More motivation to quit a bad habit, more motivation to get started on an important project that will bring us more success in our life, or even more motivation to clean out the garage so our spouse will be happy.
We all have a list of things we want to do or things we wish we would stop doing, but we just can't find the motivation to do so. Well the good news, as many researchers in the field of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) have made clear, is that such motivation can be created. And it can be created in a matter of a half hour or less.
The key is to create new links or pathways between certain behaviors and things we find either pleasurable or thins we find painful or uncomfortable. That's it, at the root of our motivations are the two triggers of pleasure and pain.
In the first article in this series, I put it like this:
Every change we create in our behavior results from changing how we associate that behavior to either pleasure or pain. Our mind automatically creates these links, with or without our conscious awareness that an association exists.
Let's start with a simple example. Suppose you really enjoy skiing. You live for winter and that beautiful white powder. And when winter finally comes, you cannot wait to get on the slopes.
Using NLP conditioning, you can create a link between the pleasures you derive from skiing to any other activity you want to motivate yourself to do more of. Suppose you are also a college student and you are having difficulty motivating yourself to study. If you want to create a motivation to get yourself to study more, you can actually link studying with the same sensations you get when you are skiing.
In other words you can create an association between skiing and studying so that you find studying just as pleasurable as you do skiing.
In order to create this association, you must first break your target behavior (studying) into its individual components. These could be, finding a quiet place to study that is conducive to good learning. Gathering all your materials together so you will not have to leave. Actually sitting in the chair and opening your books, etc.
In the process of doing this, you may find that one particular component is what you put off doing. Perhaps it is just simply getting to the library to study. Throughout your day, you may engage in all kinds of other activities that prevent or delay your getting to the library (by the way, if all this sounds like I had experience in these kinds of avoidance behaviors, you would be right).
If you find a particular behavior is what you have been avoiding, you can focus your efforts on this one target activity. Continuing on with our example of getting yourself to the library and finding a quiet corner to study, create a strong visualization of yourself going to the library, finding a table and sitting down to study.
Create a visual image of yourself doing this very clearly. In the next article, we will discuss how to then create an association with the pleasure you derive from skiing to create that same pleasure with your studying.
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