NLP in Action - How To Create Super Motivation (Part Four)

Are you getting excited yet?

If you've read the first three articles in this series, you are probably beginning to realize how easy it can be to create super motivation to get yourself to do anything, regardless of how much you have avoided doing this thing, how much you tend to procrastinate doing it, how much you internally resist doing this activity or behavior.

In the first three articles, we have talked about how to create links between the activity you wish to get yourself to do (the target) and something you already derive a great deal of pleasure from.

We've been using a hypothetical example of imaging you are a college student who has a great deal of difficulty getting yourself to study. At the same time, you also LIVE to ski. You cannot wait for winter to come and the snow to start falling, because when it does, you head for the ski slopes and stay until the last snowflake melts.

We have then used the NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) technique of creating triggers for your studying and for skiing. In the example given in the article 3, you pinched one earlobe when you visualized yourself studying and the other earlobe when you visualized yourself skiing. By pinching both earlobes at once, you were able to create the same pleasurable sensations you feel when you ski, when you study.

Obviously there is some fine-tuning to be done before you can master this technique completely, but you now have all the basics.

But before we go any further, let's add one more final step.

You still have to reinforce the triggers you have created. You do this by pinching both earlobes simultaneously. When you do this, both the image of you studying and the image of skiing will flash back and forth for a while. Practice this step for a while and practice it every day for several weeks. Your goal here is to link studying so deeply with the same pleasurable sensations of skiing that whenever you pinch both earlobes at the same time, you cannot help yourself from studying.

Before long, your biggest problem will be stopping when they start to close the library on you. (I am of course only using the college student and skier examples as working analogies for this article, but the technique will work for you regardless of what type of behavior you are trying to create motivation for you to do).

Also, please note that all the examples we have used so far have been about creating motivation for behaviors you want to do, or want to stop procrastinating on. There are different methods to be used for behaviors you want to stop, which we will discuss in future articles in this series.

But what if you cannot think of something you enjoy doing as much as our hypothetical college student enjoys skiing? Remember, the pleasure that you are drawing from ( ie the skiing) must be greater than whatever pain you perceive is in the target activity you want to motivate yourself for (ie the studying).

In other words, if our college student didn't derive greater pleasure from skiing than the "pain" he or she perceived was associated with studying, this whole exercise would not have worked. Fortunately, NLP practitioners and researchers have discovered a technique called "stacking" which solves this problem.

We will discuss how stacking works and how you can use it in a future article.