Motivation - the fickle beauty

How did you feel when you woke up today? Full of energy, ready for the day, ideas shooting through your mind with lightning speed? Or is Sunday Donothingday? Nothing wrong with that, you’ve spent all week working hard and deserve a day off. Or are you one of those people who collect things you want to do on the weekend throughout the week and end up with a 3-pages-long list on Friday evening? If so how does looking at that list make you feel? Defeated? I know that feeling. And whenever I experience it I ask myself: How can thinking of doing something and actually doing it lead to such completely different reactions inside of me? Namely enthusiasm and anticipation vs. resistance and listlessness? Allow me to introduce you to the fickle beauty motivation.

Yesterday a friend gave me the book “Living the Good Life” by David Patchell-Evans, the founder of GoodLife Fitness. I started reading it and after a few pages felt really motivated to work out more often. “Tomorrow morning right after getting up you’ll do some push-ups and crunches and finish off with a bit of yoga.” I said to myself. It’s been a couple of hours since I got up, but I haven’t worked out one single muscle yet (apart from my index fingers by typing). What happened between making up my mind to be more active and now? Sleep? That can’t be it.

My motivation apparently decided to take a vacation. Without consulting me, of course. Extremely frustrating. Have I done something wrong? Have I not treated her (motivation has to be female obviously, at least mine is) respectfully and warmly? Actually ... probably not. Motivation needs to be nurtured and trained just like any other muscle. I find it extremely helpful to think of her as a part of my body instead of an elusive quality of mind. If you never use that muscle and then all of a sudden demand peak performances you’ll most likely just strain it. We all know that going for a run is a good cardiovascular training, but how do you train your motivation?

It’s easy – give her what she wants. There must be activities you like so much that it doesn’t take a lot of persuasion to do them. Reading a good book maybe? Or meeting a friend for a coffee? Going for a swim on a hot summer day? Whatever it is I want you to ask yourself how or rather what you feel right before you do these things. A pleasant warm feeling in my stomach would be my answer. Every feeling is triggered by a thought, only we aren’t aware of it most of the time. My feeling of comfort and gleeful anticipation (I’m thinking of reading one of my favourite books, The Count of Monte Christo, perfect if you have the travel bug, but can’t do anything about it) is the direct result of seeing myself cuddled up in a nice armchair, a cup of hot chocolate beside me, book in hand. (For those of you who are interested in NLP: The previous short paragraph shows you that my preferred senses are the visual and the kinaesthetic systems.) You probably do something similar. As far as we know humans are the only species on our lovely planet that have the gift of anticipation. We can make plans for the future and even imagine ourselves in it. That’s pretty powerful stuff!

Back to my resolution to work out more often. What do I see when I try to motivate myself for that? Exactly: me sweating and out of breath. Which in turn leads to me already feeling pain and exhaustion in my muscles, although I haven’t even changed into my gym clothes yet. No wonder I can’t bring myself to do it! What should I imagine instead? The good part, of course: Me vitalized and energetic AFTER the workout. That’ll do the trick.

And about those weekend to do lists – scrap them. They will only do one thing: de-motivate the crap out of you. And then make you feel guilty all weekend because you’re not doing what you’re supposed to. Instead when you think of something you want to or have to do on the weekend practise imagining the good part of it as often as you can. So that when the time comes to do it you can be sure she will not suddenly disappear and leave you hanging in mid-air – your beautiful friend motivation.

Why are we so resistant to change?

The other day I was thinking about bad habits and why it is so hard to change them, even though we know they’re bad. One would think that apart from addictions where a strong physical component is involved behaviours like biting your nails or eating too much chocolate should be easy to quit once you’ve decided they’re bad for you. There is no rational reason to keep doing it so why don’t we just stop? Because the rational insight is only the first step. According to NLP what needs to follow is disentangling the behaviour from its intention. (One of the presuppositions of NLP is that every behaviour has a positive intention.) Let’s stick with the chocolate example for a moment. I used to eat way too much chocolate (as well as pizza and fries and all kinds of unhealthy foods) and couldn’t get myself to stop, no matter how hard I tried. Why? Because I didn’t take into account what intention stood behind my cravings for fat and sugar. Now I know that eating these calorie bombs was a substitute for emotional comfort and satisfaction – I was in an unhappy relationship and literally ate myself happy or at least happier for a short while. As soon as I got out of it I changed my eating habits without any conscious effort. Or rather – they changed themselves.  

Of course these miracle self-healings are rare because most habits are caused and maintained by a multitude of factors that usually don’t change overnight. A good way to start is to ask yourself: “What does this habit/behaviour do for me? What do I gain?” Biting nails or any other kind of auto-aggression (harmful behaviour directed towards oneself) usually fulfills the purpose of reducing tension thereby venting some of the stress or anxiety you’re feeling. Once you’ve figured out what the positive intention is you can find a different behaviour that has the same effect. Like reading a good book instead of ordering a pizza or doing a relaxation exercise instead of biting your nails. At first it will be difficult and you will probably experience some resistance to the change. Developing habits is a survival strategy so your unconscious will naturally object to getting rid of one. Especially if it has invested years of careful grooming and polishing to make it the automatic response it is now. Keep at it, though, and your unconscious will learn and eventually help you implement the new habit. Why? Well, because man is a creature of habit!

But what about more complex behavioural patterns? And highly emotionally charged ones? Some people fly into a temper regularly, others get shy and insecure in large groups and consequently don’t voice their opinion. Both usually regret their behaviour afterwards. And probably get angry at themselves. Which doesn’t help of course. Why can’t they just pull themselves together and not do it? Because they get a what psychologists call secondary gain that is a positive outcome from doing it. In the case of the choleric person it might be venting frustration that he or she habitually suppresses. In the case of the insecure person it’s probably avoiding the possibility of criticism and rejection. The approach would be the same: Find out what you gain by behaving like this, then think about different means of getting the same result.

I know that it’s not an easy thing to do because these topics usually are very emotional ones for us. I like to make use of another NLP principle called dissociation to make them less so. Dissociation means splitting off the emotions and looking at the problem from an outsider’s perspective. One way to do this is to imagine it’s a friend or acquaintance of yours who has the problem, not you. What would you advise them? Then step back into your own shoes and see how it feels. Does the proposed change make sense? Does it feel right?

Change is possible if we don’t just try to force ourselves into it, but get creative. Why not make venting frustration into a fun thing like – paintballing?

Emotions are contagious

So I sat down to write my blog as every Sunday and ... no internet. Restarted my computer. Nothing. Fiddled with the modem. Still nothing. Put my laptop right next to the modem (which is a really uncomfortable place in the hall of our house) and tried to directly plug it into the modem (good old pre- WLAN times...) – nada. And it was already too late for internet cafés and the likes. To cut a long story short: That’s why I’m posting this week’s blog today and not yesterday. But back to its actual content and topic ... psychology. Or to be more specific – emotions.

One of my upcoming workshops will revolve around effective communication. While I was working on the concept I asked myself: How do our emotions get in the way of successful communication? Well, 90% of our communication happens non-verbally. That’s a lot. And the problem is that most of the non-verbal communication is done by our unconscious. So we are not even aware of the signals we’re sending out. Think of a conversation with your boss for example: Let’s say you have an unresolved issue with him or her, you can be sure you’ll communicate that in one way or another. Which might, no, will cause trouble. So you could find yourself stuck in a downward spiral of negative interactions, although you just wanted to talk about something innocent like where to hold this year’s Christmas party. Just because your wayward emotions decided to stick their noses into this quite unemotional business of yours and MAKE IT EMOTIONAL.

Sometimes I think of my feelings as little children that just want attention. And they use the exact same strategies to get it. Like choosing the most inconvenient times to get crying fits or smear peanut butter (whatever the equivalent of emotional peanut butter may be...) all over your shirt. The exercises I will do with the workshop attendees help avoid this by making you aware of these feelings. And not only your own, but those of the other person as well. You just have to learn how to read the signs and clean up your own signal sending mechanisms. NLP uses eye movement patterns in order to “mind read”: Looking down, to the right for example usually means thinking about feelings.

So what about our own non-verbal communication? If you’ve got something on your mind while talking to somebody and you’re lucky they will see it and ask you about it. But most of the time people are not trained in reading other people’s facial expressions, voice tone, body posture etc. which sidelines that part of the communication to the realm of the unconscious. Not good. Because you have no control whatsoever over what is happening there. This could result in you talking to somebody about grocery shopping on the conscious (verbal) level, but about your disappointment about that person’s unreliability on the unconscious (non-verbal) level. Which would in turn lead to a corresponding conscious and unconscious response so that you have two totally different communications taking place at the same time. Chances are you won’t be able to agree on what to buy.

The bottom line is: Emotions are contagious. That’s why it’s so nice to be around happy, optimistic, energetic people. (Unless you feel it’s too much in your face cheerfulness. That happens to me when I’m in a bad mood and don’t want to be cheered up. Then I avoid these people if possible because I want to soak in my own unhappiness and don’t want to “catch” their good mood.) So if you plan to have an important conversation with someone and want a positive outcome you better take a closer look at the sidelines first – there might be a whole cheerleading team of emotions determined to salt your conversation with inappropriate remarks.

How well do you know yourself?

I created this blog to have an outlet for my views on psychology with a focus on emotions. In order to come up with a good topic for today I asked myself: “What is it that interests me the most?” As much as I’m fascinated by phenomena like neuroplasticity or the effects of fasting on cognitive functions my favourite always was and still is – relationships. Maybe this idea was washed to the surface of my thought process because it’s Mother’s Day. The relationship with your mother is usually the first relationship of your life (and for some people it’s a constant source of stress and other negative emotions). Relationships hold everything together. The promotion you just learnt about, the new dress you bought, the 5-course menu you cooked – if you couldn’t share it with other people you wouldn’t enjoy it half as much. But the most important relationship of all is the one you have with yourself. And yet a lot of people don’t pay much attention to it. They spend hours analyzing their last break-up or the bad vibes between them and their colleague (and ya, I know how much fun that can be, I do like a bit of good drama here and there), but never once ask themselves: “How’s the vibe between me and – me?”

I remember reading about a case study that was meant to illustrate NLP methodology a couple of weeks ago (NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming and is a “tool box” of strategies based on understanding and changing the three components of subjective experience: physiology, mind and how the use of language affects us.): A client was asked to describe her inner voice, the one she hears when she talks to herself (she had difficulties motivating herself). It turned out that it sounded exactly like her father who had always made her feel like a failure. Which explains why she couldn’t bring herself to do things, even though she wanted to. Because telling herself to sit down and work on that report that was due would inevitably turn her into an 8 year-old child that has just been told to “stop being lazy and do something useful for once”. After a lot of practice and self-observation she was finally able to gradually change the way she talked to herself. And immediately became more productive.

One of the first things I learnt about how the unconscious works is that it doesn’t respond to negatives. What does that mean? Well, for example if you want to give up eating chocolate and tell yourself not to eat chocolate your unconscious only hears “chocolate”. Which makes you think of chocolate even more than before. That’s why motivating yourself away from something negative never works, you have to move towards something positive. Something to think about the next time you try to motivate yourself. Just leave out the “don’ts”.

The relationship with ourselves is often weighed down by burdens of the past. We would never consider wearing the same pair of shoes all our lives, but quite readily keep up habits we’ve developed at a very young age. What we eat today for example is more often than not dictated by what we ate yesterday. And not only what, also how. In a hurry? Standing? Not paying attention to our actual hunger signals? The same applies to how we deal with stress. My father used to let’s say not exactly stay calm and collected in stressful situations and so I find myself getting into the same rut if I want it or not. And it took me a long time to figure out why: I talked to myself just the way he would – impatiently, reproachful, focusing on the negative. Which would make me feel even more stressed. You can imagine the rest.

And the moral of the story is...: Great if you know exactly how your colleague gets your goat. Better if you know why you have so much trouble getting out of bed in the morning.

Explore the positive

Explore the positive

Don’t worry, I’m not going to bore you with a “Yes, you can!” speech trying to motivate and enthuse you into being happy. I’m all for the negative. Life needs contrast – sadness and anger are just as useful as happiness and excitement. In moderation of course.
In clinical psychology, however, there is a massive imbalance between studies on negative emotions like depression and anxiety and positive emotions like joy or contentment to the advantage of the former. Just as medicine psychology tends to focus on disorders, on the “what is wrong?” side of things. Which is legitimate – after all people go see a doctor or therapist when they feel unwell that is out of order. And want to be fixed. But what about improving what is already good? In recent years so-called positive psychology, a rather new sapling in the field of studying the human mind, has gathered more and more momentum and yielded promising leads and ideas. The basic question of this approach is: Why look at people who are – I’m using a simplification here – not functioning and want to do so again instead of people who are functioning, but want to function better? Yes, why not? After all we don’t want to just function, we want to be happy, right? One of the results positive psychology came up with is that we all seem to have certain key or signature strengths like curiosity, kindness and self-control. Simply put: When we use them we are happy. So it’s good to know what they are and then to grow and express them as much as possible. Can you name yours?
One way to make positive emotions more dominant in your life is to become more congruent. NLP defines congruence as the perfect balance between words, body language and actions. When we are congruent we feel invincible and things seem to just happen by themselves. When we are incongruent our gut feeling tells us “Something’s wrong here, folks!” So we use the word ‘but’ a lot: “I would love to be part of this project, but...” or “I really like him, but...” Sounds familiar? Well, let me tell you something: It doesn’t have to be that way. You just need to find out what the ‘but’ stands for. It’s a part of you trying to tell you: “I object!” but we don’t always listen. NLP goes a step further and wants you to imagine all the different parts of you as persons with characteristic visuals, individual voice tones, mannerisms, you name it. I personally think this is a lot of fun to do. My creative part for example is a wise, white-haired and long-bearded old man like the Asterix character Getafix the Druid. And then you can make them have round table conferences. Or get together at a cocktail party, whatever you prefer. The main thing is: let them all have a say. If seeing your new boyfriend or girlfriend fills your belly with butterflies AND worms that’s not a good sign. No need to panic either, just listen to the part of you that opened the can of worms. And then decide what to do about it. Otherwise you might find yourself sabotaging the relationship on an unconscious level. A nasty business, believe me, I’ve been there.
The good thing is: your unconscious doesn’t try to hide its objections from you. Maybe you just need a bit of practice. Start by watching out for those ‘buts’.