Instant Confidence: The Power to Go for Anything You Want by Paul McKenna PH.D. (2016)
SECTION TWO
MOTIVATE YOURSELF FOR SUCCESS
CHAPTER 11
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What Motivates You?
A Visit to the Future
Up until now, we have been focusing primarily on the state of confidence—that feeling in your body of being comfortable, powerful, and at ease. But feeling confident is only half of the recipe for success. If all you did was to sit around all day feeling confident, your life would not change for the better. In order to truly make a difference in your life, you need to take consistent daily action.
“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”
JIM RYUN
Do this now …
Imagine it is now the future, a few years before the end of your life. You never took action to create the changes you want in your life. How do you feel? What does it inspire you to do or not do now?
Whatever your experience of that was, come fully back into the present …
Now, I’d like you to imagine you’re way off into the future again, near the end of your life. But in this future, you’ve taken action every single day to make your life the way you want it. How is this future different? How do you feel? What does living in this way inspire you to do or not do now?
We all have things we are motivated to move towards and other things we are motivated to move away from. Whichever combination of the two inspires you to take action is your own personal key to motivation!
Instant Motivation
We all have the seeds of motivation within us. For example, if your house was on fire, would you sit around on the sofa until EastEnders had finished before calling the fire department and getting yourself and your loved ones out of there? If you won the lottery, would you procrastinate for a few weeks before you eventually got around to collecting your millions?
“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.”
SIR JOHN LUBBOCK
In each of these examples, the “on/off switch” for your motivation was something outside yourself. But what if you were able to switch on your motivation all by yourself, without waiting for some external event to trigger you into action?
You only have to look at the Internet to realize that people can attach feelings of pleasure to pretty much anything (so I’m told). So imagine what would happen if you deliberately attached feelings of powerful motivation to whatever it is you most want to do?
The talk-show host Montel Williams, a former sergeant in the U.S. Marines, asked me to demonstrate this principle on his show. So they found a guy who was completely unmotivated to do any cleaning up around the house. I went to his home with a camera crew at 11 A.M. and we found him lying on the couch drinking a beer.
When I asked him what already motivated him, he couldn’t think of anything. Noticing the pool cues against the wall, I asked him if he liked to play pool. His entire posture changed. His face lit up and he began talking excitedly about how much he loved playing pool for money.
I had him vividly remember one of his most exciting matches and create a “switch” for instant motivation, just like the confidence switch you learned to create in Section 1. To make the switch more powerful, I asked him to think about his most exciting sexual experience and to add that feeling to the switch. Finally, I asked him to remember a time when he thought to himself, “What the hell—I’m just going to do this!” and we added those feelings to the switch as well. By this time, he was ready to explode with motivation!
All that remained was to link that feeling of incredible excitement and pleasurable anticipation to doing the housework. I had him push the switch and think about the housework, push the switch and think about the housework, push the switch and think about the housework until we actually had to hold him back from getting started until we could get the cameras into position.
A few minutes later he was happily ironing away in his sitting room with a sink full of newly cleaned dishes gleaming in the kitchen next door. The only problem was that he had attached so much good feeling to using the vacuum cleaner that he kept turning the switch on and off to deliver himself more and more pleasure. Less than an hour after we’d arrived to find him slobbed out on his sofa, we had to leave the room so he could have some “alone time” with his newly beloved vacuum cleaner!
What would you love to be really motivated to do?
The following exercise will give you the power to unleash your motivation in any situation …
THE MOTIVATION SWITCH
Read through the exercise before you do it for the first time …
1. Think about something you would love to be really motivated to do.
2. Now, remember a time when you felt really, really motivated in the past—a time where you took positive action and made a difference in your life. Fully return to it now—see what you saw, hear what you heard, and feel how good you felt. If you can’t remember a time, what happens when you think about how much better your life would be if you were totally motivated to take action now? Imagine how good you would feel if you had all the confidence, power, tenacity, and determination you could ever need!
3. As you keep going through this memory, make the colors brighter, the sounds richer, and the feelings stronger. Tell yourself to “Go for it!” in your most confident inner voice!
While you are feeling these good feelings, squeeze the thumb and middle finger of either hand together. From now on, each time you squeeze your thumb and middle finger together, you will begin to relive these good feelings.
4. Repeat steps 1-4 several times, adding in new positive experiences of motivation each time until just squeezing your thumb and middle finger together brings those good feelings back up to the top and has you raring to go.
5. Still holding your thumb and finger together, think about that situation in which you want to feel more motivated. Imagine things going perfectly, exactly the way you want them to be. See what you’ll see, hear what you’ll hear, and feel how good it feels to get into action and make things happen!
Just by taking the time to complete this exercise, you have set into motion the awesome power of momentum in your life. Whatever you set your mind on doing will be easier to achieve than ever before, because you have now put yourself in charge of your own motivation.
So … what are you going to do with the rest of your life?