Motivating Yourself for Change

When my wife of 3 years left me 2 years ago I was in for a real shock and a number of lessons in motivation. I had been pretty lucky most of my life, and I never really had to motivate myself to do anything. Everything I wasn't motivated to do had been done for me. I never had to look for a job, work to meet new people, or do little things like clean my house.

Within a month, my house was a wreck, my bills were unpaid, I was lying on the couch whenever I was home more depressed than I had been with my life leaving me, and worst of all, I was living on a diet of beer, fast food, and tv dinners. I say that is worst of all because food has always been important to me, and cooking was one thing that I had always been motivated to do.

For weeks I laid there feeding myself the excuse that it was my wife's fault because she had left me and made me feel so horrible. Finally one day, I woke up, looked around and had a revelation. She was gone, and wasn't coming back. More importantly, it wasn't her fault that the house was a mess, it was mine. I realized that I had to find a way to force myself to do these things that I didn't want to do. Over time I was able to put together a couple of things that worked for me.

Right now you're probably wondering what my housework has to do with social anxieties. Actually it had quite a bit to do with it. First of all, not only was the mess depressing on its own, but the feeling that I couldn't manage to avoid or fix the mess was also depressing. Because I was depressed, it was very difficult for me to get out, be social, and improve my anxiety. On top of that, the same motivational ideas that led to me being able to clean up for my self applied to motivating myself to do things I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise while working on my anxiety.

Here is a list of tips that I have come up with:

1. Don't Threaten or Force Yourself - Have you ever noticed that if someone threatens you, you feel more resistence to doing what they say? Well the same applies to when you threaten yourself. Instead of forcing yourself, you need to find other, more positive methods that will motivate you to do whatever it is you are doing.
2. Consider the Advantages - Take time to think about all of the good things that will come from whatever it is you need to do. If you need to clean, consider how nice it will look, how good you will feel when it is done, and whatever other advantages exist. If you're working on a particular social skill consider the many doors it will open for you, how good accomplishing it will make you feel, and any other advantages you can think of. Don't however consider the negatives such as how long it will take, how much work it will be, and how much you hate doing it.
3. Modify Your Perception of the Task - If you still arn't motivated to do whatever it is after considering the many advantages, you probably have strong negative feelings associated with the task. I use NLP in these situations. If you can think of a particular events that led to you experiencing these feelings, dissociating from them can help to minimize those feelings. If not, or in addition to that you can use triggers to associate positive feelings into your perception of the task. I am not an NLP guru, so I won't even attempt to explain how to do this, but I will reccomend finding an NLP therapist, or reading a book. If you choose to read a book, I would reccomend starting with "NLP: The New Technology of Achievement." Of the NLP books I have read, this one is written the best for beginners.
4. Break Tasks into Smaller Tasks - Whenever you can find ways to break up your tasks into smaller tasks that are more easily accomplished. This way you can concentrate more easily on the smaller, less overwhelming tasks rather than the ultimate task as a whole. When you complete each small task you will feel a sense of accomplishment which you can use to motivate yourself to complete the another small task. As an example, when I clean, I don't clean my whole house, nor do I clean my livingroom. I clean one couch, then another couch, one end table, the other, different sections of the floor, my bookshelves, and finally the TV. Each thing is a seperate task after which I congratulate myself, and take a well deserved short break before moving on to the next task.
5. Rituals are Your Friends - By rituals I'm not referring to ritual sacrifice. Instead I refer to ritualistic patterns that you can employ that will help you to form good habits. If you look back to the previous example, I clean my living room in that same order every time. With anything that you will need to do over and over again, creating a ritual for yourself can be amazingly helpfull, but don't start or stop at the end of your tasks. As part of your ritual, include something at the beginning to get yourself in the right state to do the task, and at the end to congratulate yourself on a job well done.
6. Rituals can also be Your Enemies - Not every ritual is beneficial. In most situations that we deal with on a day to day basis we develop some form of ritual. These rituals can actually be triggers for the negative feelings we have toward doing something. So it makes sense then to try to find these non-beneficial triggers and do something to change them. The trick is to identify these rituals in your life and do something to change them. For instance if you have trouble approaching people in bars, identify your rituals. For instance, if you walk into the bar, find a seat at the bar, buy a drink, and then look around for someone to talk to try something different. Walk into the bar, talk to someone, then sit down and order a drink and see if that makes a difference.