Self Motivational Means Mind your Language

Posted on March 30th, 2010 by admin in self motivational

Self motivational people know that the language they use can have a very big impact on their moods and behaviour. When others around them are continually using negative talk they conciously block it out to avoid it impacting on their day. How often when something goes wrong you hear others or yourself saying “what a disaster!” In most cases the disaster is no more than laddered tights just before going out for the evening or the video recorder failed to record the football match you wanted to see. So what, but the issue is that your subconcious is listening and if it hears a stream of very negative expressions it reacts accordingly. So you become more and more miserable and in extreme cases depressed and anything but self motivational. When you look at it they are only minor set backs which often can be readily overcome. But if you keep up such negative inner talk or surround yourself with people who exaggerate negativity it will begin to take its toll on your mindset.
Ask yourself this ” Does over emphasising the negative nature of a situation put you in the right frame of mind to overcome it?” Hopefully you answered “No!”. But for some people it has become a way of life to look at the world in as negative frame of mind as possible and worse still express it in extremely negative terms. What happened in Haiti recently was a disaster, missing your favourite football team is no more than an inconvenience to which you should be no more than peeved. There’s a great word to have in your vocabulary which will send the signal to your brain that it is anything but a disaster and you can overcome it or at least cope with it. If you realise that stress is not caused by external factors but by how you react to them you can see that your mental health depends a lot on the language you use and listen to regularly.
So what can you do if you want to be self motivational? First you must look to the language you use yourself. When you find yourself reacting to a negative situation, stop and think and say to yourself in the scale of things how does this compare to a real disaste (Haiti or whichever one you want to use as your yardstick) and say how bad do I feel this situation really is? In most cases it is a minor mishap not a catastrophe. So curb your desire to use hyperbole to describe a negative situation. Secondly listen for others using extreme language to make matters worse and ask them “do you really think the situation is that bad?”. You will help them to become more self motivational by challenging their thinking this way. If you find that some people do not respond positively to this challenging then perhaps its best not to spend too much time in their company. If you would like some further help in being more self motivational take a look at my favourite book list.

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Self Motivational and Self Image

Posted on January 30th, 2010 by admin in self motivational


The great thing about self motivational people is that they are not burdened by what other people think of them. That’s not because they are arrogant or conceited they just don’t let it make them feel less of themselves or on the flipside inflate their ego. To paraphrase Rudyard Kipling; self motivational people can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same. It’s about staying on the level regardless of what people say or think about you. Especially what we think others think about us as very often we don’t have a very accurate view of this.

The main reason we often worry about what others think of us is that we crave their approval. Why might we be so dependent on others approval to make us feel good about ourselves? For many of us this behaviour pattern is instilled at a very early age. When children misbehave their parents often chastise them and tell them they are a bad boy/girl. If this is done relentlessly then the child begins to believe they are inherently bad or there is something wrong with them and that their parents don’t love them. If you are a parent of young children make sure that you highlight their bad behaviour not that they are bad. In this way you can direct their behaviour but leave their self esteem intact. Research has found that up to the age of 6 or 7 years a child will accept the opinion of any authority figure as being fact and will begin to form their character as a result. As William Wordsworth said “the child is father of the man”. The problem is further confounded when a child does something well and is given high praise and told they are a good boy/girl. Often they don’t understand why they are now inherently good but it makes them feel good about themselves. From then on they know they feel good when others think well of them and they become almost addicted to the situation. Thus they crave approval even if they are not sure how they go about getting that approval. As we grow up we begin to work out what get approval and what doesn’t though we are not always completely accurate in our analysis. It becomes even more complicated when others have different expectations of us and give approval for different behaviours. This then becomes a barrier to us being self motivational.

As a result we develop a belief that what makes us ‘good enough’ is what others think about us. We then become a puppet on a string to be led one way then another by what we think people will think of us. So how can we alter that belief? The first thing to realise that it is not based on reality it is just our map of the world and that we can change that map. One of the ways of changing belief patterns and becoming more self motivational is to use positive affirmations. These can be used by writing them down a number of times or saying them out loud especially while looking into a mirror. My favourite affirmation to use in this context is “What I think of myself is much more important than what others think of me”. If used often enough you hard wire this new belief pattern into your brain which in turn cuts those strings allowing you to be self motivational. For more ideas take a look at my self motivational booklist.

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Self Motivational Means Never Giving Up

Posted on November 29th, 2009 by admin in Self Techniques

How can I motivate myself? Are you still asking that age old question? To be self motivational you need to adopt a new mindset from the one that has you asking that question “how can I motivate myself?” If you are asking this question of yourself then you are more likely to be the type that will readily quit when things go wrong. If things go wrong do you find yourself saying things like. “I knew it would never work” “Things never work out for me” “No matter how hard I try it never seems to happen for me”. If you find yourself using this type of internal talk realise that you are telling your subconscious that there is a state of permanency here which you can’t get out of. And as you should know by now if you have been reading any of my postings, what you tell your subconscious it sets about to make a reality for you.

If you are a self motivational person then how you motivate yourself is by seeing an underlying cause for what has gone wrong which you can act on and achieve better results. For that is the mindset that you must adopt. That is, when things go wrong you don’t see that as a failure that it is just a result which you didn’t want. See it as feedback which you can use in answering the question “How can I motivate myself?” If you have looked at Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) at all you will realise that this is what they call reframing. You can either put it in a frame and call it failure or you can put it in another frame and call it a different result from what you wanted. As a child when you were learning to walk and you fell over for the nth time, neither you or your parents said “OK that’s it you’ll never do this walking thing might as well give up and just crawl on your hands and knees for the rest of your life!” No you took the feedback about balance and foot placement and quite rapidly really mastered the art. Why then as adults if we fail to lose weight we say “diets don’t work for me” instead as self motivational people say “yes I still ate too much last week and didn’t get out jogging enough for me to attain the result I wanted” Similarly in the current climate some of you may be applying for jobs and getting many rejections. If you are saying “I’ll never get another job” then you probably won’t. If you are saying “how can I try a different field, improve my resume or my interview skills” then you will achieve the result you desire and you will have learned how to motivate yourself in many other areas of your life.

If you want some more support to be self motivational take a look at my own self motivational booklist of authors who have helped me along the way.

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