By Steve Chandler. 2004.
And when you’ve broken a job down, remember to allow yourself some slow motion in beginning the first piece. Just take it slow and easy. Because it isn’t important how fast you are doing it. What’s important is that you are doing it.
Most of our hardest jobs never seem to get done. The mere thought of doing the whole job, at a high energy level [and with high quality], is frequently too off-putting to allow motivation to occur.
You can create your own plans in advance so that your life will respond to you. If you can hold the thought that at all times your life is either a creation or a reaction, you can continually remind yourself to be creating and planning.
Many of us can spend whole days reacting without being aware of it. We wake up reacting to news on the clock radio. Then we react to feelings in our body. … Soon we get in the car and react to traffic, honking the horn and using sign language. Then, at work, we see an e-mail on our computer screen and react to that. … This habit of reacting can go on all day, every day.
Robert Fritz, who has written some of the most profound and useful books on the differences between creating and reacting, says, “When your life itself becomes the subject matter of the creative process, a very different experience of life opens up to you—one in which you are involved with life at its very essence.”
Plan your day the way Bill Walsh planned his football games. See the tasks ahead as plays you’re going to run. You’ll feel involved in your life at its very essence, because you’ll be encouraging the world to respond to you.
“When you say you fear death,” wrote David Viscott, “you are really saying that you fear you have not lived your true life. This fear cloaks the world in silent suffering.”
When people stay trapped in linear, flat, and logical left-brain thinking and never activate the creative right side of the brain, they lose their love of life. The right brain comes alive during dreaming at night while the left brain sleeps. But it is possible (as artists, poets, and saints can attest) to have the same two-sided interplay that we had as children, while we are awake. We simply have to fire it up by using the left brain to call on the right. This is what happens when we make love, play games, write poetry, hold a baby, or face a threatening crisis: the left brain commands the right brain to come alive and get involved. That is when you get whole-brain thinking, or what psychologist Abraham Maslow called “peak” experiences.
The three best ways to active whole-brain thinking are through 1) goal-visualization, 2) joyful work, and 3) revitalizing play. Rather than wait for external crises to appear, create internal challenge games of your own—goals and purposes—that lead you in growth toward the motivated person you want to become.
Life is now. Life is not later on. And the more we hypnotize ourselves into thinking we have all the time in the world to do what we want to do, the more we sleepwalk past life’s finest opportunities. Self-motivation flows from the importance we attach to today.
The key to personal transformation is in your willingness to do very tiny things—but to do them today. Transformation is not an all-or-nothing game; it’s a work in progress. A little touch here and a small touch there is what makes your day (and, therefore, your life) great. Today is a microcosm of your entire life. It is your whole life in miniature. You were “born” when you woke up, and you’ll “die” when you go to sleep.
The trick is to keep this motivation going. To deliberately feed your spirit with the optimistic ideas you want to live by. Any time a thought, sentence, or paragraph inspires you or opens up your thinking, you need to capture it, like a butterfly in a net, and later release it into your own field of consciousness.
For me, discovering an exciting idea in a book or magazine is like a true peak experience. It makes the world bright and comprehensible. I get that tingle in my spine. I get that “Oh, yes!” feeling. And the more I deliberately fill my mind with the words and phrases that originally stirred the peak experience, the easier it is to remember that life is good.
“This,” writes Colin Wilson in New Pathways in Psychology, “is why people who have a peak experience can go on repeating them: because it is simply a matter of reminding yourself of something you have already seen and which you know to be real.
In his psychological masterpiece, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to large goals as “outcome” goals and small goals as “process” goals. The beauty of “process” goals is that they are always within your immediate power to achieve.
Process goals give you total focus. When you are constantly setting process goals, you are in more control of your day, and you feel a sense of skillful self-motivation.
At the end of the day, or the beginning of the next day, you can check your progress toward your “outcome” goals. You can adjust your process goals to take you closer to the outcomes you want, and always keep the two in harmony.
I often start the day by drawing four [concentric] circles on a blank piece of paper. The circles represent my day (today), my month, my year, and my life. Inside each circle I write down what I want. … I am reorienting my mind to what I am up to in life. I am reminding myself of what I really want.
Because the subconscious mind only communicates with vividly imagined or real pictures, it will not seek to bring into your life anything you can’t picture.
Without advertising our goals to ourselves, we can lose sight of them altogether. It is possible to go an entire week, or two or three, without thinking about our main goals in life. We get caught up in reacting and responding to people and circumstances and we simply forget to think about our own purpose.
Motivation comes from thought. Every act we take is preceded by a thought that inspires that act. And when we quit thinking, we lose the motivation to act. We eventually slip into pessimism, and the pessimism leads to even less thinking. And so it goes. A downward spiral of negativity and passivity, feeding on itself like cancer.
The optimist always does a little something. She or he always takes an action and always feels like progress is being made. Because pessimists have a habit of thinking “it’s hopeless” or “nothing can be done,” they quit thinking too soon. An optimist may have the same initial negative feelings about a project, but he or shee keeps thinking until smaller possibilities open up.
Recent studies show, says McGinnis, that optimists “excel in school, have better health, make more money, establish long and happy marriages, stay connected to their children and perhaps even live longer.”
Whenever you feel pessimistic or overwhelmed, remember to keep thinking. The more you think about a situation, the more you will see small opportunities for action—and the more small actions you take, the more optimistic energy you will receive. An optimist keeps thinking and self-motivates. A pessimist quits thinking—and then just quits.
Optimists have chosen to make a different use of the human imagination. They agree with Colin Wilson’s point of view that, “imagination should be used, not to escape from reality, but to create it.”
When we stay the same, it’s not because we didn’t make a big enough change, but rather because we didn’t do anything today that sent us moving toward change.
If you continue to think of yourself as a great painting you are going to paint, then wanting to instantly change is like wanting to finish your portrait in 10 minutes and then put it up in the art gallery. If you see yourself as a masterpiece-in-progress, then you will relish small change. A tiny thing you did differently will excite you. … If you want to change yourself, try making the changes as small as they can be. If you want to create yourself, like a great painting, don’t be afraid to use tiny brush strokes.