The Science of Motivation

Strategies & Techniques for Turning Dreams into Destiny

Brian Tracy,Dan Strutzel

• Publisher: G&D Media
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781722520052
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

The legendary college football coach and analyst, Lou Holtz once said: "When all is said and done, more is said than done." These few, yet extremely profound words explain one of the biggest predicaments that individuals face today. Many of us say we want to be successful, happy and influential. Yet, very few of us follow up what we say-whether said to others or ourselves-with specific actions that move us directly toward those goals. The idea of being successful is an attractive dream that fills us with positive emotions. Whereas the actions required to be successful (at work, in our relationships, in sports competition, etc.) are often difficult and lengthy.So what do we need to bridge this gap between what we say we want, and what we must do to achieve it? We need goal-oriented motivation. This specific kind of motivation is the fuel that takes us across the long and often uncertain bridge to our desired destination in life.What would it mean to you to learn how to develop this kind of motivation on-demand, sustain this motivation through the difficult periods of life, and instill this motivation so intricately into your daily life that you make the very idea of motivation unnecessary? All of that and more is available to you in this cutting-edge, all new program from personal development expert and motivation master, Brian Tracy.

SIX

Sustaining Motivation, Part One: The Power of Daily Self-Talk

Dan

This is the first of three chapters in which we’re going to talk about the importance of sustaining motivation through the process of any important accomplishment. Our tendency is to become stale, routine, and distracted. In the beginning you talked about all the modern distractions that we have from technology and elsewhere that take us off the route of our goals. And then there’s just the fact that life passes by, and the years stack up upon one another, or people lose their focus.

Discuss how these next three chapters will give readers ideas, techniques, and strategies to overcome this common occurrence of losing their motivation.

Brian

We talked earlier about the power of suggestion in determining everything that happens to you. You’re greatly influenced both by external influences and by internal influences. You can only respond and react effectively to external influences, but you need to take complete control of your internal influences, because they’re far greater.

One thing that revolutionized my life was this very simple principle: that with affirmations, positive self-talk, your future and your potential are unlimited, because 95% of your emotions are determined by how you talk to yourself on an ongoing basis. You become what you think about most of the time. You also become what you say to yourself most of the time.

What are the words that you say to yourself? Remember that the default setting, the automatic setting, in the human brain is to talk to yourself in a negative way, to see the worst in things. This comes from childhood; maybe it’s instinctive in human beings. You think about your worries and your pains and your grievances and your aggravations and your irritations, because these are the things that are the thorns in your side.

Very seldom do we deliberately choose to think about the things that we like and the things that make us happy. As you talk to yourself in a positive way, as you take control of this inner dialogue that’s continually going night and day, even while you’re asleep, you actually take control of your emotions. As you take control of your emotions, you take control of your attitude. You begin to change your beliefs as well, and you change your expectations.

The greatest single obstacle to success is the fear of failure, the fear of loss. What if I lose my job? What if I lose my money? What if I lose my time? What if I lose the love of someone else?

This is always manifested in the feeling I can’t. I can’t change, I can’t do this, I can’t improve things. It’s learned helplessness. What is the antidote to this fear of failure? The answer is I can do it. Instead of saying I can’t and becoming angry, you say I can, I can do it, I can do anything I put my mind to.

I learned this four decades ago, and I practice it on my children. I’ve told them from the very beginning, “When you grow up, you’re going to be a big success.” I program them with this. It’s like sitting down next to their mental computers when they aren’t watching. When they’re young, children are susceptible; they have no ability to block the input of information from their parents. Whatever the parent says to the child repeatedly when the child is vulnerable becomes a permanent part of the child’s makeup.

If the child is told over and over again how much their parents love them and how wonderful they are, and parents play with them and give them eye contact and hold them and walk with them and treat them like they’re really important, this is what locks into their subconscious mind in the first three years of life. From then on, they build their whole life on that.

Fortunately, you can go back and reprogram an upbringing of negativity by repeating the words over and over again, I like myself. I like myself. I like myself. This drives the idea deeper, like pilings used to build a bridge. It drives it deeper into your subconscious mind and eventually cancels out any negative programming that you might have had.

The second thing that parents do when they’re raising children is in order to protect them: they keep saying, stop, get away from that, don’t do that, don’t touch that. The child who is driven by its natural instincts to explore its environment only hears I’m too small, I’m incompetent, I’m incapable, I can’t. At a very early age children stop trying new things, they stop exploring, because they know that their parents are going to get mad at them.

The child’s greatest fear is the fear of loss of a parent’s love. It’s also true for adults. That’s why the greatest gift of a parent is unconditional love, when they make it clear that they love their children 100%, no matter what they do or say, and they back them 100%.

I had an experience with this unconditional love. I once got an emergency call from the country club. My son and his friend, who were about ten or eleven years old, had gone over there, and they were playing around. They got some shampoo from the locker room. They took it with them, and they put it in the Jacuzzi outside.

Well, it frothed up, and people came running. The management came out, and they called the police. Then they called us. We drove over there. There were two police cruisers, there were the people from the country club, and you’d think there’d been a massive robbery. But it was just this Jacuzzi foaming up.

My son David and his friend were petrified. I asked the police, “What’s happening?” They said, “Well, kids are just kids, they got a big scare. Country club’s making too much of this. We have to stand by like there’s a serious crime in progress.” I said, “Thank you, don’t worry, I’ll take them home.”

I took Michael home, put him in the back seat, drove him home, never said a word. When we got home, I said, “What happened?” “Well, we just got the shampoo.” I said, “Sheesh, we did dumber things than that when we were young. That’s OK. Go to bed now.”

Two days later the country club phoned us up and kicked us out. They canceled our membership because of our juvenile delinquent children. I went to David said, “David, you got us kicked out of the country club.” His eyes lit up, and I said, “But it’s OK, don’t worry, it doesn’t matter.” He was clear that he was safe.

I took David to Europe with me two weeks ago. We were talking about how I’ve always given him unconditional love. He’s twenty-nine years old now, and he said, “I remember the country club. I remember when you came and picked me up. You took me home, and you never said a word. You backed me 100%. I still remember that. You did that with all of us; it was the greatest thing in the world.”

Anyway, my point is this continuous flow of positive verbal messages to your children, and to your spouse, to your grandchildren, and to other people. Constant positive reinforcing is one of the most wonderful things you can do. Positively reinforce yourself as well.

There’s another law that says that whatever is expressed is impressed. Whenever you say anything that raises the self-esteem and self-confidence of another person, you automatically raise your own self-esteem and self-confidence. By making another person feel happy and positive, you feel happy and positive.

If you are going to take a first-aid course, when do you take it? At the scene of the accident, when somebody is bleeding, or before? Obviously you want to take it before so that you’re fully prepared.

It’s the exactly same thing with positive self-talk and reversals and setbacks in life. Talk to yourself on a positive basis all the time, so that when you experience the unexpected reversals and failures, you are subconsciously prepared to be resilient, like the bamboo tree. You will take the initial shock, and you will bounce back immediately.

Talk to yourself and say these magic words: I can do it. I can do it. I can do it. If somebody else is doubtful say, you can do it. Many people’s lives have been changed by one person saying you can do it. You have incredible ability.

Whenever I’m out anywhere and I meet anyone who is doing a good job, especially in waitressing, or in business, or hotels, I say, “You know, you’re going to be a big success sooner or later. You’ve got star quality, and you’re going to be a big success.” I may never see them again, but I know that many people’s lives were changed forever by one person taking the time to tell them that they were good and that they had great potential.

After all the negative messages in their lives, they grab onto your message, and they hold that message. I’ve had people come up to me and say, “You may not remember, but I was in jail and you wrote to me,” or “I met you at a seminar in Kansas City, and my life was in shambles. Now this is my life today, and it’s wonderful. I have my own business, a beautiful home, and family, and everything else. You changed my life. You took the time to talk to me, you wrote to me, you called me, you sent me a message. I still have it, I still look at it, I have it on my desk, because nobody had ever told me that.”

This law of reversibility says that the more you tell other people how good they are, the more you say the same things to yourself. Also, the more you talk to yourself in a positive way, the more naturally you talk to other people in a positive way.

Dan

Excellent. Brian, is there any kind of formal process that you recommend, like the one you have with goals, when it comes to creating a habit of positive self-talk? It’s for people who think, “Consciously, when I force myself to say these positive things, I can say them, but then I have this ongoing chatter. I’m so used to putting myself down.” Is there a process you recommend for people to get in the habit of positive self-talk day after day?

Brian

Yes, there is a process. Napoleon Hill called it autosuggestion. Autosuggestion means self-suggestion, which goes back to our talk about the power of suggestion. Today we call it autoconditioning: we are conditioned by ourselves.

There are two types of conditioning. One is autoconditioning, where you condition yourself by talking to yourself. Then there’s heteroconditioning, which means being conditioned by others, by having them talk to us and influence us. The best, of course, is to have both, but at least you can control autosuggestion.

There’s a five-step process that you can use to learn how to talk to yourself in a positive way. The first step of the process is to idealize. Idealize means that you project yourself forward, you use the magic wand theory, and you imagine that your life is perfect in every way. If your life were perfect in every way, what would it look like? What would you be doing? How would you feel? What would you be accomplishing?

I teach this to corporations who are going through strategic planning exercises. I’ll have everyone in the room imagine that this company is perfect in five years. If it were perfect in five years, how would people describe it from the outside? If a major magazine were going to do a story on this company, and they fanned out and they interviewed everybody connected with this company—customers and suppliers and vendors and competitors and staff—what would you want them to say?

People around the table say things like, “This is the best company in its industry,” with the highest-quality products, great customer service, tremendous technology, regular growth rates, stock value three times as high as it was five years before, the best leadership, the best training, the best people, and so on. (These, by the way, turn out to be the characteristics of all the best companies.) I say, “All right, now, are these ideals possible?” They all say stop and they say, “Yes. Not in one year, but in three years or five years, we could accomplish all of those.”

I walked a company through this process a few years ago. They came up with seventeen ideal descriptions, almost like affirmations of what the company would look like if it was perfect in five years. At that time they were at $20 million in sales. One of their goals was to be at $40 million, with double the sales and of course double the profitability.

They began to initiate all of these ideas enthusiastically; everyone got into it. Five years later, they called me and invited me to a special dinner in downtown Washington at the Ritz Carlton: “We’d like you to come; we’re celebrating our five-year anniversary of that strategic planning session.” They paid for my way and everything else, so I went.

It was beautiful. They had a live jazz orchestra, fabulous food, everything. Then they got up and they made the announcements. The announcement was that this year they had hit $104 million in sales, five years after they had set a goal to hit $40 million. In other words, they exceeded their goal by 500%, and they said it was all because of that exercise in idealizing.

The first thing you do to exceed your goals is to create an exciting future picture of what your business and your life would look like sometime in the future if they were perfect in every way. The second thing you do is you visualize. You imagine; you create a mental picture of that success. Remember, you cannot accomplish something on the outside unless you can visualize it and see it on the inside.

One couple went through this seminar explaining this process about idealizing and visualizing. They said they wanted to have a dream house. I said, “Then get some pictures of dream houses. Buy some beautiful magazines that are full of pictures, like House Beautiful and Architectural Digest and Better Homes and Gardens.”

They went out and did that. Two years passed. It was the most amazing story. They called me up and said, “You’re not going to believe what happened after that seminar. We went out and we idealized. We found these magazines and we subscribed to them, and we started to tear out pictures of rooms and gardens so that we could create our perfect composite home.

“Then we made a big file folder with all these pictures. We would take it out, and we’d look at it every week. We’d think about and dream about living in that home. Then, a year later, we got an announcement that my husband was being transferred out west.” In this case it was to Edmonton, Alberta.

The first thing the husband had to do was buy a house. He went out on a Tuesday or Wednesday. He called up a couple of real estate agents, and he remembered this picture, this dream that he had. He said, “We’re looking for a house that has these aspects and this view and this number of rooms.” The listing agent said, “Well, I know everything in the inventory in town. There is no house like that for sale right now, but there is a house just like that coming on list tomorrow. You could be one of the first people to see it.”

His wife came out on Friday, and Saturday morning the real estate agent picked them up from the hotel. They drove out to this house, and they walked in. It was the perfect house from Better Homes and Gardens—the one that they had been dreaming about and visualizing for two years. The price was right, the location was right. They bought the house, and they’re living in it today. They said, “It was like a dream; it was the house we had dreamed of.”

Visualizing is really important, and here are the rules. There are five parts to visualization. The first is clarity. The greater clarity you have of the mental picture of the person you want to be, or the things you want to have, the faster they come into reality. It’s alm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• One Why Is Motivation So Important?
• Two The Myths of Motivation and the Truths That Will Set You Free
• Three The Power of Beliefs: Turning On Your Action Mechanism
• Four The Problem with Goals: How to Turn Goal Setting into Goal Achievement
• Five The Power of Right Action and Flexibility: Why “Just Do It” Is Not Enough Today
• Six Sustaining Motivation, Part One: The Power of Daily Self-Talk
• Seven Sustaining Motivation, Part Two: Developing a Long-Term Perspective
• Eight Sustaining Motivation, Part Three: The Keys to Resilience When Life Gets Tough
• Nine Motivating Others: The Secrets to Servant Leadership
• Ten Beyond Motivation: The Power of Rituals for Living an Extraordinary Life
• Index