, which is a very energetic, physically demanding type of contest between fighters wearing padded safety gear. Olympic Style sparring is fairly safe and is practiced in tournaments from the local to the international level, including, of course, at the Olympics. To the best of my knowledge (understanding that my experience is limited), no other martial art offers such a well-defined and safety-conscious sport of sparring.

So Olympic Style Taekwondo sparring for me is as much a sport as a martial art, which gives more direction to my training and provides more ways to enjoy Taekwondo. But many Taekwondo schools don’t teach Olympic Style sparring, or they focus on other elements of Taekwondo, or they practice a type of Taekwondo that is not based on rigorous traditional practices. None of these kinds of schools would work nearly as well for me as Blue Wave would, although Blue Wave is far from unique: there are many excellent Taekwondo programs around the country and the world.

I could go on about what I like about Blue Wave, but if I’ve done what I intended, I’ve shown at least one example of finding a kind of exercise that really fits the person doing it, enough to provide a glimpse of what April in Paris looks like. Here’s hoping you’re already there, or if not, that April comes soon.

Photo by 2nd dan Blue Wave black belt Sandra Pavlo

Just before Thanksgiving, I posted How Not to Blow a Diet Over the Holidays, which contained the best information I had to offer about holding to a difficult course of fitness and weight loss during a time of year crammed with distractions, temptations, and surprises. Toward the end of the post I said, “Today I weigh 182 pounds. I’ll update this post in early January to let you know how it came out for me: I expect to have lost at least a few pounds.” Was my prediction sound? And just how useful did I find my own recommendations?

What worked
Well, my rash declaration definitely helped me focus my attention and reminded me to use the best knowledge I have. (After all, just knowing something isn’t the same thing as making active use of the knowledge), and the self-motivation skills I’ve been researching and writing about seem to have done the trick: my scale this morning tells me I weigh 177, five pounds less than I did a few days before Thanksgiving. I’ve lost roughly a pound a week over that time, most of it in the beginning of December, and am very close to my goal fitness level. (Exactly how close, I can’t be sure, as I’m not aiming for a number on the scale, but instead for a level of visible fitness.)

Did my pre-Thanksgiving strategies help me? Absolutely. I made a point of bringing food I could eat to celebrations and meals, planned what to eat ahead of time (including limits), took special care to track what I was eating, and talked freely about what I was doing to get support and to increase the potential rewards of sticking with it.

Unexpected complications
So did my own pre-holiday advice eliminate all trouble for me? Definitely not. The two problems I wasn’t expecting seem obvious in hindsight, but when I was making my plans, all I was worried about was the food that would be available to me.

The first of the surprise problems was time for exercise. I generally try to exercise as close as possible to every day. Over the holidays, there were a number of days when I would be with friends or family in all of my available time, and the idea of getting everyone up after Christmas dinner to go for a family run somehow didn’t seem very appropriate to me. Also, my habit of taking 3-5 Taekwondo classes a week was interrupted by holiday closures of the dojang (Taekwondo gym). So I squeezed in exercise when and where I could, more than once getting on the elliptical trainer or doing home Taekwondo practice well after 10:00 at night. In future, I’d want to plan better for these scheduling challenges, probably getting in some morning exercise instead of following my usual evening schedule–but I will also know to expect that I’ll get less exercise over the holidays, and to a limited extent, that’s OK with me.

The other problem I faced was a one-two punch: I would arrive home tired (though cheerful) after having eaten at irregular hours and spent the day with family or friends. I don’t know about you, but for me the combination of being tired and being off my normal eating schedule is a very bad one: it tends to make me feel hungry and inattentive, which means I’ll often just take whatever I think of first and eat it–hardly a recipe for weight loss success. A day like this broke my winning streak of keeping under 1700 calories a day and logging everything I ate, which had gotten up to 42 interrupted days. I’m now in the early days of a new winning streak, and have high hopes that it will carry me across my personal finish line as I rack up the days.

One good holiday season may be the most I’ll ever need
As I write this and do my best to extract knowledge for future (an example of keeping a feedback loop), I’m realizing that if all goes well, it’s very, very likely that when the 2010 holidays come around, I’ll have been on maintenance for quite a while, and while I’ll need to continue to be careful, I won’t need to be nearly as careful as I am now. In other words, losing weight over this past holiday season together with continued effort may mean I’ll never have to be quite so careful over the holidays again. Even if I had done no better than maintain my weight during that time, the same result would probably apply. For many people who are getting in shape, one really successful holiday season may be the make-or-break period for the entire process.

How did things go for you over the holidays? Any special difficulties or unusual accomplishments?

Regardless of how the holidays came out for you in terms of your health, we’re now at a time of year that is probably better suited to renewing commitment and redoubling efforts than any other, and we can use it to launch ourselves forward. Here’s to a powerfully motivated New Year.

Photo by oh_candy

In recent articles I’ve posted about choosing a New Year’s resolution and why New Year’s resolutions often fail. Now that 2010 has begun, here are 5 ways to make a New Year’s resolution stronger.

1. Schedule a regular time to think about it
New goals can tend to get shoved out of the way when things get busy or complicated. To make sure that they always come back into the spotlight, it’s important to take time to think, talk, or write about that goal on a regular basis. This kind of attention helps encourage problem-solving and makes more opportunities to reflect on and reinforce the kinds of behaviors that will support the goal.

2. Set waypoints
If your new goal is a long-term one, getting to the vision you have for yourself may be a long, challenging trek. Setting waypoints makes goals more immediate and rewarding. For example: if you’re decluttering your house, make each room a goal of its own, the entire focus of your attention until it’s done. While working on that room, you deliberately give yourself permission not to worry about the rest of the house. It’s a lot easier to come to grips with organizing a room than organizing a house, and worrying about the whole thing at once will only get in the way of the large job at hand.

3. Read and learn
Find books, online forums, blogs, in-person groups, magazines, articles, or any other resource that will help you learn how to pursue your goal better, or even just inspire you to keep pursuing it. Learning more about your goal gives you more power to move toward it, keeps it fresh in your mind, and often provides a vision of what things might be like as you see more success.

4. Be prepared for a few failures
If habits were the kind of thing we could just switch off, there would be no need for willpower. Trying to change a bad habit, adopt a good one, or make regular progress to achieve something challenging is difficult and is likely to involve some setbacks now and then. If and when these come, unless you’re defusing a bomb or building a card house, all is not lost. It will help enormously to step back and try to recover soon from a problem rather than saying “Oh, I blew it–now it doesn’t matter what I do.” Failure is a normal byproduct of success, and a lost battle isn’t the same as a lost war.

5. Stay inspired
Taking on anything challenging means that there will be times when you don’t feel like working on your goal and are faced with the choice of pushing ahead or giving up. At these times, it makes a real difference if you’re in touch with why you’re doing what you’re doing and have kept your enthusiasm for it alive. Visualize what things will be like as you make more progress; review the things that draw you toward your goal; reflect on past accomplishments; explain to friends or family why you’ve chosen the path you have; or do anything else you can to keep yourself inspired. Inspiration does not automatically create willpower, but it certain does help fuel it.

Photo by Tim in Sydney

In many past and contemporary world cultures, the beginning of a new year has been a time to repent old mistakes, reflect on choices, and aspire to better things in future. Our own tradition of New Year’s resolutions reflects this. Unfortunately, our tradition of failing to meet our New Year’s Resolutions is almost as strong as our tradition of making them. Why?

There are 4 key problems with the way New Year’s resolutions are usually made. Avoiding these problems can transform what might otherwise be nothing more than a well-intentioned gesture into a personal victory.

1. Only make a New Year’s Resolution if you’re not in the middle of another life change
If you’re already working on fixing your financial habits, don’t try to take on weight loss or learning French or organizing your files at the same time. Every change in habits or substantial project requires attention and focus. Trying to spread that attention and focus too widely typically brings all of the efforts down, because in this situation, there’s not enough brain time to fully support any one of them.

2. Make only one New Year’s Resolution
This is another part of making sure you can focus your attention: to make real progress, hold yourself to one new goal at a time.

3. Plan immediate steps, not just long-term ideals
While it’s important to understand your ultimate goal, it’s also important to define what your first steps will be toward achieving it. A goal of “Write a novel” or “expand sales into the northwestern states” is so large and complex that thinking about trying to achieve it directly is overwhelming and tends to sap motivation. It’s much more effective to focus on what the very first steps to achieving the goal might be, like choosing a novel premise from a list of book ideas or researching demographics for target markets.

4. Set aside a regular time to refocus and do feedback
Any attempted change in habits or push to accomplish a project will falter and fail unless your attention is brought back to it on a regular basis. With some projects and responsibilities, like taking care of a baby, you’re naturally prodded to not forget. On most, though, keeping attention focused means setting aside time–preferably at least a couple of times a week–to review progress so far and plan ways to stay on track and improve.

Our New Year’s Resolutions are traditionally made regardless of what else we’re doing in our lives, in bunches, with only large goals in mind, and without specific plans for follow-through. By bucking this trend and carefully nurturing one new goal at a time with specific, short-term steps and regular feedback, we can participate in the tradition of making New Year’s resolutions without participating in the tradition of  failing to keep them.

Photo by hebedesign

There are at least three good times to target a new life goal:

1) When a person doesn’t have a goal at the moment and decides to improve life by getting one
2) When the goal or goals a person has already been pursuing turn out to be no longer necessary or not as high-priority as they once were (or once seemed), or
3) When work toward a current goal has gone so far that everything needed to keep on track for that goal has become habit, or in the case of a goal that’s a specific project, when that project is finished.

Should I always have a goal?
It’s hard to imagine that there’s anyone who has achieved every goal that would ever do them or others good–which suggests that if it’s practical, it’s probably worth having a goal nearly all the time.

But there’s that limitation, “if it’s practical”: is it always practical? Probably not absolutely all the time: if a person is dealing with a major crisis in the family or temporarily working 80 hours a week to deal with a short-term problem, there’s probably so much time, attention, and energy going into that short-term problem that long-term goals would wither from having too little effort going into them.

At the same time, for many people it feels like there’s always a special situation or problem going on: financial crisis after financial crisis, or having to work 80 hours week after week, or constant breakdowns in an important relationship. Even though these can be real crises, the fact that they’re continuing over a long period of time probably means they’re systemic problems: in other words, there’s some underlying difficulty that probably needs to be addressed if these crises are going to stop. Addressing that underlying difficulty would be a goal.

What if I need to pursue two or more goals at once?
Often there are battling needs in our lives that present multiple, top-level priorities, all of which need to be addressed at the same time. Right?

Actually … no. The idea that priorities “need” to be addressed is a broken idea, because “need” is absolute. “Needing” to be done doesn’t mean a thing necessarily can be done, or that it’s the highest priority, or that absolute devastation will occur if it’s not done. A more effective way of looking at things that seem to need to be done is to phrase them in terms of actions and consequences, for instance “If I don’t get the house cleaned before my friends come over, they will see my house dirty” or “If I’m late paying that bill, they’ll charge me an extra $25 and call to ask me where the money is if I don’t call them first.” This is instead of “I need to clean the house!” or “I can’t miss paying that bill!”

The reason I’m pointing to this problem of thinking of priorities as needs is that with rare exceptions, we really can’t take on more than one significant goal at a time. Successfully pursuing a goal means changing habits, devoting thought to the subject, and pulling time and energy away from other tasks. It’s true that if someone has a lot of extra time all of a sudden, for example due to recent retirement, it might be possible to pursue more than one goal at a time, like getting fit and starting a consulting service. Most of us, though, have lives that are already full of other things, and even if some of those things aren’t necessarily a good use of our time, in most cases we’re used to doing them, and it will take a lot of focus to change over to doing something different.

The upshot is that even if there are several really pressing problems to address at the same time, the most effective way to deal with them will be to decide which will pay off the most extravagantly if it’s done first. For instance, if you are constantly overcommitted and don’t have enough money to pay your bills, both of those are pressing problems, but in many cases it will make sense to deal with the overcommitment problem first, because if that’s addressed effectively, there will be more time to address the financial problem, which may in many cases require extra time if a solution is going to be worked out.

Making multiple goals into one goal
There actually is one approach to choosing a goal that can accomplish multiple major life priorities at the same time, which is to focus on process and organization instead of on the goal itself. For instance, I could adopt a goal of trying to do a very good job of making every choice, however small. Practicing this goal would mean things like regularly thinking back over good and bad choices made to try to repeat the good choices and improve on the bad choices; becoming more mindful of thoughts; and possibly adding healthy improvements to life, like meditation or more exercise.

A goal like this could simultaneously help in a lot of areas of life: eating better, making better use of time, improving relationships, spending money more wisely, and so on.

Other goals that serve multiple purposes include communicating better; getting very good at tracking, organizing, and prioritizing tasks; and improving mood. If there’s more than one thing you really want to accomplish in your life at the moment, ask yourself: is there any kind of practice I could learn that would benefit all of these areas?

New Year’s resolutions and other big goals
As we move toward 2010 and (for many people) New Year’s resolutions, I’ll be looking at ways to make and keep a resolution that will really make a difference. This article is the first in the series. The others will be posted over the coming week, right up to New Year’s Day, on my regular Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule.

Photo by simonsterg

If you’re a regular reader of The Willpower Engine, you may be wondering by now what purpose it’s supposed to serve to keep reading new ways to break down self-motivation into one simple concept or another. In one article, I say that willpower is exactly like owning a dog. In another, I say that willpower is a matter of thinking more of the right things and less of the wrong things. And so on.

There is a point to these different perspectives, even though each is a simplification, because each one comes at motivation from a different perspective. The point is that it’s much easier to find and fix the problems with our self-motivation if we keep examining it from different angles. So for today’s article, here’s another way to look at self-motivation: do your self-motivation efforts have all six of these basic requirements?

Direction
In order to motivate ourselves, we need to decide what exactly to motivate ourselves toward. That is, we have to have a clear, attainable goal that tells us what we want to achieve.

Knowledge
Once we see where we want to get, it’s essential to understand what steps are needed to get there. Someone who’s trying to organize needs to learn organization techniques. Someone who’s trying to lose weight needs to learn how much they should be eating each day and how to exercise effectively. Someone who’s trying to renovate a house needs to know how to put up wallboard.

Desire
We are very, very unlikely to be successful in achieving goals we don’t care about, for fairly obvious reasons. It is possible to start caring about a goal (for instance, by carefully considering the benefits), but the self-motivation machine groans to a halt when it runs out of passion.

Time
Pursuing a goal means devoting time to it, and if a person hasn’t been pursuing that goal already, the time needs to come from some other activity. In order to pursue a goal successfully, therefore, it’s essential to carve out time to do that and to know what to do less of in order to free up that time.

Effort
Even if we have a goal, know what needs to be done to achieve it, desire the goal, and set aside time for it, it will not do itself. At a certain point it’s necessary to make a decision to put out effort. Sometimes this is easy, especially if desire has been stoked up. At other times it requires a conscious resolution, saying to ourselves, “OK, now it’s time to put on my sneakers and run.” or “That pile of papers isn’t going to file itself! Let’s get started.”

Attention
Lastly, like a plant that withers and dies without water, goals weaken and get forgotten if they’re not regularly showered with attention. All this means is making a resolution to turn the mind to the goal on a regular basis. One very effective approach to regular attention is a feedback loop. An even more powerful (but more labor-intensive) approach is decision logging.

And that’s it. The reason there’s so much information on this site is that none of these six requirements is always simple. Sometimes it’s hard to choose the right goal, or to know the best way to pursue it once chosen, or to find the time or ignite the desire or to make the effort or to focus the attention. Yet anyone who does all six of these things will make meaningful progress toward their goals: there’s no inborn talent for motivation, no secret ingredient, and no insurmountable barrier. Which is a good thing: just doing these six things takes work enough!

In my previous article, I offered four ways to make self-motivation easier, and talked about stacking up advantages ahead of time instead of waiting to come face to face with a difficult situation. Here I’ll cover five more ways to make self-motivation easier: building up enthusiasm, being more mentally and physically prepared to face challenges, getting help from others, learning, and minimizing temptation.

Visualize and find your enthusiasm
When things are going well, I’m not distracted, and I have time to think about what I want to do, I’m often in a good state of mind to improve my motivation, but by definition these low-demand times tend to be ones when not much motivation is needed. I can build up motivation for harder times by using these opportunities to visualize where I’m trying to get and by otherwise spending time thinking about and especially enjoying my goal, whether I’m reflecting on successes so far, enjoying progress, envisioning future payoffs, or planning ahead. The more time I spend thinking positively about my goal, the more accessible positive thoughts about it will be when I really need them. For instance, if I’m trying to learn to play a musical instrument, I can visualize myself playing it and remind myself why I’m putting in all the hard work.

Take care of yourself
When we get enough sleep, exercise regularly, eat well, and use techniques like meditation to aid mood and mental focus, we’re much more capable of being proactive in our lives than when we are tired, inactive, badly nourished, overstuffed, or carrying around a lot of stress. Mood and physical well-being have an important impact on making good decisions, so everything we can do to improve them will tend to improve  motivation, too.

Get support
Connecting with a friend or family member to talk about your goals, the problems you’re running into, your plans, and your successes is a good way to keep your goal more in mind and to process your thoughts about it. Having someone in your corner can also make it more important to to do well and provides more options if something starts going wrong. A person trying to quit a bad habit can go talk to a supporter when temptation seems particularly strong. Someone trying to get a better job can talk through their plans and strategies if they have a sympathetic ear.

Read, learn
Reading about subjects having to do with our goals serves several purposes at once: it gives us more information to use when making plans; keeps our goal more in our mind; lets us try on others’ ideas; and serves as a physical reminder (whenever we see the book) of what’s being accomplished. Someone trying to get fit can learn a lot from books about nutrition and exercise, like The 9 Truths About Weight Loss. Anyone trying to change habits and running into emotional resistance can benefit from books like Emotional Alchemy, The Feeling Good Handbook, or A Guide to Rational Living.

Minimize temptation
Finally, minimizing temptation can be a real boon, at least in the short term, for anyone who’s really struggling with making the right choices. If you’re working on spending money wisely, you can take any savings you have and put it in a CD or some other instrument that makes it difficult or impossible to withdraw for a time. Someone who’s trying to quit playing video games can actually sell the games rather than hanging on to them to play just a little bit now and then.

This approach is a bit of a crutch, and the problem with relying too much on it is that when a situation comes up where there is temptation–for instance, when the person working on spending gets a tax refund, or when the former video game player is staying with a friend who has a top-notch video game system–the strategies to deal with the temptation may not be very well developed. But like all of these strategies, minimizing temptation–if not relied on absolutely–can help make everything simpler.

Photo by James Jordan