Last Updated on August 19, 2024

Maximizing motivation and enjoyment

My wife and I recently visited my Mom in California.

My Mom is a very accomplished woman.

She was a choral director for young women’s choirs for many years.

I’m not a big “choir concert” person, but these performances were out of this world.

In fact, they were so beautiful they consistently made me cry!

It was like hearing angels sing.

Her choirs traveled internationally and my Mom even has two GRAMMY awards.

She is now retired, but even in her 70s she still tends to her large and beautiful garden.

In other words, she’s quite the doer!

The structure of ambition

I asked her how she feels motivated to do all these things.

This is what we call “modeling” in NLP — eliciting someone’s unconscious strategy for how they do something excellently.

My mom said she thinks about how good it will feel when it’s done.

Her voice tone changed as she described this.

It sounded like she was picturing it being done, and breathing a sigh of relief.

And maybe also feeling a bit of positive pride.

This simple mental image of it being “done” plus this strong positive feeling had driven her to achieve great things.

The joy of doing

While we were there, my Mom “volunteered” me to help in the garden.

I have no particular interest or skill at gardening, so I was kind of dreading it.

To trim a large overgrown bush, I had to sandwich my body against the bush and the fence.

Then with a dull and rusty saw, I was trying my best to cut through some thick branches.

As I was dripping sweat, covered in sawdust, my shoulder muscles burning, my mom was saying how frustrating it was.

But I wasn’t feeling frustrated!

I was feeling pretty patient, and focusing on just being present.

In fact, I remembered a technique from Boy Scouts about how to saw through a thick branch or log by creating a v-shape.

That made me feel excited and hopeful!

My mom felt frustrated and complained a bit about the size of the bush.

Whereas I was focused on how much progress we had made already.

Many aspects of motivation

When we were done with cutting back this large bush, my mom seemed very relieved.

She deeply appreciated that it was done.

Whereas I felt only a mild sense of accomplishment.

Later my mom reflected on how difficult and annoying the bush trimming task was.

Which was interesting, because my memory of it was that it was successful, and not too bad, actually!

This whole experience got me thinking about motivation, and how there are many aspects to it.

And especially how we can improve at every aspect of the process!

After a deep discussion with my wife Jess about it last week, I drew this diagram:

We can anticipate the start of the action, either getting excited or dreading it. (1)

We can think about how enjoyable or difficult it’s going to be to do it. (2)

We can think about how good it will feel when we’re done, or maybe how tired we will be instead. (3)

We can think about the ultimate result, like how the garden will look when everything is done. (4)

Then there’s the actual experience of starting (5), doing it (6), and finishing it (7), which may or may not correlate with what we thought.

Like with procrastination, often we anticipate things will be harder than they end up being.

We can also reflect afterwards about the action, either about how enjoyable or annoying it was to do (8), and how great it is that it’s done, or how awful the ending was in the case of trauma. (9)

And there’s even the experience of actually accomplishing the ultimate aim, which might be fantastic, or might not live up to our expectations! (10)

Tuning up your motivation and enjoyment

Thinking like this gives us more options for improving our ability to motivate ourselves to accomplish great things, as well as improving our experience along the way.

We all have strengths and weaknesses.

I realized I have a lot of room for improvement in anticipating actions.

I mostly make mental pictures of how difficult or tiring things will be to do!

But then I’m pretty good at not stressing once I get started.

I could also improve really feeling good when I complete things.

But I’m also really quite good at asking “What went well?” when I review my day and my week.

Where are your strengths and weaknesses in all of this?

Free 8-Minute Guided Visualization

In my coaching group this week, I taught about this topic.

I also recorded a guided 8-minute visualization that takes you through each of the 10 aspects of motivation in this diagram!

The goal is to both boost motivation to get things done and enjoy the process.

Give it a listen, and let me know what you think!

Take care,

 

 

 

~Duff
(they/them)

P.S. If you want to join The Joy of Doing coaching group, it’s only $47 a month.

We meet Sundays 11 AM Denver time for an hour.

The group is also included in any 1-on-1 coaching subscription as a bonus!