Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE

There are a lot of different ways that people use to motivate themselves. Rather than just tell you about them, I want you to get some experience of finding out about them on your own. Pair up with someone you don't know, and find out how she gets up out of bed in the morning. Everybody here had to do it at least this morning; the ones who can't do it didn't make it to this seminar. Start by asking simply, "How do you get up in the morning?" Your partner will give you one or two fairly general statements about what she does, and you'll have to ask more questions to get the rest of the details.

When you think you have the whole sequence, try it yourself to see if it works for you. For instance, your partner might say, I see the light coining in through the windows, and I say to myself, 'get up' and I get up." If you try that yourself — you look at light in the windows and say to yourself "get up" — you don't necessarily get up. It's not quite enough. You have to do more than that to make it work. People do these things automatically and unconsciously, so often you have to ask a lot of questions in order to get all the pieces.

Since this isn't a strategies seminar, I don't insist that you get every little detail. But I do want you to get the basic pieces in the sequence, and get the key piece that makes a difference. That will usually be an element that changes in a crucial way. With Betty, it was a change in voice tone that actually got her up. To find that out, you really have to be a stickler for detail. If somebody says, "I make a picture of myself getting up," you have to ask for more detail. "Is it a movie? Is it a slide? Does it have color? Is it big? Do you say anything to yourself? What tone of voice do you use?" These small details are what make the sequence work. Some of them will be much more effective than others, and you can find that out by changing them one at a time, and noticing the impact. Pair up now and try this; take about fifteen minutes each. . . .

Well, what did you find in there? How does your partner motivate himself? What were the key pieces in the sequence?

Bill: My partner first hears the alarm clock, and he looks at it as he turns it off. Then he lies down again, and feels how comfortable he is in bed. An internal voice says, "If you stay here, you'll go to sleep and be late," and he makes a picture of a time when he was late to work, and feels bad. Then the voice says, "It will be worse next time," and he makes a bigger picture of what will happen if he's late again, and feels worse. The sequence seems to be "voice, picture, bad feeling." When the bad feeling is strong enough, he gets up.

That's what we call "the old anxiety routine." You keep generating unpleasant feelings until you're motivated to avoid them. Rollo May has that one. He even wrote a long book about it, which can be summarized in one sentence: "Anxiety has been misunderstood; anxiety is good because it gets people to do things."If your motivation strategy runs on anxiety, that's absolutely right. But not everyone has that kind of motivation. For other people anxiety prevents them from accomplishing things. They think of doing something interesting, then they make a picture of how things could go wrong, then they feel anxious and just sit at home.

Suzi: I do something very similar to what Bill's partner does. I tell myself that I can rest for a few more minutes, and I do. But as time passes, my picture of being late gets bigger and closer and brighter. It stays the same picture, but when it's big enough, I have to get out of bed to stop the bad feelings.

Do you procrastinate in other things? (Yes.) How many of the rest of you did term papers at the last minute? The longer you waited, the more motivated you were. Bill's partner has his own internal anxiety generator. Suzi's runs off the clock. They are both very similar in that they use unpleasant feelings as a motivator. Did any of you find an example of motivation that used pleasant feelings — even to do an unpleasant task?

Frank: Yes, Marge pictured all the things she was going to do during the day and felt good about doing them. She said that those pleasant pictures "pulled her out of bed."

What if she only had unpleasant things to do that day? Did you ask her about that?

Frank: Yes, I did. She said she made pictures of those things being all done, and felt wonderful that they were done. That good feeling pulled her out of bed, too. That seemed unreal to me. I can't imagine that actually working, and I wanted to ask you about it.

Where's Marge? . . . Marge, when do you do your taxes? Marge: I have them done by mid–January. It's so nice to have them done, so I can do other things.