Mind-Body-Mood Advisor:
10 Tips for Becoming a Peak Performer
Whether you're trying to lose weight, train for a race, or reach some other milestone, knowing how to motivate yourself is one of your best assets.
Connect with past successes to keep yourself motivated and on track.
You can reach your goal, if you know how to keep moving forward.
RODALE NEWS, LENOX, MA—Are you looking for ways to power up your motivation to make positive changes in your life? Knowing how to motivate yourself is critical for success, but it's not always easy.
Many of the people I see come for help in achieving a challenging personal goal:
“I want to lose 25 pounds.”
“I’m struggling to finish the book I’m writing.”
“I’ve got to quit smoking.”
“My kids are all out of the house and I’ve decided to run a marathon.”
“I want to finish my bachelor’s degree.”
My clients who are successful come up with a realistic and practical plan of action. More intangible, but no less essential to their success, is their motivation. Peak performers are strongly committed—and they find ways to stay motivated in the face of anticipated and unforeseen obstacles.
Recently, I spoke with one of my Canyon Ranch colleagues, Peggy Holt, who is a master at helping people fortify their motivation for positive change. Peggy is a life-management therapist at Canyon Ranch in Tucson. She and Steve Brewer, the medical director at Canyon Ranch in Tucson, have written a beautiful book, The Everest Principle: How to Achieve the Summit of Your Life, that offers medical and motivational information to help you reach your health and fitness goals. Here are several of their strategies, which you can use to keep your motivation strong and be a peak performer—whatever your personal goals and challenges may be.
Feel like your motivation is flagging? Use these 10 motivational enhancers to reconnect with your commitment and keep moving toward your goals:
1. Make sure your goal is high enough to be really compelling. Peggy points out the joy of pursuing a really exciting goal this way: “It’s the challenge and the mastering of it—whatever “it” might be—that provides one of life’s greatest satisfactions.”
2. Develop a plan that is realistic and workable for you. Even if your ultimate goal is ambitious—in fact, especially if your ultimate goal is ambitious—your plan for reaching it needs to be grounded in reality. If you need to, consult with a knowledgeable friend or an expert to help you develop a practical plan. A goal without a plan is just a wish.
3. Connect with a memory of prior success. When you start feeling like you'll never reach the objective you've set for yourself, push back against that negativity by vividly remembering a time when you did succeed. It doesn't have to be a memory relating to your current goal—if you're trying to lose weight, for example, it could help to recall a successful presentation you gave at work or a difficult D-I-Y project at home that you finally completed. Remember how you felt physically, the energy in your body, and how you felt about yourself when you met that goal at last. Tapping into the energy of a past success can really help to amp up your present motivation.
4. Surround yourself with reinforcers. Find a picture of yourself that inspires you toward achieving your goal, and place it where you can see it often. For instance, it you want to lose weight, find a picture of yourself when you were thin and fit. Or a picture of yourself doing something that energizes you, like hiking, biking or running. Choose other reminders and reinforcers that connect you with your passion to achieve your goal: A positive phrase you say to yourself, a symbolic object, or an inspiring piece of music can all do the trick.
5. Acknowledge your accomplishments. A good workout…a healthy meal...writing one more page of your thesis. You can build on that feeling of accomplishment. Congratulate yourself often. Take pride in your accomplishment. Self-acknowledgement is a powerful key to success. Acknowledging and celebrating your accomplishments will boost your self-confidence reserve, and you'll become more willing to face challenges and take risks.
6. Keep a journal and write about your successes. Chronicling your journey helps you build confidence and insight, and find meaning and inspiration in pursuing your goal. It’s about so much more than pounds lost, miles run, or pages written. It’s about who you are becoming.
7. Identify and recruit people in your life who will be your cheerleaders. These could be friends, family members, a personal trainer, a personal coach, a nutritionist, or a mentor. Arrange specific times to talk with your cheerleaders. Successful people know what help they need and figure out how to get it.
8. Don’t beat up on yourself. It's rare for anyone to accomplish something great without hitting some setbacks along the way. Coming down hard on yourself for past failures or procrastination is not only a waste of energy, it also can reinforce a negative self-image, leading to a feeling of defeat and a spiral of inaction. In effect, you prolong the impact of a temporary setback by believing it’s permanent. If you make a mistake, take a moment to reflect on it and learn from it, then let it go.
9. Identify and transform the beliefs that are limiting you. You can get stifled all too easily by beliefs like:
“I don’t deserve it.”
“I’ll never get what I want.”
“It’s not worth it.”
Peggy points out that underneath these current beliefs, there may be old messages from childhood that you may not even be entirely conscious of. For instance, when she was training for the first of her marathons, Peggy had to confront old negative messages about being an athlete: “You can’t be an athlete,” “Girls don’t beat girls,” “You’ll never get a man.” Once you identify your old messages, you can debunk them and not let them stop you.
10. Stay focused on achieving your goal rather than worrying about failure. Peggy tells a wonderful story about running in a high-school race against girls who wore little bells on their running shoes. What at first seemed cute became totally intimidating when she heard the jingle of those bells approaching from behind her on the race trail. As the jingling got closer, her fear of being passed by the jingling runners consumed her. She lost her composure and the race. But she learned an important lesson about staying focused on achieving the goal rather than fearing failure.
No comments:
Post a Comment