Springboard by G. Richard Shell

Author:G. Richard Shell [Shell, G. Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101601464
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

The human mind is wired to respond to associations. When you smell chocolate cookies, your mouth starts to salivate, even if you are not especially hungry. The same thing is true for motivation. Although music is one of the most powerful associational engines of them all, virtually any motivational routine can activate your energies.

Want to get motivated to cook a great dinner? Create a ritual of neatly laying out all the items you will need before you get started. Want to motivate yourself to do well on a test? I once had a student who dressed in her best, most stylish interview outfit every time she took an important exam. Her pretest ritual of dressing for success helped her focus. Although her classmates teased her for taking her work so seriously, she had the last laugh at graduation—where she took honors. She also landed a job she wanted after school based on her academic performance.

Once you start your motivational ritual, it is a lot easier to get any hard-to-start activity under way, from a sports contest to cooking.

4. Compete with Yourself: Make Up a Prize

Employers pay us for our work and, if we are lucky, praise us for our accomplishments. But the competitions that motivate you need not originate from sources outside yourself. Many people talk themselves into being energized by creating inner competitions, prizes, penalties, and challenges for what they are doing. Entrepreneur Mary Kay Ash (founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics) once put it this way: “Competition can be a very strong motivation. But I have learned that it becomes most powerful when you compete with yourself.”

One way to do this is to create your own reward-penalty plan for exercise, dieting, studying, or completing work assignments. The award-winning novelist Joyce Carol Oates—author of over fifty novels, numerous short-story collections, and eight volumes of poetry—once told a reporter about a motivational trick she uses to keep herself productive. She happens to love, almost to the point of obsession, cleaning and straightening her house. “I go into a very happy state of mind when I am vacuuming,” she said. So she uses that as bait to keep herself on track with a writing project. As she notes, “The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done.”

5. Prove Someone Wrong: Show Them What You’ve Got

Have you ever felt the sting of someone saying, “You’ll never make it—you might as well give up?” You don’t actually need someone to say that to use it as motivation. Just turn on a technique my students and I call “I’ll show them!” Although I think this motivational boost has its limitations—built as it is on measuring yourself against others’ expectations—entire careers have been built on it. The humor writer George Plimpton authored a series of award-winning books about his amateur exploits playing on a professional football team (Paper Lion), pitching in a Major League Baseball game (Out of My League), and performing at Harlem’s Apollo Theater (the short story “I Played the Apollo”).

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