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Todd Beeler is a top ranked motivation coach who has appeared in Sales and Marketing Management and Incentive magazines on the subject of motivation. Over 9500 people in 30 countries read his monthly newsletter on motivation. Beeler is the author of the “Mastering the 7 Hidden Secrets to Motivation” advanced course and can be found online at http://www.masteringmotivation.com/. |
| 3 Myths about Motivation Almost Everyone Believes! |
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In this article, you’ll discover 3 shocking myths about motivation almost everyone believes. Does positive thinking work in motivation? Does goal setting work? Is willpower effective? Let’s start with one of the biggest motivation myths-the power of positive thinking. Research shows that thinking positive often leads to illusion based thinking. It’s basically a complete denial of reality. Thinking through the issues realistically and confronting reality actually works better. Consider the first step to overcoming an alcohol addition-it’s admitting we are powerless and addicted. This is a painful step but an effective start towards transformation. Consider a simple example. Let’s say your motivation state right now is represented by the number -10. Let’s say you wanted to get it to +100. What if you multiplied the -10 x +10, what would you get? You would get -100. Positive thinking is represented by the +10, it actually made things 10 times worse. On the other hand, what if you embraced reality and made some changes until your desires lined up with reality? Let’s see, that’s a start of -10 x -10, the second -10 represents your motivational strategy of using loss aversion. The result of -10 x -10= +100. My conclusion is simple, if you are already at a +10 in your motivation, THEN using a positive thinking approach will work well– +10 x +10= +100. However, if you are like 70%+ of people struggling with motivation, your starting point is negative, so you need to use a negation strategy to negate or nullify the negative. One more example? 80% of people that start a business think they will succeed? Reality? 80% of them will fail. Wouldn’t it be wiser to scenario plan for things that will go wrong?How about goal setting-does that work well? You know the answer. Have you set a goal to be wealthy? Sure. Did it work? No. Did you set a New Year’s resolution to lose weight? Yes. Did it work? No. Well meaning authors cite a ‘study’ where only 3% of a class of Harvard grads set goals, and these 3% outperformed the other 97%. Sounds good right? Unfortunately, that study does not exist. It’s a myth. Goal setting doesn’t work at least 70% of the time because your control beliefs counter your goals. Your control beliefs are you prior beliefs that are based on past failures, and your skill beliefs, that are based on competency. Which means, unless you can get past your past failures, and unless you ramp up your skills, you will not believe you can achieve your goal? According to NYU researcher Peter Gollwitzer’s massive research on goal achievement, you need to set up a feasibility plan to make the goal feasible in light of your time and talents. Then you need to create a 5-step plan for reaching that goal. Additionally, detail when, where and how you will accomplish it. Finally, set up contingency plans to anticipate things that could get in the way. So goal setting alone is wishful thinking. Actually, the more far fetched your goals are, the more likely you are to fail according to Dr. Oettingen’s research. She found having realistic expectations predicted success better than having fantasy land based goals. Goal setting—it’s another motivational myth. So how about willpower-is that effective? Harvard’s Daniel Wegner has proven willpower almost always backfires. Why? Because of ironic processing. When I say ‘Don’t think about a white polar bear” what do you think about? A white polar bear. Why? Well, the harder you try, using willpower alone, the less likely you are to get your outcome. You have a tendency to oppose your own intentions. The prefrontal cortex in your brain controls motivation, and action. Yale’s Dr. Bargh has proven you can get your outcomes without using willpower by learning to engage your automaticity via your pre-frontal cortex. Your motivation can be automatically triggered by things as simple as your environment, or using verbs more often in your language patterns. So, to master motivation, you first need to demythologize yourself from the unscientific myths that predominate your current beliefs. If you base your motivational system on science instead of myth, you’ll raise probability dramatically and practically eliminate the risk of failure. Instead of believing the 3 myths of motivation, focus on reality based thinking, detailed planning, and action based language patterns.
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