Motivate Yourself and Reach Your Goals: Teach Yourself

Frances Coombes, Frances Coombes

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781444183894
• eBook ISBN: 9781444183917
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Is this the right book for me? If you want to learn how to motivate yourself and be motivating to others, then this is the book for you! Easy to follow and invaluable to have around, each chapter focuses on honing particular skills, improving your insight and increasing your all-round performance. Including sound information from inspirational voices, motivational trainers and entrepreneurs, it explains what motivation is, how to define your goals, how to boost your creativity, sharpen your motivational skills, challenge limiting beliefs, create the circumstances for success and much, much more! By the end of the book, its simple but effective techniques will help you overcome the challenges of any situation effectively and imaginatively and to set and exceed your goals. It also gives you further reading and details of training and learning groups to build on what you have already learnt. Motivate Yourself and Reach Your Goals includes: Chapter 1: What is motivation?
Chapter 2: Create the life you want
Chapter 3: Motivation at work
Chapter 4: Create a compelling future
Chapter 5: Incentives to produce good ideas
Chapter 6: Discover your life's purpose
Chapter 7: Sharpen your thinking
Chapter 8: The power of setting goals
Chapter 9: Step to the edge of your boundaries
Chapter 10: Create circumstances for success
Chapter 11: Recognize people's thinking styles
Chapter 12: Take control of how you think
Chapter 13: Model success strategies
Chapter 14: Pick a skill you want to acquire
Chapter 15: Strengthen your completion drive
Chapter 16: Listening and questioning skills
Chapter 17: Coaching your inner team
Chapter 18: Tips for staying motivated
Chapter 19: Model success to master change
Chapter 20: Pulling it all together Learn effortlessly with a new easy-to-read page design and add feature: Not got much time?
One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you started. Author insights
Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience. Test yourself
Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress. Extend your knowledge
Extra online articles to give you a richer understanding of self-motivation. Five things to remember
Quick refreshers to help you remember the key facts. Try this
Innovative exercises illustrate what you've learnt and how to use it.

1

What drives motivation and performance?

In this chapter you will:

• Explore the tools and techniques you want to acquire

• Identify how you can use strategies for your own purpose

• Tune into how others are viewing the world

• Design a metaphor that gives you more choices in life

• Test the evidence to make sure your strategies work for you.

‘It’s all in line’

‘In line, in line, it’s all in line. My ducks are all in a row…’

James Taylor, American singer-songwriter

Life becomes simpler when you know your purpose and have a model and some simple tried-and-tested principles to work to. In this book you will find tools to help you discover your beliefs, values, goals, motivation and purpose in life. You are learning to line your ducks in a row, as the James Taylor song puts it, by simplifying and aligning your thoughts, beliefs and behaviours, so that they flow together to make all your efforts work for you.

Making quick and lasting changes for the better becomes easy once you harness the power of your motivation – and use it. Imagine how immensely powerful you will feel when your thoughts, beliefs and actions are aligned and you are already achieving the things that you want to on a regular basis. You may want to…

• start your own business

• increase your sales by overcoming your fear of making cold calls

• get a better job

• change disempowering beliefs that hold you back.

Once you have a framework to work to and some simple processes to follow, you can visualize and define your goals more effectively. When you can clearly visualize the outcomes you want, and taste the emotions of success in advance, new options spring up to encourage you to turn your goals into reality.

This book will help you to set and surpass your expectations by drawing on a wealth of life-changing tools and adapting them to suit your needs. The book will give you the tools to identify the characteristics of successful achievers so that you can model their success strategies and make them your own. Undertaking the exercises will enable you to identify more fully how you can unlock your potential, surpass your expectations of what you think you can achieve, and improve your effectiveness in every aspect of your life.

An overview

The techniques we will use may seem simple, but they build into a very powerful model for achieving more of the things you want to in life. In the case study below I have quoted extensively from a magazine article I wrote that includes many of the topics we will cover and that demonstrates how others are already using the skills to achieve their aims. Reading this will give you a flavour of the tools you can expect to use and the kind of situations you might find them useful in. Afterwards, I will ask you to list the techniques that seem useful to you – look out for the corresponding exercises throughout the book.

Case study: Give people the strategies they want

Recently, I ran an in-house training day for a mixed group of hospital staff. Learners agreed that a successful outcome for the day would be to go away with at least three or four really good strategies they could take away and use to feel more confident in their working and personal lives. The group also wanted strategies that would equip them to address problems that were at the forefront of their minds at that moment. Based on the requirements of the group, we chose strategies from the following Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) toolkit.

EXAMPLES OF HOW TOOLS ARE USED

1 Self-management skills

Increasingly, managers have greater numbers of staff reporting to them, and so will have minimal time allotted to developing individual employees. People who can think for themselves and can manage themselves in relation to their work and life are the ones who will do best in the modern world.

✽ Strategies for focusing and clarifying and setting good outcomes. Have a framework for thinking about outcomes: ask yourself, ‘What is the goal in the actions I am taking right now? Am I moving forward or marking time? What needs to happen for change to happen? What would make things work for me?’

✽ The ability to build your inner confidence by managing your internal state. Ask yourself, ‘How much do I want this outcome on a scale of 1–10? What am I assuming that is stopping me from achieving that goal? Is what I am thinking a “Fact” / “Possible Fact” / or a “Limiting Assumption”?’

✽ Tools for getting yourself into the right frame of mind to do a task. It is important to remember past victories and resources we possess and come to new situations armed with these powerful tools.

✽ Setting outcomes for negotiations. Check that you are on the same wavelength as the other parties. Summarize what has just been said. Ask yourself. ‘What is the point of my message seen from the viewpoint of the other person? Are there any emerging difficulties that I did not recognize before?’

✽ Dealing with things that are stressful. Sometimes just ask: ‘What is a better behaviour to have instead of the one I am using right now? What kind of beliefs may be fuelling my behaviour? What fears do I have over changing my behaviour?’

2 Building better communication skills

✽ Building rapport skills with others

✽ Understand better your own and other people’s behaviours

✽ Noticing what motivates you/others to get things done

What made the learning attractive to participants was that they first set individual outcomes so they could have evidence-based results, and recognized that the skills they were learning for work are also transferable to all aspects of their lives. Techniques learned can be used to improve not just learners’ work and career issues but also to aid their relationships with children, lovers, relatives and friends.

3 Modelling successful outcomes

If you want to be successful, find someone who already has the skills and then model them. Most people start with small individual skills and then move on to group work and greater things. Group examples of using modelling skills are:

✽ Great Ormond Street Hospital theatre team noted that they were saving patients’ lives in theatre, but that the minutes between leaving the theatre and reaching high-dependency wards were critical. They modelled Formula One racing drivers' pit-stop crews responsib...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• About the Author
• Title
• Contents 
• 1 What drives motivation and performance?
• 2 Maximize the impact of whatever you do
• 3 Set and achieve any goal you choose
• 4 Align your values and motivation
• 5 Find your purpose
• 6 Sharpen your thinking – generate better solutions
• 7 Motivating your inner team
• 8 Step to the edge of your boundaries
• 9 Understand people’s thinking styles
• 10 Take control of how you think
• 11 Stay motivated
• 12 Challenge limiting assumptions
• 13 Learn modelling strategies
• 14 Take the leap!
• Copyright