What Is Motivation?
Sometimes questions can be easy to answer...
Take a quick tour around the internet looking for articles and information about 'Motivation', and what do you come across? As far as I can see, the majority of information out there can be divided into two areas; 1: Motivation and traditional psychology (including it's derivatives in employment and sports) 2: 'How to' articles using traditional, but weak, methods for 'improving motivation'.
You know what the biggest problem with this is? It doesn't seem to take into account that motivation is both completely natural, and something that is easily modified.
Let me explain this a moment, as I take a slightly different viewpoint.
As an NLP'er I asked this question and came up with something like this; 'motivation is a label for set of processes in the brain that simply make someone want to do, or not do, something'.
You can think of it a little like the effect of desire.
If you want to do something enough, you will do it.
In other words, if you desire something enough, you will find a way of getting it.
Let's go back to the brain issue a moment.
What (sufficient) desire does is create a series of thoughts that inevitably take you toward action.
That action is experienced as motivation.
You can experience this for yourself, in many different ways.
Think of needing to go to the toilet, for example, you don't need to do a goal setting program and think positive thoughts to get you on your feet and moving to the nearest lavatory! You do it automatically.
This is true motivation.
It seems to me that the things that most of the self help articles assume that there are no discrete internal mental processes that can be changed, upgraded, manipulated and improved.
Yet my experience, and that of thousands of NLP'ers is that this is most emphatically not the case.
When I started looking at the issue of motivation it was prompted by a conversation I had with a previous business partner.
We we're finding out what our customers wanted from us, based on feedback and questions sent via email.
One of the things frequently mentioned was the up and down cycle of training (being motivated) and not training.
They wanted to get out of it.
And if you've ever experienced the cycle of action and laziness, or motivation and lethargy, or whatever labels you want to put on it, you'll know how horrid it is, and how much you want to change it.
Indeed this cycle was something that my business partner had suffered with, and wanted to change.
So we went to work and found out how we was currently motivating himself.
What we found was fascinating.
In short, during his periods of sloth and lethargy, he would get further and further away from what he wanted his body to look like, and then he'd hit a point where an alarm went off in his head, and POW, it was time to start working out again.
Now, when I heard this story, I was also taking in the non-spoken information he was giving me.
Information about his unconscious internal processes.
It was here that we needed to make changes.
So that's what we did.
In short, what we found out was highly interesting, highly relevant and, most importantly, highly effective.
What was it? Motivation is a skill that you can learn, that you can improve and that YOU can control.
And from that I developed a 'motivation training course'.
You can think of it as a training course in 'how to want to do, what you don't want to do'.
Thanks for reading, George SuperBootCamps
Take a quick tour around the internet looking for articles and information about 'Motivation', and what do you come across? As far as I can see, the majority of information out there can be divided into two areas; 1: Motivation and traditional psychology (including it's derivatives in employment and sports) 2: 'How to' articles using traditional, but weak, methods for 'improving motivation'.
You know what the biggest problem with this is? It doesn't seem to take into account that motivation is both completely natural, and something that is easily modified.
Let me explain this a moment, as I take a slightly different viewpoint.
As an NLP'er I asked this question and came up with something like this; 'motivation is a label for set of processes in the brain that simply make someone want to do, or not do, something'.
You can think of it a little like the effect of desire.
If you want to do something enough, you will do it.
In other words, if you desire something enough, you will find a way of getting it.
Let's go back to the brain issue a moment.
What (sufficient) desire does is create a series of thoughts that inevitably take you toward action.
That action is experienced as motivation.
You can experience this for yourself, in many different ways.
Think of needing to go to the toilet, for example, you don't need to do a goal setting program and think positive thoughts to get you on your feet and moving to the nearest lavatory! You do it automatically.
This is true motivation.
It seems to me that the things that most of the self help articles assume that there are no discrete internal mental processes that can be changed, upgraded, manipulated and improved.
Yet my experience, and that of thousands of NLP'ers is that this is most emphatically not the case.
When I started looking at the issue of motivation it was prompted by a conversation I had with a previous business partner.
We we're finding out what our customers wanted from us, based on feedback and questions sent via email.
One of the things frequently mentioned was the up and down cycle of training (being motivated) and not training.
They wanted to get out of it.
And if you've ever experienced the cycle of action and laziness, or motivation and lethargy, or whatever labels you want to put on it, you'll know how horrid it is, and how much you want to change it.
Indeed this cycle was something that my business partner had suffered with, and wanted to change.
So we went to work and found out how we was currently motivating himself.
What we found was fascinating.
In short, during his periods of sloth and lethargy, he would get further and further away from what he wanted his body to look like, and then he'd hit a point where an alarm went off in his head, and POW, it was time to start working out again.
Now, when I heard this story, I was also taking in the non-spoken information he was giving me.
Information about his unconscious internal processes.
It was here that we needed to make changes.
So that's what we did.
In short, what we found out was highly interesting, highly relevant and, most importantly, highly effective.
What was it? Motivation is a skill that you can learn, that you can improve and that YOU can control.
And from that I developed a 'motivation training course'.
You can think of it as a training course in 'how to want to do, what you don't want to do'.
Thanks for reading, George SuperBootCamps
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