How to Get Motivated

The first question you need to ask yourself whenever you do not feel motivated is: "Am I avoiding doing something out of fear?"

If the answer is yes, the next question is: "Are the consequences of not doing that thing worse than the consequences of doing it?"

Another, related question would be: "What are the benefits of doing that thing, and to what degree do I value those benefits?"

If you procrastinate doing something, and it is important to you, then presumably you nevertheless value the payoff of not following through more than you value the payoff of doing that thing. In other words, you have a better, or stronger, conception of the value of avoiding doing the task, a more vivid sense emotionally, than you do when you think about the payoff of following through.

In Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy there is a concept called "long-range hedonism." This idea is founded on the assumption that, ultimately, the values we have are maintained by a "good feeling" of some kind that occurs in our nervous system whenever these values come to mind. A problem can arise however when we envision some kind of pain arising from the process of attaining that value. In other words, we want pleasure (we seek it out, defined by the term "hedonism"), but sometimes, in order to achieve that pleasure, we may have to go through pain to attain it. For this reason, it is suggested that we adopt an attitude of "long-range hedonism", whereby we adopt an approach to life which recognizes the benefit, ie., the pleasure, that will be attained over the long term by doing the action you are avoiding.

Part of the reason we are not motivated to do the things that would bring us pleasure in the long term, or value, is that most of us have never really invested the time to figure out what we value most in life, why, how much, and in what order. Indeed, our emotions, which are often organized in a somewhat random way within our nervous system, often do not reflect the values we have.

A great example is smoking. Surely, a cool, rational, clear-headed analysis would reveal that, no, I do not want to go through the agonizing pain of cancer or lung disease, and that I know that this kind of pain would far surpass that of quitting. Yet, because we have not "weighted" our values, we have not sat down and truly put our values in a list of priorities, then we favour avoidance of quitting smoking over avoidance of cancer.

Clearly, in such an example, the problem is that it is not enough that our brain can produce the verbal answer "Cancer is worse than the discomfort of quitting smoking." This is not sufficient. The reason it is not sufficient is because there is not enough emotion involved: AND MOTIVATION RUNS ON EMOTIONS.

We are taught many things in school. We are taught the operations of arithmetic. We are taught the operations of writing, and of reading. We are even taught the operations of various sports and physical activities. Yet there is a system we could learn to operate that we are not taught at school: how to run your emotions.

Since the days of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius and the stoic philosophers, it has been known that we can control our emotions. Indeed, well before the Greeks and Romans Indian mystics were aware that states can be controlled by meditation: out of this grew an entire science of mental and emotional control: Buddhism.

This system of emotions, and how to navigate, operate and control it, is in fact paramount for effective living: because EMOTION CONTROLS MOTIVATION.

Yet modern, Western secular forms of childhood education do not normally pay attention to this fact: despite it being of immense importance to adult life.

If you want to be motivated to do the things that will get you where you want to go, you must first take the time to realize what your goals are. You cannot aim at something if you do not know what that thing is.

Once you understand what goals you wish to have, then you must look at the values, i.e., the emotions, that are holding you back from completing the steps.

Let us say you want to get a new job, but this would involve using the telephone, and you loathe using the telephone. Another way of saying this is that your emotions about using the telephone are "weighted" too heavily in comparison with your emotions about getting a new job.

Sit down and visualize this system. Imagine a scales, where on one side is the emotion connected to using the phone, and on the other side is the emotion connected to getting your dream job. Imagine the scale is weighted in favour of the emotions connected to using the phone.

Fortunately, the mind does not know that it can be tampered with. As a result, you can trick it into changing the weighting of various emotions/values. With the image of these scales clear in your mind (or even if it is not clear, but only fuzzy), do your best to imagine the scale tipping in the other direction, so that the side that represents getting a new job is now heavier than the side that represents using the phone. Normally, even if you have to do this exercise several times, this should start to change the value system in your mind, so that the thing that is, rationally-speaking, trivial (using the phone), FEELS less important than the thing you really want -- in this case, a new job.

There are many ways to change the way you have prioritized the emotions in your head. The example I have given is merely one. You can even make up your own: perhaps in fact it is better you do; chances are you can come up with techniques better suited to your personal preference.

However you manage it, if you wish to master motivation, you need to master your emotions. This, in a way, is the key to life. It is well worth the pursuit of learning to do these sorts of techniques. Once your emotions are on board with the plans you have for yourself, you will find it easier to propel yourself towards your goals