Taming the motivation monster

One of the greatest mysteries we face is how to get, and stay, motivated. Some new research has found a direct route from your eyes to a unique part of your brain called the amygdala (ah-mig-da-la) that bypasses the conscious portion of your cerebral cortex (your thinking brain.) This has provided exciting clues about how to tame the “motivation monster.”

Here’s how your amygdala works: If you pick up a rock and a rattlesnake crawls out, that image goes directly to your amygdala to initiate an immediate life-saving response—you leap out of reach of the snake before you are even aware of what you saw or why you reacted.

This powerful direct pathway can be trained to carry images of anything  critically important to you, such as your master goals. The secret is this: The more emotion tied to those images, the more likely they are to rush directly to your amygdala. And once they’re there, they can cause an automatic positive response in support of your goals.

So, packing your goals with desire and emotion builds and sustains motivation. The more intense your emotion, the more likely you’ll notice anything in your field of vision that relates to reaching your goals, even if you are focused on something else at that time!

How does one do this? We humans are motivated by basically two things: gaining pleasure and avoiding pain. Anthony Robbins claims that that pain is a greater motivator that pleasure, and I tend to agree with him.

Here’s a little exercise that could help you fire up your emotions and get your “amygdala shunt” working for you:

Imagine walking into a room and meeting the “you” of ten years from today. What will you look like? How will you be dressed? Where will you be living? What will your lifestyle be like? What car will you be driving?

Will you be running a business? If so, how successful will you be? What will your net worth be?

You really only have three choices about how your image of the “you of the future” will look. Your choices look something like this:

• Choice 1: Somewhere between how you are today and a totally broken mess. Here’s where the “avoiding pain” motivator could kick in.
• Choice 2: An exact duplicate of how you are now except ten years older. Absolutely nothing will have changed in a decade. Again—not a very satisfying picture for most of us, and perhaps a strong “avoid pain” motivator for many.
• Choice 3: A happier, healthier version of  your current self. This will kick in the “gain pleasure” motivator.

Obviously, no one would choose to visualize Choice 1. But in doing so, you may in fact create an intense “amygdala shunt.” Every time you see some image that reminds you of NOT moving ahead, your amygdala shunt will spur you to take automatic action. “Make that phone call NOW,” it will insist, and you will have the telephone in your hand before you even think to procrastinate.

If you choose Choice 2, you are effectively saying that nothing will change over the next ten years. You will be older, but your lifestyle will basically remain the same as it is today. You will still face today’s problems and frustrations, but will have ten more years of them piled up. This is an active decision to remain in your comfort zone, which is actually only an illusion of safety—in today’s rapidly changing world, what you call your comfort zone is being eroded beneath your feet as you read this.

That leaves Choice 3. This is the arena of dreams and wishes. If all we had to do was have a dream and the dream would automatically come true, none of us would ever have to set goals and build the motivation to achieve them.

But dreams come true only if we wake up and go to work. And, unless you are a most unusual person, you usually find that the problems and challenges of everyday life take priority over working to manifest your dreams.

If your motivation is not adequate to overcome procrastination, you might want to take a good hard, look at what you do not want in your life. If you can fire up some intense emotion about getting rid of those things, you may well find your amygdala shunt pumping some new action-energy into your life!