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 Now, years later, it’s your subconscious mind’s out of date self-view that creates your reality.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!
