5 Motivational Mistakes or Something

To achieve great things – to achieve anything – you need to understand how motivation works.

The thing is, our minds don’t work the way we often think they do. (It’s the Inigo Montoya effect: “You keep using that mind. I don’t think it works like you think it works.”)

Therefore, there are some very popular motivational techniques that sound plausible, but are actually counterproductive if you don’t know exactly how to use them. Here are five of these techniques. For each of them, I’ve given an alternative that does work to produce more motivation and more goal achievement.

1. Affirmations

Affirmations do work – but only if you’re affirming something you actually believe to be true.

If you keep telling yourself what you know to be lies about yourself, all it does is create dissonance and disillusionment. If you don’t believe you’re beautiful, standing in front of the mirror saying “I wish I was beautiful” is an exercise in futility. Rather than improving your self-image, it will make it worse. So instead of saying that, say " I am beautiful" It'll make you feel better about yourself instantly.

2. Visualisation

According to a very popular teaching which rhymes with “Flaw of Distraction”, visualising your end goal is pretty much all you need to do in order to achieve it.

In fact, this is an excellent way to ensure that you achieve your goal, no matter how many seminars you attend or products you buy in an attempt to find out why you haven’t “made it” yet. Why you haven’t “made it” is that you’re not taking action. And one of the reasons you’re not taking action is that you’re spending your action-taking time convincing your mind that the goal if out of bounds. So visualize yourself achieveing the goal. (Of course action is equally important here. Only visualizing wont help)

3. Willpower

Willpower works to motivate you – up to a point. That’s the point at which you run out of willpower, because like energy or strength, it’s a finite resource.

Whenever you motivate yourself to do something that you don’t, emotionally, want to do, there are measurable changes in your body and brain. You use up blood sugar, for example. It’s an effort, just the same as running round the block is an effort. And just as you can’t run round the block forever, so you can’t keep making yourself do things that you feel negative about doing forever, however important they are to your long-term happiness. So use willpower but only to do things that you enjoy doing. 

4. Rewards

Rewards can be motivational – but only if they relate to what you’re actually doing.

Whether it’s bribing children with candy to get them to draw pictures or offering workers more money instead of more fulfilling work and more autonomy, “extrinsic” motivators tend to backfire and produce less motivation, not more. So rewards are imporant but only when you've done something to deserve a reward and it shouldn't be something totally irrelevant.

5. Punishment

Punishing or scolding yourself (or someone else) may be one of the most commonly practiced forms of motivation. It’s true that negative consequences are motivational, but only if you use them in a particular way. Otherwise, they just produce resentment and backfire – not only because the emotional associations with the goal become negative, but also because the punishments, like the rewards, that are offered are often extrinsic to the goal itself. So, no scolding yourself and brooding over failure. Learn from your mistakes and move on to the next job. 

You’ll notice that there’s a common theme in what works. It’s the process – the very thing we don’t want to think about, don’t want to go through – that holds the key to success. By paying attention to your process, you give yourself a motivational advantage and you’re much more likely to achieve your goals successfully. 

So what we conclude from this is that positive thinking without action and process and action and process without a positive outlook are both useless. Success is achievable only when you have both, positive attitude and hardwork. So go for it!

Cheers! :)