Getting Motivated (2 of 5) | It’s Not About Your Feelings

You don’t have to wait for your feelings to come right before you can get motivated. You can choose your motivational state and act to bring it about. Your feelings will follow.

WHEN YOU’RE weary, as the song goes, or feeling small—or feeling down—you tend to focus on, well, your feelings. You try to nurse them into a better shape. You need to feel better, you tell yourself, in order to get motivated, to get going. Similarly, when you’re struggling to get going on a Monday—or to drag yourself to the gym on any given day—it’s often because you’re waiting for the right feelings to kick in. But what if you’re doing it all wrong? What if it has nothing to do with feelings at all, but motivational states?

In the first article in this series, I introduced the matrix of five motivational states that I’ve identified through my work as a high-performance life and executive coach. These states are:

• Agitation (using force, pushing too hard)
• Flow (enjoyment, absorption, the loss of time)
• Animation (positive action towards a goal)
• Rest (active relaxation, recovery)
• Ennui (boredom, flatness, resistance)

(You can read about these in more detail by following this link.)

The common understanding alluded to in the introduction above is that your motivational state arises out of your feelings towards an activity or event or circumstance. So, for example, I would need to like an activity before I can get animated about it. Or I would need to feel like doing it. Or, when something makes me angry or frustrated, I get agitated. Alternatively, it’s because I’m unhappy at work or in my relationship that I do nothing on weekends and drift downwards into ennui.

Motivational states can be activated by conscious choice

However, the science has shown that while you can allow that to be the case, the causal relationship can also be the other way around. Motivational states can be activated through conscious choice—by a decision, in other words—followed by action. When you do this, your feelings will follow; they’ll be dragged along in the wake of whichever motivational state you’ve chosen. (Yes, this is true even for many types of depression, although it can and should be supplemental to any other treatment, like therapy, CBT and/or medication; it’s not intended to preclude those forms of treatment.)

The research to prove this was done by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, back in the 1970s. It was before cell phones and the Internet, and he gave his subjects a backpack with a clipboard inside it, and a pager. When their pager beeped, the subjects had to take the clipboard from the backpack and make notes. He wanted to know what they were doing and what they were experiencing.

You can enter the state of flow with almost any activity

What he found was that people could enter the state of flow, which he also termed the state of “optimal experience”, with virtually any activity, as long as their approach to the activity met certain conditions. To summarise, he found that flow arises when there is intense focus, at the outer limit of your skill level, on a task or activity where the outcome, and the activity itself, matters to you; it requires a goal, and an activity that can provide immediate feedback.

Of course, the classic example would be playing a musical instrument. It challenges your skill level and captures your attention. Whether your goal is simply to learn to play your first song, or to be able to perform a whole repertoire perfectly in front of an audience, well either of those will probably matter to you. The immediate feedback would be whether you’re hitting the notes and keeping time or not.

There are a lot more activities that fit into this category than any modern person realises or wants to admit.

You can see, then, that the activity needs to capture your attention and challenge your skill levels. So you’re not going to get there by watching television or scrolling on your phone. The activity is likely to capture your attention if it’s something you would do for its own sake, and if the outcome matters to you. And this is the important bit. There are a lot more activities that fit into this category than any modern person realises or wants to admit—and, no, I don’t mean the whole range of adventure sports!

The problem of choice

In this day and age, we’re inundated by choice. In fact, choice is seen as a human right. It’s been elevated to almost sacred status. Millennials won’t do anything they don’t want to do. Yet, here’s the rub. “Some things we are initially forced to do against our will,” says Csikszentmihalyi in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, “turn out in the course of time to be intrinsically rewarding. … Often children—and adults—need external incentives to take the first steps in an activity that requires a difficult restructuring of attention. Most enjoyable activities are not natural; they demand an effort that initially one is reluctant to make. But once the interaction starts to provide feedback to the person’s skills, it usually begins to be intrinsically rewarding.”

So, that hobby you’ve been threatening to start, but aren’t sure if you really want to? That DIY task you’ve been putting off because you don’t feel like it? That sorting task? That spreadsheet of your expenses? That report that your boss has been asking for? All of these activities can meet the conditions for flow. Yes, the outcome can even matter to you. Fixing that broken lock. Having a tidy house. Submitting your tax returns. Getting the boss off your back and showing her that you can do a better job than she expected. You can connect to each of these outcomes in a way that they matter to you. Then, when you bring your full attention to the task and do it to the best of your ability, you activate the conditions for the flow state.

Enjoyment is what you put in

German philosopher Eckhart Tolle, he of The Power Of Now fame, puts his own spin on this when he says in his later book, A New Earth: “Enthusiasm means there is deep enjoyment in what you do plus the added element of a goal or a vision that you work toward.” His use of the word enjoyment is specific. By his definition, the joy “does not come from what you do, it flows into what you do”.  In other words, you can enjoy any mindfully chosen activity, done with full presence, that is not just a means to an end. In addition, if it challenges your skill level for that activity, and if it has a predetermined outcome, or goal, it’s likely to get you into the flow state. This is true regardless of how you feel when you start out.

You can enjoy any mindfully chosen activity, done with full presence, that is not just a means to an end. This is true regardless of how you feel when you start out.

In fact, Csikszentmihalyi pointed to the loss of self that happens when you’re in the flow state—you forget about yourself and your problems. He also described the “expanded” sense of self that you have when you’ve completed the activity and exited the flow state, presumably to rest. This expanded sense of self arises largely as a result of your having escaped yourself for a while, combined with your sense of achievement, firstly at having performed the task and, secondly, at having achieved the goal.

The call is to act despite your feelings – then gather evidence

On the other hand, if you lie around doing nothing, waiting for your feelings to shift, you’re more likely to remain with those same feelings. They may even become worse. Then you’d be likely to take that as evidence that you don’t have the energy, and you’d spiral downwards. As you can see, either path becomes a self-reinforcing spiral.

So, the call is to act despite your feelings, and then get out your clipboard and gather the evidence of what impact the activity has, not on your feelings, but on your motivational state. (Yes, you should also note the impact it has on your feelings, but you’ll want to review those results in the longer term.) Each time you gather and review the evidence, you’ll strengthen your case for doing it again.

Focus on your motivational state and your feelings will lose their power over you

Soon, you’ll learn to attach your attention to your motivational state, rather than to your feelings. You’ll notice two things. Firstly, that your feelings will still be there, however, they’ll lose their power over you. They’ll become like a radio that plays in the background. You can tune into them when you choose to—and process them when you feel you have to.

In fact, the catchphrase I give to my clients who have a deep need to process their feelings is: “If you haven’t solved your problems, or the world’s problems, within twenty minutes, go and wash the dishes.” In other words, allow yourself the time to process, and then cut out after 20 minutes. Without fail, they report back that this works wonders for them.

Secondly, you’ll probably find that, while there are still ups and downs, the general level of your feelings will have improved. To quote Csikszentmihalyi on this: “[Living in this way] lifts the course of life to a different level. Alienation gives way to involvement, enjoyment replaces boredom, helplessness turns into a feeling of control, and psychic energy works to reinforce the sense of self, instead of … being held hostage to a hypothetical future gain.” My motivational speaker version of this statement is, “Your lows will be higher than your highs used to be!”

Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, you’ll discover that you don’t need to wait for your feelings to shift in order to be motivated. In fact, you’ll learn that your feelings are subordinate to your motivational state. You’ll be able to get going just because you say so.

In the next article in the series, you can read about the state of animation, which is all about getting through the dip.