Using Your Brain —for a CHANGE

Well, it certainly seems to work for her. Nobody enjoys doing taxes, but most people enjoy having them done. The trick is to be able to access that good feeling of having them done ahead of time to get you started. Marge's motivation uses pleasant feelings instead of unpleasant ones. It's less common, and very strange to Frank, who does the opposite.

Lots of people are good at motivating themselves to do pleasant things. They just make pictures of doing the pleasant things, and are so attracted to these pictures that they start doing them. However, that process doesn't work for things you want to have done, but you don't like doing them, If you don't like doing taxes, and you make a picture of doing them, you'll feel repelled. That's not motivating at all. If you want to get motivated positively, you need to think about what's really attractive about a task. If you don't enjoy the task itself, what's attractive is having it done.

Actually there is another piece that needs to be there if Marge's motivation strategy is going to work. How many of you have thought about how nice it will be to have something done, and then you "ran out of gas" when you sat down and started on it?

Marge, when you start on your taxes, what keeps you going?

Marge: All along, I keep thinking about how nice it will be when they're all done.

That's an important piece, but I'll bet you also do something else.

Marge: Well, each time I write down a number or fill in a piece of the form, I feel good about getting that little piece done, too. It's like a little taste of the good feeling I'll have when it's all done.

Right. Those two pieces are what keep you going, and the second one will be more effective than the first. If you just think f it all being done, and it takes some time to finish a project, it can get to seem like "pie in the sky." But that good feeling of accomplishment you get every time you complete a small piece of the task will sustain you through a lot of drudgery.

Marge: That's interesting. It explains a lot of things in my life. People have often called me a "Pollyanna," because I'm always thinking of how good it will be when something unpleasant is over. I always get a lot done, but I've had trouble getting other people to do unpleasant jobs. When I tell them about how nice it will be when it's done, I usually get a blank stare.

Right. They just don't understand. That's not the way they motivate themselves.

Frank: It seems like you're saying that someone can be powerfully and effectively motivated without even having any unpleasant feelings. Is there any hope for the rest of us who propel ourselves with anxiety?

Sure. Like anything else people do, motivation strategies are learned, and you can always learn another one. It's fairly easy to teach you how to use Marge's strategy. But you have to be careful when you make such a pervasive change in someone's life,

Some people make lousy decisions, but since they aren't very motivated, they don't get into much trouble. If you teach them a really effective motivation strategy, they will actually carry out all those bad decisions, and do a lot of stupid, irrelevant, and possibly harmful things. So before I teach someone a powerful new motivation strategy, I make sure that the person already has an effective way of making decisions. If he doesn't, I'll teach him a new decision strategy before I teach him the new motivation strategy.

There are a lot of variations in how people motivate themselves, but we've already got examples of the two major patterns. Most people motivate themselves by thinking about how bad they will feel if they don't do something, and then they move away from that bad feeling. Rat psychologists call this "aversive conditioning."

A few people do the reverse, which is what Marge does. She uses pleasant feelings to move toward what she does want to have happen, instead of away from what she doesn't want to have happen — and she gets reinforcement along the way.

Someone with a motivation strategy like Marge's really lives in an entirely different world than most people — a world without a lot of the anxiety, unpleasantness, and stress that many people experience.

Many people have some combination of the two. They may first think of what will happen if they don't do something, and then think of how nice it will be when it's done.

All motivation strategies work, and you can't knock something that works. However, some of them are a lot faster and more tenacious, and a lot more enjoyable than others.