Since 1996, in my two-day work­shop, I’ve asked par­ticipants if they think that they’re per­fect. No-one ans­wers “Yes”. It’s damn difficult to motivate your­self if there are things about your­self that you don’t like. And, of course, chan­ces are that there are things that you don’t like about your­self that you’ve been meaning to change but never have. After all, research shows that most people have the same New Year’s Resolutions from one year to the next! And, as if that weren’t enough, people then read so-called self-help books and try to talk them­selves into feeling good and being motivated.

Self-affirmation amounts to a waste of time. Positive self-talk bom­bards the con­scious mind with feel-good statements that don’t make the con­scious mind feel good! Because the con­scious mind feels nothing – it just thinks – app­roximately 50,000 ran­dom thoughts each day. And most of those ran­dom thoughts are either useless or self-destructive. You’re was­ting your breath!

It’s your subcon­scious mind you want to get in touch with. That’s where you’ll find your self-doubts and your miscon­ceived self-perceptions. Your subcon­scious uses those incor­rect self-perceptions to create your ever­yday behaviour – your per­ceived strong points, your per­ceived weak points and their related self-defence mechanisms. Your subcon­scious was program­med with your view or your­self during your for­mative years. Now, years later, it’s your subcon­scious mind’s out of date self-view that creates your reality.

Your visual subcon­scious took snapshots of the things that imp­res­sed you when you were young and imp­res­sio­nable. Your snapshots are programs that run today to enable you behave automatically through what psychology calls automaticity. Automaticity is great for get­ting habitual repetitive tasks done without you having to think about them. But your whole life is habitual and repetitive, your work colleagues and your nearest and dearest are so familiar to you that ever­ything you do to them, for them and with them becomes habitual and repetitive. So, in fact, automaticity “enables” you do almost ever­ything without thin­king about it. You don’t even have to bother to turn up!

Research con­firms that you only put 1% of you into the here and now. No won­der most people don’t love them­selves – they don’t know them­selves. How could they, they’re not all there!

Therefore, to motivate your­self you need to stop this automatic non­sense. Let’s make it sim­ple by star­ting small. Stop doing little things automatically and, sooner or later, you’ll start doing really impor­tant things min­dfully too. So, tomor­row mor­ning, brush your teeth with the hand with which you don’t habitually brush your teeth. The result will be that you will be more “all there” than nor­mal and you will have star­ted to dis­rupt your repetitive pat­tern of nor­mal min­dless living. This will attract more of your subcon­scious mind’s atten­tion into the here and now, so that you’ll begin to pay less atten­tion to the snapshots that have been dictating your automatic behaviour.

You don’t have to talk your­self into being motivated – the nor­mal per­son isn’t lis­tening anyway! You sim­ply have to be a little more present than nor­mal – that’s all! Then you’ll be more effective, more efficient, more tuned it – about your­self and life. And, when you’re more tur­ned on, more alert and more present, you have presence. Presence makes you more imp­res­sive. So, not only will you motivate your­self, you may well motivate a few other people too!

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