Milestones©
by Al Killeen

Hi Friend,

How do you motivate yourself? For that matter, how do you motivate your children, friends, or co-workers? Do you do it with positive or negative motivation?

What if your style of motivation had far greater implications for your life than you might have imagined…?

Today’s Issue: “How You Motivate Determines How You Live…”

Imagine that you have two sets of friends. They are married couples who have been together for some years now, and they are relatively successful with the material side of life. However, they are very different in other ways.
One couple seems very happy with life, but the other couple can’t seem to wait for it to be over…

Imagine that Don and Susan are your neighbors living next to you on the left, and Bob and Joan live on your right.

Don is a desperate soul, and you’ve never figured out why. He seems successful enough, but he just never seems fully happy in life. For instance, he has a recurring weight problem that he periodically attacks with great gusto, which results in impressive weight losses for a time. However, you’ve noticed that he seems to cycle, and after a few months of dropping in weight, he seems to gain it all back over the next few months. Sometimes, he seems bigger after this cycle than when he first started it.

This seems to weigh on him and cause him some depression…

Susan has a somewhat similar pattern with her body, but it manifests differently. She is so thin that she looks virtually emaciated, yet also seems depressed over her physical appearance. She only allows herself very specific calories during the day, exercises maniacally, yet never really seems to feel very good about herself as a result.

In fact, she seems to get sick a lot, and you worry that something may be fundamentally wrong with her health on a deeper level.

At work, Don is a taskmaster. He bullies his employees with a heavy hand, and nothing ever seems good enough for him. While they respect him in his knowledge, his constantly threatening management style has them afraid to speak up when they see things that might be done differently; might even be improved. He scares them with continual scenarios of possible doom and gloom if they don’t grow their productivity. He even talks openly about the company going under if everyone doesn’t work harder, smarter and better.

Many of his employees are looking for other places to work…

Now, let’s look at Bob and Joan.

Bob is one of those happy-go-lucky guys who always seem to be smiling. He is in pretty good physical shape and plays at a lot of sports, even though he isn’t always the best at them. When he plays golf with his buddies, for instance, he sometimes loses the game but seems happy for their having played well anyway. Afterwards, for example, he’ll buy the drinks in the bar and seem really sincere in listening to them revel in their recounting of “that great chip shot on 10” or whatever. Also, you notice, he doesn’t seem to need to be the center of attention.

His job is in middle-management at a large corporation, and he is steadily climbing up through the ranks. Despite his material success, he seems strangely aloof to identifying with his job and money. He is highly-regarded by his boss, and revered by his employees. He seems to genuinely care about them as people, not just “cogs in an economic machine”. They often miss him when he is gone on vacation.

You aren’t sure if he is a religious or spiritual man, but you suspect that he might be because he just seems so damned happy all of the time and something must be behind that.

His wife, Joan, seems every bit as fulfilled as Bob. She works full-time at another company, manages the kids through a busy schedule, and exercises regularly. She is very entrepreneurial in nature and has creatively added many improvements to her company’s product line. Accordingly, she just seems to get one promotion and raise after another, yet she doesn’t seem to be too caught by her status and power. While grateful for the recognition and economic rewards, she just seems to accept them as a matter of course.

Many mornings, you notice her jogging purposefully and fitfully through the neighborhood at a pace that you can only envy. Interestingly, she always seems to be smiling deeply as she runs, as if she has just told herself a very amusing and enjoyable story…

What is the point of these two couples? They reflect archetypes of motivational style, and they are examples of how you and I have choices in how we live our lives. Those choices are often, first and foremost, determined by how we motivate ourselves and those around us.

Let’s consider…

Don and Susan use negative motivation to drive their actions. Don talks to himself (“runs a tape, so to speak”) about his weight in the following manner: “Okay, you fat S.O.B., Summer is coming and you may have to take your shirt off at the beach sometime, so you better get your fat butt on the treadmill or you’re going to look like the disgusting walrus that you did last year!”

Susan, similarly, may run a tape that sounds like this: “Joan is so much prettier than I am! Why was I given such a disgusting body? I just have to try harder to not eat so much so I can maybe not look so stupid this summer when I put on that old swimsuit…”.

What are they doing? They are using negative motivation to force themselves into action to avoid something that they don’t want. This usually works great to start them into action, but unfortunately has some strange side-effects. While it is an excellent way to initially provoke them into action, it actually works against them to keep them in action.

This is because NEGATIVE MOTIVATION PROVOKES IMMEDIATE, BUT NOT LONG-TERM ACTION.

Why? Because the source of that motivation is moved away-from as action is taken, and therefore the source of original action grows ever-more distant as progress is made. Accordingly, Don and Susan have to do something very interesting to keep moving forward.

They have to continually introduce negative scenarios into their frame of reference to keep moving forward, and their quality of life is ruined by it.

Think of it this way. If you were standing on a mountainside and suddenly noticed that a hungry bear was right next to you, you’d take action to get away from it as quickly as possible to reduce the chanced of getting eaten, right? However, once you moved to a safe distance of, say, a mile or so, you would probably stop moving away.

A habit of negatively motivating ourselves, or our spouses, or our children, or our employees, is like continually keeping that hungry bear right next to us. It is excellent at keeping us moving forward in fear, but ruins our quality of life as a result of that fear.

And most of us live this way, most of time…

How many times have you heard yourself or someone else say something like, “I just don’t know what I’m going to do about our bills” or “I’ve just got to lose some weight or I might as well just stop leaving the house”?

So, what about positive motivation?

It works just the opposite. It is not nearly as effective at getting us started into action. That’s the bad news. But it does something far more important over the long run. It improves our quality of life because:

POSITIVE MOTIVATION INCREASES OUR MOMENTUM OF ACTION WITH TIME!

Bob and Joan, for instance, use inspirational futures that they imagine to pull them towards a better tomorrow. They might have self-talks that sound like this: “What a beautiful morning this is! I’m so lucky to be able to get our here and run every day at dawn and enjoy living in this incredible place!” Or they might think about other employees like this: “Henry sure is a great guy. I bet that he could sure help this company grow that sales department in the right way, (which, by the way, would sure help the old profit-sharing bonus that I get every year, heh-heh). Maybe it’s time that I brought his name up at the next manager’s meeting”

Bob uses inspirational possibility to pull himself toward a better future, and his quality of life is insured by it!

As opposed to a hungry bear about to eat us, positive motivation is like walking toward a cool oasis for a refreshing drink of water after we’ve been walking in the desert for a long time. The more we see that oasis, and the closer we get to it (even if it is a mirage), the faster we move toward it.

Therefore, either type of motivation, negative or positive, provokes a constancy of stimulation to keep us moving forward toward our goal. Negative motivation provokes negative scenarios, scarcity and fear. Also, it requires that we keep those destructive (long-term, anyway) states of mind with us to keep us moving or we’ll stop. Accordingly, our quality of life is destroyed, which is completely counter to what we all want out of life.

Positive motivation, however, works just the opposite. It creates possibility and abundance. It inspires us forward through a vision of the future that we desire to get to, and in viewing that future, we are somehow already enjoying it as though we have already arrived. Simply being in the state of mind of inspiration that comes from considering a better future than our past provides us, instantly, with tremendous quality of life. Instantly!

So, what kind of life do you want?

Your quality of life, moment to moment, day to day, is largely determined by how you choose to motivate yourself and others around you.

Simple…., but not easy.

For that, you may need support.

If I can support you in doing this, let me know.

I’ve had the honor or helping hundreds of people do it.

Helping you is my oasis.

You are my positive motivation.

You are what inspires me…

Today’s Quote:

”We are so anxious to achieve some particular end that we never pay attention to the psycho-physical means whereby that end is to be gained. So far as we are concerned, any old means is good enough. But the nature of the universe is such that ends can never justify the means. On the contrary, the means always determine the end…”

- Aldous Huxley –