motivation Archives

External Vs Internal – A classic motivational struggle

by David

Interesting post on Seth’s blog a while back.

He’s commenting on one of my key themes: External motivation versus internal motivation. He doesn’t go into the topic at length of course, that’s not his blogging style. He likes short and pithy and he is the best in the world at it.

He just ends the post with this and it struck me.

“The nature of our new economic system, that one that doesn’t support predictable factory work, is that external motivation is far less useful. If you’re looking for a big payday, you won’t find it right away. If you’re depending on cheers and thank yous from your Twitter followers, you’re looking at a very bumpy ride.
In fact, the world is more and more aligned in favor of those who find motivation inside, who would do what they do even if it wasn’t their job. As jobs turn into projects, the leaders we need are those that relish the project, that jump at the chance to push themselves harder than any coach ever could.”

In isolation this is about work. It’s about industry. He doesn’t actually say it (it’s really not his department anyway) but I don’t think he knows how to exactly engender internal motivation that overcomes the external. How to make the gut strength motivation deeper and more pervasive than that which comes from the brain topside.

He’s not alone. Most every coach, counselor, or guru who’s trying to do it is on the wrong track. Often they fail to see that the motivation they’re supplying to their client is just yet another external motivating factor. Like a bird chirping on a tree branch or the sound of a wave hitting the beach. It’s still from the outside. It’s external.

Not surprising that they don’t see it for what it is though.

Internal motivating ques are very subtle and personal. Who gathers around the water cooler to talk about their gut feeling? Almost no one.

Too bad though. That one phenomenon is the basis of the new immunity that I’ve been writing about for some time now. The point I always make is simple but, as the old saying goes “still waters run deep” and this is no exception. It’s taken me years to give this voice so that I can explain it to people.

I think the era of the great motivator standing up on stage getting everyone going is now just about over. I don’t think people will go on paying big money for that same stuff for too much longer. Same with the calm-talk of the “spiritual teacher” sitting there answering questions while attendees hang on his/her every word. It’s more personal now. It’s got to be. There’s just too much to contend with already.

All they’ve got is mostly just more words. Words that form ideas that motivate people. That’s how it’s been done for centuries. It’s about as old hart as it get’s

But now that model is in real trouble as our difficulties with a changing world catch up with us. Seth is smart enough to notice this new trend. So, how about you?

[Would you like to hear more about what I’ve got to say on this topic? Sign-up here and get a free limited release MP3 download of my 90 minute conversation with copy guy extraordinaire Donnie Bryant. I hold nothing back and this call is jam-packed with information about my H.E.R.O. project that I haven’t ever released on this blog before.

More power to you.

Positivity Fail

by David

Mobius Monday Minute – June 20 , 2011

Do you dream about how good an ideal future outcome is going to be? Do you follow the typical common coach’s suggestion about visualizing yourself in the winner’s circle?

If you do you could be heading for failure.

Reams of studies put together by psychologists over the years have shown that indulging in positive fantasies actually makes people’s ambitions less likely to become reality. But no one had yet figured out why.

Until now that is.

A new study carried out by researchers at New York University’s Motivation Lab points to evidence that positive fantasies sap our energy. “By allowing people to consummate a desired future”, the researchers explain, “positive fantasies trigger the relaxation that would normally accompany actual achievement, rather than marshaling the energy needed to obtain it”.

It looks like fantasizing about successful outcomes makes the task of putting out the energy to do the hard work seem unnecessary. If success seems like a forgone conclusion then why work so hard?

Apparently, the study revealed that when the fantasizing sets in even the subjects seem to get so relaxed that even their blood pressure dropped. (Although that correlation to motivation is still being looked at.)

So, should we stress ourselves to success? Or fantasize ourselves into relaxation?

Could this be why we see so many successful people with heart problems and dreamers who are flat broke? It’s quite a serious trade-off at either end of the spectrum don’t you think?

Personally, I’ve never been much of a fan of dreaming about the future. I prefer to go with future vision. Dreaming about great tomorrows that might never come is not productive. Dreams tend to be just shinny new objects in the distance that we see through the eyes of our imagination. They often appear like a movie with lots of movement and plenty of drama. But they also change a lot from session to session.

Vision is different.

With vision all you see is one frame of the completed movie. It’s always the same each time. Solid and sustained over long periods of time.

But that’s not all.

Vision allows you to actually feel its truth… it’s absoluteness that the future will be that which has been seen. Accomplishment happens through hard work sustained over time. That takes a high state of motivation that apparently dreaming can’t call-up. Dreams may be nice things that can appear fuzzy and warm but vision is a manic steamroller on its way to the finish line.

Choose wisely.

More power to you.

POLL: Napoleon Hill’s Thesis

by David

Syncing in self-belief

by David

I was born with two brains.

Let me be clear though. I’m not claiming that I was somehow favored with an exceptionally large heaping helping of neurological goodies far beyond the norm. To my knowledge my particular gene pool wasn’t necessarily Olympic-sized and overpopulated with excess ganglion. It hasn’t allowed me to be a lot smarter than you or anyone else for that matter. See, I simply can’t claim that for myself. I’d like to but… I can’t.

Know why?

Turns out that my birth attributes weren’t all that special at all. At least when it comes to a tally in the brain department. The fact of the matter is, you have two separate sets of brains in your body too. So does the rest of the human population. All seven billion of us.

Seven billion problems

With all these brains there arises a problem though that needs to be addressed. None of us came with an owner’s manual. Having two sets of brains living in one body can be difficult to get a handle on at least from street level.

It doesn’t help that one brain set is in the head and the other one is in the gut. Or that the latter feels but doesn’t think while the former thinks (like gangbusters) but can’t feel a heck of a lot – if anything.

Out of sync

You’d think, given such a different set of skills, that each brain would seek out the other to form some sort of a coalition. That would work well if they actually knew each other existed by more than a passing glance. But as they mature they don’t seem to. Like the group of metronomes in the video posted here these two brain sets just seem out of synchronization most of the time. There is some communication between them but mostly they’re left to do their own thing.

For example, the head-brain can deliver to us a complex cognizance of our world. It can sometimes be seen as a romantic view and what all that means and then… other times? It could be a negative black hole.

The gut brain handles the smelly [definitely unromantic] task of digestion. This sort of disconnect allows the head-brain room to get into some turbulent thought territory. When that happens is it produces a lot of “noise” for our intellect to deal with. Often that noise is expressed as stress which tends to drown out all chances for optimal productivity in the thinking-straight department.

So, why is that?

Just take a look at your computer. All sensitive systems need some sort of buffer from external factors that might be damaging to its integrity. Of course we don’t call them buffers we call them “firewalls” and “anti-virus programs” but the effect they have on the system is similar. It would be foolish if you were to turn off those services and go out surfing all over the web wouldn’t it? You’d be asking for trouble and it wouldn’t take very long to find it.

So you can imagine what it’s like for the beleaguered head-brain. Every day it steps out into the world and – sooner or later – it will fall into some crappy thought-company.

It desperately needs a buffer too.

In the video we see how that was accomplished. The metronomes finally got a buffering platform that allowed them to communicate with each other. That little bit of connection quickly turned around the chaos and made it into an organized mass of oneness. Like those metronomes we too could pull these brains into sync with a new platform. One that can cause a unique unbroken communication of energy between both sets of brains creating harmony from randomness.

It could become more of what was intended: a symphony of ideas coupled with the motivation to put them into action. That platform is the ocean of potential that comes as a standard factory installed capability within each of us. The only reason we don’t think we have ready access to it is because it’s too huge a pattern to fit into the confines of our head- brain.

The ugly-duckling gut brain though has a unique advantage. It doesn’t think it feels. That potentiality is energy-based. Easy for the super sensitive gut brain to know if it’s there or not. It can feel it.

That dynamic informs us of who we are: a feeling/thinking being capable of amazing things. Let’s hear it for a solid self-belief built on inner-togetherness.

More power to you.

Gut Energy

by David

Famous Quotivations # 12 – February 4 , 2011

psycho-cybernetics book — Max’s first book was a Best Seller

Today’s quotivation is from Dr. Maxwell Maltz MD, the author of Psycho-cybernetics one of the most popular books in self-improvement ever written.

“When this energy is at an optimum all our organs function better, we ‘feel good’, wounds heal faster, we are more resistant to disease, we recover from any sort of stress faster, we feel and act ‘younger’, and in fact biologically we are younger.”

It is true that energy plays a huge part in the lives of humans. It is also true that the duality principal applies here also.

Dr. Maltz was an astute observer and recognized that there was not one but two types of energies at play within us. He made references to one that he termed “caloric”, that is, it comes from the food we eat. As a medical doctor he knew that one well since it was a “produced” energy, but the other was a much more an elusive and immeasurable one.

This energy was much more mysterious yet he was a great believer that it alone held the most promise for the overall wellness of us all. You can almost sense his effusiveness about it in this quote.

I don’t know if he knew it or not but this energy, the existence of which he could not actually prove but could only speculate on, was very different. It’s not a produced energy – it’s a naturally occurring “emitted” energy. Sort of like how an atomic reaction emits energy.

Now, please don’t be weirded out here, but this one unseen energy interacts with us humans every day. Let me explain:

When you look out at that world something happens to what you see, it becomes a memory. To accomplish this the information must go through a type of transformation. The information about that physical experience must be converted to an ethereal state so it can be available as a memory to the mind which is itself in an ethereal energy-based state.

This is what happened to that newspaper article you read this morning, that music you heard on the radio in your car on the way to work, and it’s why you remember where you were when you first heard that Barack Obama had won the election as US president. But here’s where things start to get strange.

Let’s suppose that you had a flat tire when you came out to your car this morning. You realize that you have to now change that tire or you’re not going anywhere. So you haul out the spare and then struggle to jack up the car.

Now, with much huffing and puffing you get the tire on only to find that your headlights were on all that time and now your battery is drained. You go to get the jumper cables that are “supposed” to be hanging up in your garage but are not and … well, you get the picture.

You are just about at your wit’s end about ready to quit right there and give up but, for some reason, you don’t. Instead you decide to power through. You walk over to your neighbor’s house to ask for his assistance and if he would help you with a boost. He agrees and soon, after a quick clean up, you’re again on your way.

A story like this may not be all that unusual but when you recall it, like you would do inside a H.E.R.O. Tour session, you would realize that it was your persistence that kicked in and caused you to get the job done despite all the difficulty. After all you could have chosen to quit. The energy that is persistence is mysterious. It’s sometimes referred to as a “gut drive” that powers accomplishment. But no one has ever detailed how it works.

Not until now that is. Here’s what I think is going on.

That hidden drive that Dr. Maltz was so fascinated with is felt in the gut area of the body but do you know why?

It took a cell biologist studying the digestive system to stumble upon what I believe is the definitive answer. Turns out that now the “good old gut feeling” has a sound scientific base to it.

Fantastic as it sounds woven into the sheaths of tissue that line the digestive track from your throat to your colon is another brain! This brain, called the “enteric nervous system” by Dr. Michael Gershon who announced his finding to a New York Times reporter in 1996, is rich in natural ‘feel good’ chemicals and is made up of neurons identical to those found in the head brain.

But here’s the connection to that strange invisible energy I talked about in the beginning.

The next time you have a gut feeling about something remember this: You feel it in the area, just below the rib cage, because your gut-brain is incredibly sensitive. (It’s designed to feel but not to think.) What you are feeling is an energy this actually has enough weight to it that it can brush up against the neurons there and cause that feeling – but, that’s not all. If you’ve had a gut feeling and it’s turned out to be right it’s because this mysterious energy has an intelligence attached to it and, lucky for you, it has your best interests at heart.

So, next time you think it would be a good career move to seek out a mentor and following their advice without question it might be a good idea to do a quick gut check first.

You would make Max proud.

It’s Friday, consider your self “quotivated”.

I’m David Parsons and you’ll find me blogging away at Mobiusman.com

More power to you.