I thought we’d spend some time thinking about goal setting as we embark on a new year and in light of the I-Ching for this month. Working out what it is you want and having a plan to achieve desired outcomes is always good.

I’ve played so much over the years with setting goals, vision boarding, working with SMART goals, employing creative visualisation etc.  All of these things have their place.  All are useful to a point. 

A lot of management speak is focussed on SMART Goal setting.  This is an acronym for “S = Specific” – making sure the goal you set has a very small scope; “M = Measurable” – that is, being able to measure the success of the goal; “A = Achievable” – making sure the goal is actually within reach; “R = Relevant” – there needs to be a strong ‘business’ case for wanting it to happen; and “T = Time bound” – to be achieved within a specific time frame.  These are used to set project and business goals like: “To increase sales of X product by 20% in the next 6 months.” They are also used to set personal goals like: “To double my income by December 2016”.

However, there is a real trap I have found and observed with many approaches to goal setting. It’s what a friend of mine calls ‘replacing the catholic guilt’.

A few years ago I attended a course that included vision boards and dreaming big.  The course was full of great energy, wonderful and passionate people.  We spent some time visualising short, medium and long term goals and doing the magazine thing where we cut images and text out of magazines and pasted them onto a time line.

In my medium term vision I had things like a gold Saab; a slim and beautiful body; a large house with a pool.  I never did ‘manifest’ any of these things in the time frame that I had ‘imagined’.  How did I feel?  Ever so slightly ripped off really – to be honest.  And also ever so slightly pissed off – with myself.  Seeing it as a reflection of my inability to manifest and be ‘happy’. Conclusion … there must be something ‘wrong’ with me.

Since then I have realised a couple of things.  Firstly: we used magazines!  OMG. This was huge for me.  I have fought the stereo-types of what success is  and what it ‘looks’ like all my life, and here I was cutting images out of the propaganda that I did not believe in and allowing it to dictate my values.  Most magazines, let’s face it, see success through Hollywood eyes.  Rich (money money money), powerful (by position), beautiful (by Hollywood standards) and enviable! There was this fairy tale assumption that if I imagined it so it would be. At least SMART goal setting comes with a bit of realism. Secondly, none of the images I chose actually aligned to who I REALLY believe I am, who I WANT to be and the VALUES that I align to.   This is where I needed to start.

I have come up with my own goal setting steps …

1)      Litmus Test: What if nothing changed? What I am looking for here is an understanding that I am complete where I am.  That I can sit with my hand on my heart and truly say “My life is good”.  I’m not wishing for anything to be different ... from this point I can allow my true desires to unfold. The trap is we often spend time in judgement of ourselves and others … the grass is always greener etc. I aim to get to a place where I can slow down and notice what is true – for me. If I’m unable to feel a basic ok’ness with my life, then something has to give that may need the help of a councillor or a lawyer, or both!

2)      Exciting: my visions for my ‘self’ excite the real me, inside and deep down. The excitement comes from coherence with my inner self. The focus here is not on doing and having, but on being and being some more. 

3)      Values Driven: I am aligned to the values that drive me. Is this what I truly desire to bring forward in my life? I understand who I am and all my decisions and dreams align to the core of me. 

4)      Expectations: An honest evaluation of my expectations, of what I’m able to do or not do to make this happen? I might want to save $500 a week but is that practicable or will I set myself up to fail?

5)      Reflective: How will this feel to bring this forward in my life? To achieve this goal (be it a doing, having or being goal)? Does it sit well with who I truly am? Or am I somehow buying into a societal brainwash of what happiness is? If it sits well I can then begin to visualise as a reality.

LEVER goals!  Too twee?

Works for me, it’s a good ‘lever’ for me to determining new possibilities in my life J

What do you reckon would work for you?

It has been a very productive couple of months and I have had some great reminders of taking the time to mark transitions from one thing to another. I have experienced the beauty and flow of doing so and the push and effort of not doing so.

On a macro level, at this time of the year, it might mean taking some time to transition into the New Year.  Reflecting on what has past, the great stories and the not so great stories of the year. The looking toward of 2015. The journey behind and the journey ahead.  It’s not about resolutions, though goal setting can be useful for some, it’s more about acknowledging an end and embracing the next beginning.

On a micro level, and sometimes a more powerful and profound level, it’s about knowing when to take a breath between daily moments. 

How many times have you found yourself in the 4th meeting of the day without taking a breath between and reflecting, pausing and taking heed of what has actually gone down and giving yourself a moment?  How many times have you jumped in the car to pick up the kids straight from an intense moment at work and found yourself irritated before they’re even in the car?  Or gone from a strong family moment where you were deep in ‘discussion’ with your teenager then finding yourself in the supermarket car park having an overreaction to the person who got the space before you?  Or the transition from work to home now there’s one I’m sure could do with some attention.

The key here is awareness. Mindfulness if you like. In all the busyness (business) of the day and the lives that we live, it can sometimes be tricky to remember to take some transition time.  Bus’i’ness is a serious thing in most people’s worlds.   Barrelling on through the bus’i’ness without marking transitions can be responsible for a build up of stress, of inattention, forgetfulness, hurried judgments and decisions … the list is endless and can often have disastrous consequences in our lives. 

Taking time to learn some tools can help. Mark the end of one meeting with some breathing, a cuppa, a short walk, a loo break (consciously). 

Breathing is the most helpful skill you have.  We all know how to do it.  Learn how to do it consciously to mark a transition.  Alternate nostril breathing is great or just taking 3 deep breaths.  You’ll be amazed how much time frees up.

There are many other tools and tips from mindfulness and meditation techniques that really work.  Take some time to learn some.  Or just simply begin by ‘noticing’, noticing the end of something and acknowledging it before you transition to the next thing. 

I spend quite a bit of my time sitting in rehearsal rooms or watching performances of musical ensembles doing their thing.  There are so many analogies we can make with how a large ensemble makes beautiful harmonies and succinct music with how we are choosing to run our organisations or teams.

Bear in mind that I am not a musician’s big toe.  I work with them as an enabler – so this is really an outsiders take on what happens through observation and my take on how that reflects in the leadership models that I uphold.

There is quite a bit of work and observations already done on the role of the conductor and how we can take pointers about different kinds of leadership from different conducting styles.

For me there are a few key points:

1.       The conductor has the score – they hold the vision and a detail of everyone’s role in that vision.

So a leader has the opportunity to really create and hold a vision; a big picture.  More than that, they have the responsibility of understanding how all the pieces can come together and create that vision.  What is needed to create the vision and who is best placed to make that happen? They also realise that many different types of musicians are going to be needed, even within one instrument distinctions are made.

2.       A part of the conductor’s role is to offer an interpretation of that vision and communicate it clearly to the players so that becomes a shared understanding.

Communication is of most importance here.  An ability to communicate with clarity and be understood will create the synergy the orchestra needs.  I have sat in rehearsals where talking through a particular point or bar can take what feels like a huge amount of time.  Neither the conductor nor the players are happy to move on until they have reached a shared understanding of how to proceed at that point.  How much time do we put into gaining clarification on points in other teams?  From my experience there is a lot of assumption going on without actual agreement.

3.       The musician then interprets that communication.

Each individual musician will bring their own interpretation of the piece.  Nuances are what makes their playing theirs.  A great conductor will bring out those nuances.

4.       Each musician has their role specifically mapped out for them.  It may not always be dots on a page, but a direction and energy of where that music needs to go is agreed on and upheld to the best of their ability.

A musician brings their interpretation following the vision as lead by the conductor.  Each musician trusts the others in the ensemble to do their part, and they rely and support each other as parts of a larger whole.  The violin will never play the clarinet part.  Everyone has a role and is respected for their individual selves. 

There is so much to learn here.  As I have observed the rehearsal process, the one thing that really sticks out to me is that leaving ego at the door enables the process to run so much more smoothly than when there are egos present.  This is not to say that a sense of your own personal contribution and self worth is left at the door, absolutely not.  What is left at the door is a sense of one instrument being more important than another.  Even within the hierarchy of an orchestra where there are lead instruments and non-leads, none is more important.  The sense of the cleaner being as important as the CEO as important as the sales person as important as the IT person all working to make the vision happen.  Knowing that we are all doing the best we can with the resources we have.

5.       Listening to each other is vital.

If you don’t take the time to stop and listen to the vision and then to listen, really listen to each other, then everything will go off the rails.  This listening is not only in the verbal communication that might happen; conductors are the silent one in the group – there is nothing verbal once performance hits.  The communication is body language between the members of the orchestra and the conductor, 100%. The players will also use body language to communicate, and they will also listen intently to the language of the music that they are making and communicate with that.

Merryn ♥

A Relevant TED Talk: Lead like the great conductors
http://www.ted.com/talks/itay_talgam_lead_like_the_great_conductors?language=en#t-672924

I met a woman who had recently moved from an African nation.  She bemoaned her lack of community here in Australia.  She said – all that we do here in our new life is work to live, live to work, work work work, we have no time for community, for the things that matter.

This got me thinking - given so many of us are spending so much time at our work, could the organisations we are working in provide a sense of community? What kind of organisation?

When Harley-Davidson turned 100 in 2003 it celebrated over 14 months culminating in “a million bikers” roaring into the company’s headquarters.  Despite their diversity, Harley riders have something in common: a fanatical dedication to their Harleys.  Is this a community?

The more I have worked with and researched what a community is, I believe it comes down to 3 keys.

These keys can be applied to any community that forms around any shared focus – cultural, theme, geographical, organisational.  For an inclusive community to grow and flourish these 3 things are paramount:

{disclaimer: not a definitive list, simply a place to begin the conversation.}

Empathy

Being able to ‘walk in another’s shoes’ is basically impossible.  Knowing what it is like to be say brought up in another faith, another socio-economic group or race is nigh on impossible.  Being able to actively imagine what that must feel like, to be in a state of openness to stand under (understand) another person’s experience holds the beginning of a truly compassionate community.

Take a moment to imagine how it is for another person – whether that be the CEO, or whether you are the CEO.  I wrote about the power of imagination in empathy in a previous article HERE.

Empathy is the key to building great relationships and is the cornerstone of any community.

Communication

Stories are a key medium for communicating corporate myths. (Boleman, Deal 2008)

I wonder if you could be a fly on the wall in any conversation happening around your organisation or community; what is the theme, underlying vernacular or energy of the discussion?  What are the mythical stories of the organisation that creates the tradition, the loyalty or lack of it?

To be of value, communication by its nature needs to imply honesty.  It needs to be trusted.  It needs to be imbued with empathy as an overarching force, and it needs to be communal, shared and reciprocated. 

Here is a bit of a list of what ‘good’ story-telling might look like in a community that is an organisation:

• Communicating who you are – everyone within the community feels safe and secure to be ‘seen’ truthfully and as they really are
  
• Communicating who the company is
  
• Transmitting values – do my values match what the organisation ‘stands for’?  Can everyone in the organisation align with the values of the organisation?
  
• Fostering collaboration
  
• Stopping the gossip – when stories are actively communicated, less Chinese whispers are possible
  
• Sharing the knowledge – what works, what doesn’t, what’s been tried, what’s been successful
  

Participation

Communities are not inactive.  They require the action of participation, or active participation.  Good communication and empathy by themselves will not engage employees as members of a community. It’s probably one of the topics that have created the most rhetoric in management theory.  How do I create a culture of ownership, engagement and participation? We know that participation is a powerful tool to increase both morale and productivity…but how do we foster it? If we look at other communities we might be able to get a bit of a clue.  Effective communities are groups of people motivated around a shared passion. At work, are we motivated by the pay check or are we motivated to make a difference.  I think its got to be a combination. It is not real to think that we can foster participation by passion alone.  The reality is that most people are motivated to work to keep a roof over their heads.  (see another article here) Topics I believe work to foster active participation are things like egalitarianism, diversity, team focus, job enrichment, values alignment (real not tokenistic)…among many others I am sure….again not a definitive list but a beginning of a conversation.

How powerful it is to become aware of understanding the things that we can influence & change in our lives and working on them, and stopping wasting time on worrying and wishing about the things we don’t have influence over.  I heard Rosie Batty speak this month.  She recently lost her young son in tragic circumstances.  What is incredibly powerful to me is her attitude. Her focus is so much on what she can have influence on...not trying to wish for a different past.  She cannot change that.  What she has realised is that due to her position, she now feels able to have a broad influence on the topic of family violence and she is listened to by people in positions of influence like politicians.  She used words like: “I have nothing to lose”, “my voice is all I have”. She is one of the most proactive people in the face of adversity I have met.

Steven Covey in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, talks about a circle of influence.  Proactive people are aware of what is inside their ‘circle of influence’ and focus on them, instead of spending time on their ‘circle of concern’ which is full of “if only’s”!

When I look at my life objectively, there are places I have influence and places I wish I had more influence and there are places I have great concern for and know I have no influence in.  I am working at growing my circle of influence, and having ‘influence’ in the areas I can – which is mostly within myself.

I’m reminded of the AA mantra ..

‘God grant me the serenity 
to accept the things I cannot change; 
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.’

This has been around for such a long time and has had such a strong positive impact on many people’s lives. 

Do we need to have tragedy in our lives to become proactive about anything?  What does it take for us to believe that we actually have a wider circle of influence than we think?

Steven Covey wrote before the advent of blogging.  With www and all that comes with the cyber space that we inhabit, there is so much more opportunity to expand our circle beyond our physical world.  My actual physical friendship circle is probably around 100, however who I can have ‘influence’ on is way smaller. My cyber circle is larger, therefore so is the potential to influence on a wider scale.  Oprah Winfrey’s circle – just on face book alone is over 10million. Not to say all these people are part of her circle of influence, but there is that potential. It is possible today to build our influence exponentially. 

My hope for the future is that more and more people who are lead by their heart expand their circle of influence into the ‘power’ circles that make decisions of law, rules and regulation in our world and with their ‘influence’ helps the world evolve into its positive loving potential. 

Competence

I have discovered a debate.  A what comes first – the chicken or the egg kind of debate….and it’s to do with confidence and competence.

My premise has long been that confidence is a state of mind.  So I can be confident that I can do something before I know that I am competent at it.  I think that is why I have often thrown myself in the deep end with things.  I can see myself achieving at new things, before I am proved to be competent at them.  I see confidence as the first step to achievement and what follows on the path to becoming competent or capable is learning.

For me there is a difference between being able to say – ‘I know I can do that ‘(confidence) to saying ‘I understand how to do that and I have the experience that proves it’ (competence).  There is a balance needed and to succeed at something there’s no doubt we need both, confidence and competence.   

Last month I wrote about confidence and explored the development of trust – personal trust – that can overcome fear. Confidence is something that is drawn out and encouraged into being, tricks of trade can be learnt, however authentic confidence is found through personal development.

With competence, I believe the learning happens on a more cognitive and practical level – with acts of perceiving, knowing, experiencing and remembering.  This enables us to move from understanding, to knowing, to embodying processes, actions and ways of doing.

Competence requires flexibility, emotional intelligence, self awareness and resilience.  It is wholly experiential.  I can study ‘how’ to play basketball, but until I get on a court and practise, then I can be as confident as I like, but I will not know that I am competent.  Experience brings the theoretical into reality.  I have observed this sitting beside my 17 year old as he learns to drive. 

So building BOTH confidence and competence is a key for success, however I believe it helps to start with confidence. It’s the chicken and the egg thing again.  I do think that having a confident attitude to start with enables a whole lot more opportunity for development of competencies.  Take someone like Richard Branson – here is someone who is the epitome of confidence, someone who only develops competencies after her has chucked himself in.  I like his four top competencies in business:

• The ability to identify appropriate growth opportunities
  
• The ability to move quickly
  
• The willingness to give day-to-day management control to relatively small operating teams. 
  
• The ability to create and manage effective joint ventures
  

In my life I can translate these into:

• Ability to see opportunities 
  
• The confidence to take them up – say ‘yes’
  
• Willingness to delegate and not be in control the whole time
  
• The ability to create, develop and maintain relationships
  

Fine competencies for a balanced life I would say.

Building core competencies in presentation skills and public speaking is the focus of the second ‘C’ , COMPETENCE : The Art of Effective Speaking.

 In this one day seminar we extend your competencies in;

• Voice Projection
  
• Developing audience rapport
  
• Microphone and video techniques 
  
• Impromptu skills 
  
• Framing
  
• Practice
  

http://www.imaginalhouse.com/the-three-cs-of-presenting---one-day-workshops.html

I wanted to sit down and write some pearls of wisdom about confidence.  So I sat down and stared at the screen for what seemed like ages.  I wrote some stuff and then deleted it.  I wrote about other stuff.  Then I did other stuff.  Facebook had some interesting articles.  I needed to connect with new people on Linkedin.  Then I had a lightbulb moment.  I was feeling under confident about writing about confidence.  I was doubting myself.  I was not trusting in my own ability and my own voice. I was hearing the voice of my critic and imagining negative responses before I had even given myself a chance.

So, as is quite often a human condition, I am taking a look at confidence from the negative premise of under confidence and fear.  I want to really look at that fear though.  What is it when fear gets in the way of confidence?  Is it possible to be confident and fearful? 

I looked up our thesaurus (the one we all share online) and it threw up some antonyms – opposites – to look at:  afraid; cowardly; depressed; doubtful; fearful; indefinite; meek; pessimistic; sad; shy; timid; uncertain; unsure; weak.  Fearful was there as is afraid, so yes it would seem that fear is thought of as an opposite of confidence.  Then, as is my want, I looked up fear.  What struck me was the word TRUST. 

Trust forms part of a definition of confidence as much as it is an antonym for fear.

For me trust is the real key in understanding and embracing my confident self.  Trust is so often used in a sense of me to another.  I trust you to repay the debt, or to look after my children, or to let myself be seen by you.  How is that relationship changed when it becomes a matter of self-confidence, or when the trust that is on the line is a trust in myself?

As we age and mature there are certain things that become potential scenarios for how the relationship develops with ourselves and how that manifests in our confidence to be in the world.

A series of small successes can allow a more positive attitude and instil more confidence in my abilities.  A series of small failures can undermine that confidence and create a vacuum.  So there must be a role for resilience.

I believe the key to resilience is knowing where to put your attention.  If you are constantly listening to that voice in your head that is talking you down, telling you that its not possible and not worth it, that its too risky and that you are never good enough anyway so why would you try, then chances are you will begin to believe these things. 

Confidence blossoms when we begin to put our attention on what is working, and listening to the coach rather than the critic.


Merryn

The path to compassion and empathy

I’m a huge believer in the power of imagination. A healthy and positive imagination is one of the paths to a life of awareness, fulfilment and freedom.  With imagination comes freedom of choice with choice comes personal power.  Imagination puts us in the driver’s seat of our own lives. What it does even more than that is foster empathy.  Empathy is not possible without imagination.  We need to be able to “walk in another person’s shoes” in order to get a sense of what they might be experiencing.  We can only do that in our mind’s eye.  We will never be really able to live another person’s life. It will always be coloured with our own sense of the world. 

A few years back Australian Greens Senator Rachel Siewert had a go at living on the income of the dole (or Newstart allowance).  She did it for one week to get to understanding of what it might be like and in a bid to attempt to persuade other sides of politics to raise the allowance by $50 per week.  She wanted to get a feeling of what it might be like to have to budget down to the cent.  Of what it might be like to have to prioritise paying for food for the kids over paying the rent. What she got was a sense of temporary discomfort.  She would never really understand what it would be like to be born into a family that had no sense of being able to move beyond the dole, no sense of the generational poverty that many people live with.  She may have however, been able to stimulate her imagination enough to start to develop some empathy for them.  At least she gave it a go.

So what does it take for us to truly have empathy, or to truly imagine what another person’s life is like? 

We are certainly not being given many positive role models from our political leaders in Australia in empathy at the moment.

The veil of secrecy surrounding the asylum seekers plight at the hands of the Australian government is testament to that.  There is no imagination at work here.  There is no compassion and there is no empathy.  There is abuse and there is vilification.  There is injustice and there is downright anti-human behaviour.

As the world is getting smaller from some perspectives – we can be in touch with other people so easily; we can see through the power of video and interact through social media. It seems to me that the chasms between the haves and the have nots and the righteous and those without rights has grown to the point that we are blinkered to even start to understand what another person is going through, let alone open our hearts to have compassion, let alone imagine how that might feel enough to have empathy.

I’ve never been homeless.  I have never had to flee from anywhere for fear of my life.  I have been in a couple of hairy situations, but I have always thought that the county I lived in and the system that I lived under supported at least my rights to be alive (if not my right to marry, but that’s another story).  I can, even if only slightly and a little bit, imagine what that must feel like.  I can’t imagine what it must be like, but I can imagine how it might feel, and I strive to do just that.  I want to actively stimulate my imagination.  I want to stretch it and exercise it, bend it and grow it.  I want to expose myself to many different people so that I can inform my imagination with more 3 dimensional tactileness.  I want to expose myself to new things, to different things, to other opinions, to other adventures, listen to stories and join in on conversations about topics I know nothing about.  I want to grow my imagination – not for me – but so I can grow my empathy, so that I can make more of a difference.

"You’ve been criticising yourself for years.  Try approving of yourself and see what happens." Louise Hay.

 How does behavioural change really happen?  We are so conditioned to believe that to make adjustments and grow ourselves we have to find the things that we are ‘bad’ at, or that are not working for us and do less of them…easy isn’t it?  We spend such a lot of our lives being down on ourselves, and criticising our every little action.  How’s that working out for you?  Not so great?  Are you still down on yourself, still doing those things? What if we started focusing somewhere else?

Our attention is one of our most valuable assets. Did you get that? Attention is one of our most valuable assets. Whatever we give our attention to is what will grow and flourish. So if we are focussing on what we are doing wrong, then chances are we will see more and do more of that. Hang on…wasn’t that supposed to help us do less??  I suggest not. If, on the other hand, we choose to give our attention to what is already working for us and focus on that, then chances are we will find ourselves doing more of that…and maybe even enjoying ourselves in the process!

We are all motivated to be competent and to become more competent.  A feeling of competence contributes to our well being.  But how is this best developed?

In corporatesville, there is a thing called the Pareto principle.  This basically says that 80% of my income is coming from 20% of my customers; So – If you focus your very valuable attention on the 80% of your customers that is giving you only 20% of your income and try and grow them, there is a real possibility that the 20% that are your loyal clients or customers and your real bread and butter are going to lose out.  So spending less time on focussing on what is not working, and more time on making the 20% more prosperous, could that take less effort, be more profitable and perhaps be a good strategy?…yes?

The same goes for personal development.  Let’s look at this from a public speaking perspective. I am wanting to be a great public speaker. If my valuable attention is where I perceive my downfalls are – counting how many times I say Ummmm, focussing on how nervous I am, the stain on my shirt from lunch etc,  then I will no doubt finish the presentation knowing that I said Ummm 12 times, that my hands shook and that the stain is still there.  I will walk away with that as a focus and as the relationship that I have just built with my audience; all of that attention that I could have been giving to them, not me.  

How about I change that around?  The feedback is that I know I am good at some things, like building rapport, eye contact, and storytelling.  So if I can change where I put my attention and start focussing on more of what is already working for me, then I can start to build my relationship with myself and my audience from a positive perspective.

Constructive criticism is often ‘back handed’ compliments, designed to undermine our self value.  Think about everything that happens in a sentence before a ‘but’.  I loved your presentation, but I think…..Did I really love the presentation?  What happens after the ‘but’ is going to be the thing we listen to the most.  We love to hear negative things – we have heard them all our lives and that is what we are used to.  It comes down to self-esteem.  We all seek to verify our own perceptions of ourselves, so if we have low self-esteem we will look for the criticism and be comfortable/comforted with that.  We will often not believe a compliment when it is paid; not even receive it, let alone believe it! Negative events have a greater impact on your brain than positive events do.  This is because negative events pose a chance of danger and we become hypersensitive to them at the level of instinct, the spiral is that we then have a hard time seeing, hearing or feeling positive.                                                         

We tend to focus more on what they think went wrong or what we did badly. We are very quick to criticise ourselves and need to be encouraged to see the positives first.  If we focus on the negatives first, we will have a really hard time giving ANY attention to the positives.

Powerful change can be achieved when we focus on identifying what is already working.  What are your good and great attributes?  Celebrate them and then apply them and grow them. 

Once again…in corporatesville… the phrase for this is called Appreciative Inquiry. It is about building on the strengths to transform an organisation.  According to Peter Drucker of the Drucker School of Management, change comes from an alignment of attention on strengths that makes a systems’ weaknesses irrelevant. I believe this applies in a similar way to personal change.  Elevate your strengths and your perceived weaknesses become irrelevant.  Enquire of yourself – what is already working for you? Now work to amplify that.

Your ATTENTION is POWERFUL. Choose what part of your experience you want to see more of, focus on that, and more of it will flow into your life. Guaranteed! 

It is not the horse that draws the cart, but the oats. −Russian proverb

http://youtu.be/QzW22wwh1J4  for a cute look at Appreciative Inquiry

I have always thought of myself as a self-motivated person.  As I am maturing and growing into different values and new ideals, my motivation has been shifting and changing as well.  I’m wondering just what motivation is, how best to harness it and where it is most useful?

The Oxford Dictionary says motivation is the “reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way”.  Its more than just a desire to DO stuff, it is the get up and go and the reason that I get out of my chair and do it.  It’s the action. 

Recently I have been witness to a few of my friends (finally) making the step to stop smoking.  I know with myself a number of years ago when I confronted smoking, I needed to really make a firm decision before even attempting to give it a go! Looking back I what really motivated me was the kind of person I could imagine myself being without cigarettes.  So with any given task, goal or outcome, there must be some motivation to complete it.  Where does that reason stem from? 

If we explore a take on the Nuerolingistic (NLP) theory of ‘away from’ or ‘towards’ motivation, there are 2 types of people. 

The first is ‘motivated’ by a desire to move ‘away from’ something.  Mostly this is associated with pain of some sort, as humans are programmed to move away from pain and towards pleasure. So an ‘away from’ person will be looking to eliminate something they don’t like, something they don’t want. They will be focussed on the problems in an attempt to move away from them.

The second set is ‘motivated’ by moving ‘towards’ a solution.  They will be looking for solutions to create something different in their lives, something they like, something they want, exploring possibilities and focussing on the pleasure that will bring and moving ‘towards’ that.

Let’s explore a few scenarios.

Statement:  I want to stop smoking.

An ‘away from’ person will be focussing on the downfalls of smoking.  Their motivation will be tied up in that pain, in the feeling of out of control.  They will be asking themselves questions like – Why am I addicted to smoking? Why do I smoke? Why am I out of control around smoking?  The tricky thing with our mind is that we will always come up with answers to those questions.  I am addicted because I am inherently weak; I smoke because don’t have any self control, or its my choice and I will do what I want!; I am out of control because I am addicted and there is nothing I can do about it …etc.

A ‘towards’ motivated person in the same position will be seeing the solution and asking themselves different kinds of questions: How can I overcome this addiction? What would provide me with the greatest motivation to stop? What would I feel like if I didn’t have to be conscious of the smell of smoke?  Answers: I seek some help; I could work with someone to support me; I am looking forward to the freedom I will feel from not smoking; …etc.

Statement:  I want to be debt free.

Away from Questions: Why have I found myself in this position? Why am I so bad with money? Why are my finances out of control? 

Away from answers:  I have found myself in this position because I am useless with money; I am so useless with money because I don’t have any self control; my finances are out of control because my parents never taught me how to save; my boss doesn’t think I deserve a raise…etc.

Towards Questions: How long will it take to be debt free if I do this scenario? What would happen if I refinanced and looked at other options? What if I altered my life style to spend less? 

Towards Answers: I would be debt free in x months; I could bundle my debt and create a plan to eradicate it; I could sell off some things; I could spend less on eating out…etc.

Statement: I want to be 10 kg lighter

Away from Questions: Why am I so fat? Why can’t I lose weight? Why am I so out of control around food?

Away from Answers: Because I’m useless; Because I’m useless; Because I’m useless and besides which its all Macdonald’s fault that they are on every corner and I can’t resist the marketing, and I can’t operate without sugar, and there’s a party on today so tomorrow will be better…etc.

Towards Questions: How can I be 10kg lighter? I wonder what difference it would make if I went for a walk each day? What if I said no to that chocolate? What if I just started today?

Answers: You could say no to that chocolate; It would make me feel better today; It would make me feel better today; It would make me feel better today…etc.

That is the theory behind motivation according to NLP.   Quality questions bring positive solutions.  ‘Why’ questions coming from a negative perspective will always find an ‘away from’ answer.

We all know about the power of positive thinking, but how many of us are really listening to the quality of the conversations we are having in our minds? If we could listen a bit closer we might be able to catch ourselves asking the why questions which brings a blame and shame answer and try reframing the questions to how/what if questions which will start changing direction to a ‘ towards’ approach.

The trick here is to become the listener of your thoughts rather than the speaker of your thoughts.  Which voice are you paying attention to?