Promise the moon

Promise the moon

One frightening and effective way to motivate yourself is to make an
unreasonable promise—to go to someone you care about, either
personally or professionally, and promise them something really big,
something that will take all the effort and creativity you've got to make
happen.

When President John Kennedy promised that America would put a man
on the moon, the power of that thrilling promise alone energized all of
NASA for the entire time it took to accomplish the amazing feat. In his
book about the Apollo 13 mission, Lost Moon, astronaut Jim Lovell
called Kennedy's original promise "outrageous." But it showed how
effective being outrageous could be.

In his book Passion, Profit, and Power, Marshall Sylver recalls seeing a
billboard in Las Vegas put up by one of the casino owners who wanted
to become a non-smoker. The billboard read: "If You See Me Smoking
in the Next 90 Days, I'll Pay You $100,000!" Can you see the power in
that promise?

A couple of years ago I promised my children that I would send them to
camp in Michigan. They had been to the camp near Traverse City before, and loved it. When you live
during the year in Arizona, there's something magical about the water
and emerald forests of northern Michigan. It was an expensive camp,
but when I made the promise I was doing well financially, and I was
confident that they could all go.
Then as the summer neared I'd run short of money and had to rearrange
my priorities. My speaking schedule had replaced much of the
commissioned selling I was doing and it looked like camp might not be
in the picture.

I remember specifically talking to my boy Bobby, who was 8 years old
at the time, about how times were temporarily hard and how camp
didn't look like a good possibility any more this year. He was in the
front seat of the car and I'll never forget for as long as I live the look on
his face. He said very softly, so softly that I could barely hear him, "but
you promised."

He was right. I didn't say I'd try, I didn't say it was a goal, I promised.
And the feelings I had at that moment were so overwhelming that I
finally said to him, "Yes, I did promise. And because you reminded me
that it was a promise, I will say to you right now that you're going to
camp. I'll do what it takes. I'm sorry that I forgot it was a promise."

The first thing I did was change jobs, and my first condition on
accepting my new job was that my bonus for signing was the exact
amount of money it took to send my children to camp. It was done.

Get your soul to talk

Get your soul to talk

We've always been a little nervous, culturally, about talking to
ourselves. We usually associate it with insanity. But it was Plato who
said that his definition of thinking was "the soul talking to itself."
If you really want to get your life worked out, there is no one better to
talk to than yourself. No other person has as much information about
your problems and no other person knows your skills and capabilities
better. And there's no one else who can do more for you than yourself.

A lot of people in the motivational and psychological professions
recommend affirmations. You choose a sentence to say, such as, "Every
day in every way I'm getting better and better," and repeat it whether or
not you think it's true. While affirmations are a good first step to
re-programming, I prefer conversations. Conversations work faster.

The two most inspirational guidelines to productive self-conversational
exercises are in Martin Seligman's Learned Optimism and Nathaniel
Branden's The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem. Seligman offers ways to
dispute your own pessimism and create the habit of optimistic thinking.
Branden offers provocative sentence stems for you to complete.

Rather than brainlessly parroting "I'm getting better and better" to
myself, it makes a longer-lasting impression when I logically argue the
case and win. With enough back-and-forth conversation, I can prove to
myself that I am getting better. Proof beats the parrot every time. It's
one thing to try to hypnotize myself through repetition of words to
accept something as true, and it's quite another to convince myself that
it is true.

Branden suggests that we get our creative thinking going each morning
by asking ourselves two questions: 1) What's good in my life? and 2)
What is there still to be done?

Most people don't talk to themselves at all. They listen to the radio,
watch TV, gossip, and fill up on the words and thoughts of other people
all day long. But it's impossible to indulge in that kind of activity and
also get motivated. Motivation is something you talk yourself into.

Try to sell your home

Try to sell your home

Once when Steve Hardison and I were discussing a few of my old habits
that were holding me back from realizing my business goals, I blurted
out to him, "But why do I do those things? If I know they hold me back,
why do I continue to do them?"

"Because they are home to you," he said. "They feel like home. When
you do those things, you do them because that's what you're
comfortable doing, and so you make yourself right at home doing them.
And as they say, there's no place like home."
"Home" can be an ugly place if it's not kept up and consciously made
beautiful. "Home" can be a dark, damp prison, smelling of bad habits
and laziness. But we still don't want to leave it, no matter how bad it
gets, because we think we are safe there.

However, when we inspect the worn-out house more closely, we can
see that the safety we think we're experiencing is pure self-limitation.
It's very hard to leave home—many of us try and fail many times. Noel
Paul Stookey wrote a hauntingly beautiful song called "The House
Song," which captures this feeling. The opening words are, "This house
goes on sale every Wednesday morning...and is taken off the market in
the afternoon."

After grasping Hardison's metaphor of home, I immediately saw that I
needed to move out of my house. I needed to move up in the
neighborhood. I needed a better home. A home that contained habits
that would keep me focused on goal-oriented activity. Hardison helped
coach me in that direction until the new activities began to feel like
where I should have been living all along.

Hardison's metaphor of "home" as the equivalent of old disempowering
habits has stayed with me for a long time. Recently while I was putting
together a tape of motivational music to play in my car, I included the
energetic "I'm Going Home" by Alvin Lee and Ten Years After. As I
drove around listening to it turned up all the way, I thought about what
Hardison taught. I let the song be about the new home I would always
be in the process of moving to.

Don't be afraid to leave the psychic home you're in. Get excited about
building a larger, newer, happier home in your mind, and then go live
there.

In Colin Wilson's brilliant but little-known, out-of-print novel Necessary
Doubt, he created Gustav Neumann, a fascinating character who made
many discoveries about human beings. At one point Neumann says, "I
came to realize that people build themselves personalities as they build
houses—to protect themselves from the world. They become its
prisoners. And most people are in such a hurry to hide inside their four
walls that they build the house too quickly."

Identify the habits that keep you trapped. Identify what you have
decided is your final personality and accept that it might be a hasty
construction built only to keep you safe from risk and growth. Once
you've done that, you can leave. You can get the blueprints out and
create the home you really want.

Bring on a good coach

Bring on a good coach

After a rare disappointing round on the golf course, Tiger Woods will
often take a golf lesson.
When I first heard about this, I asked myself, who could give Tiger
Woods a lesson in golf?

But that was before I ever really understood the value of coaching. The
person who taught me that value was a young business consultant
named Steve Hardison. Hardison taught me this: Tiger takes a lesson not
because his coach is a better player who can give advice and tips, but
because his coach can stand back from Tiger Woods and see him
objectively.
Steve Hardison had created an art form of coming into corporations and
seeing things objectively. In fact, his perception ran deeper than that.
He had near-psychic power to "see what was missing." It was a gift he

could also apply to individuals, but only if they were ready for the rigors
of his coaching.
I used to teasingly call one of his illustrative personal stories "The
Parable of the Mission." As a young missionary for his church in
England, Hardison broke all records for enrolling congregants. He
contrasted his own method with that of the other missionaries.
While the others would rush out and knock on doors all day, Hardison
would spend the first part of each day planning and plotting his
activities. By creating his day before it happened, he was able to
combine visits, economize on travel time, and increase the number of
enrollment conversations in a given day. He also used his creative
planning time to set up intra-neighborhood referrals for himself so that
many of his visits came with a reference.
The other missionaries were very active, but they were focused on the
activity, not the result. They were in the business of knocking on doors
and scurrying about—Steve was in the business of enrolling people into
the church. The records he set for enrollment were no accident. He
planned things that way.

Steve helped me understand something that lives inside of all of us,
something he called "the voice." When you wake up in the morning, the
voice is there right away, telling you that you are too tired to get up or
too sick to go to work. During a sales meeting when you are just about
to say something bold to a client, the voice might tell you to cool it.
"Hold back." "Be careful."
"The trick is," said Steve, "to not ignore or deny the existence of the
voice. Because it's there, in all of us. No one is free of the voice.
However, you don't have to obey the voice. You can talk back to the
voice. And when you really get good, you can even talk trash to the
voice.

Make fun of it. Ridicule it. Point out how stupid it is. And once you get
into that way of debating your own doubts, you start to take back
control of your life."
Many times I'd be in the middle of a large business project and ask to
meet with Steve for an hour. After he listened for a few minutes, he
would almost invariably see right away what was "missing" in my
behavior. Like a great golf teacher watching Tiger Woods' backswing,
he would say, "Are you willing to accept some coaching on this?" And I
would eagerly say yes. Then he would tell me truthfully, sometimes
ruthlessly, what he saw. I didn't always like what he saw, but I always
grew stronger from talking about it.

Hardison's coaching was so jolting that sometimes it reminded me of an
incident that happened to me when I was a boy playing Little League
baseball.
I had injured my knee in a play at third base and when the game was
over the knee was swollen and my entire leg was stiff. As I sat on the
bench with my leg straight out in front of me, a doctor whose son was
on our team was kneeling down by my leg as my father looked on.
"I'd like you to bend your leg now," he said to me as his hands gently
held my swollen knee.
"I can't," I told him.
"You can't?" he asked, looking up at me. "Why can't you?"
"Because I tried, and it really hurts."
The doctor looked at me for a second, and then said simply but gently,
"Then hurt yourself."
I was startled by his request. Hurt myself? On purpose? But then,
without saying anything, I slowly bent my leg. Yes, there was
tremendous pain, but that didn't matter. I was still mesmerized by his
request.

The doctor massaged my knee with his fingers and nodded to my father
that everything would be okay. I'd have to have x-rays and the usual
precautionary exam, but he saw nothing seriously wrong for now.
But I was still aware that something very big had just happened to me.
After a boyhood that was characterized by avoiding pain and discomfort
of any kind, all of a sudden I saw that I could hurt myself if I needed to,
and that I could do it calmly without batting an eye. Perhaps I wasn't
the coward I'd always thought I was. Perhaps there was as much
courage in me as in anyone else, and it was all a matter of being willing
to call on it.

It was a defining incident in my life, and it was not dissimilar to the way
Steve Hardison, as a coach, has required that I call on things inside me
that I didn't know I had.
One time I was having a hard time enrolling people into seminars and
doing my prospecting calls on the phone. Steve grabbed the phone and
started calling people and signing them up. Then he accidentally dialed
a wrong number and reached some mechanic at a car repair garage.
Most people would have apologized at that point and hung up and
dialed again. But rather than waste the call, Steve introduced himself
and then stayed on the phone—until the mechanic had signed up for a
seminar.
Hardison is a gifted and courageous public speaker, a resourceful and
relentless salesperson, a talented athlete and a committed family man
and church member. The kind of guy who used to make me sick!
I could write an entire book about Steve Hardison's remarkable work in
coaching and consulting, and someday I just might. Examples of ways
that he coached me to higher levels of performance are plentiful. But I
think

the greatest thing he has taught me is the value of coaching itself.
Once you open yourself up to being coached, you begin to receive the
same advantages enjoyed by great actors and athletes everywhere.
When you open yourself up to coaching, you don't become
weaker—you grow stronger. You become more responsible for
changing yourself.

In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck writes, "The problem of
distinguishing what we are and what we are not responsible for in this
life is one of the greatest problems of human existence...we must
possess the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual
self-examination."

The best coaches show us how to examine ourselves. It takes courage to
ask for coaching, but the rewards can be great. The best moments come
when your coach helps you do something you have previously been
afraid to do. When Hardison would recommend that I do something I
was afraid to do I'd say, "I don't know if I could do that."

"So don't be you," he would say. "If you can't do that, then be someone
else. Be someone who could do it. Be DeNiro, be Bruce Lee, be
anybody, I don't care, as long as you do it."
Coaching's contribution to my life is illustrated in these words by French
philosopher Guillaume Apollinaire:
" 'Come to the edge,' he said.
They said, 'We are afraid.'
'Come to the edge,' he said.
They came.
He pushed them.
And they flew."

You can get coaching anytime. If coaching is appropriate for your golf
or tennis game, it is even more appropriate for the game of life. Ask
someone to be honest with you and coach you for a while. Let them
check your "swing." Let them tell you what they see. It's a courageous
thing to do, and it will always lead to more self-motivation and growth.

Swim laps underwater

Swim laps underwater

When Bobby Fisher prepared for his world championship chess match
with Boris Spassky, he prepared by swimming laps underwater every
day.

He knew that as the chess matches wore on into the late hours, the
player with the most oxygen going to his brain would have the mental
advantage. So he built his chess game by building his lungs.

When he defeated Spassky, many were surprised by his astonishing wit
and mental staying power, especially late in the matches when both
players should've been weary and burned out. What kept Bobby Fisher
alert wasn't caffeine or amphetamines—it was his breathing.

General George Patton once gave a lecture to his troops on brainpower.
He, too, knew the connection between breathing and thinking.
"In war, as in peace, a man needs all the brains he can get," said Patton.
"Nobody ever had too many brains. Brains come from oxygen. Oxygen
comes from the lungs where the air goes when we breathe. The oxygen
in the air gets into the blood and travels to the brain. Any fool can
double the size of his lungs."

I learned about Patton's passion for teaching his troops deep breathing
from Porter Williamson. I had once written a few political radio and
television commercials that caught Mr. Williamson's attention, so he
called me and asked me to lunch one day. Because he had identified
himself as the author of Patton's Principles, I eagerly accepted his
invitation, having coincidentally read the marvelous book a few weeks
earlier. Williamson had served in the army for many years as Patton's
most trusted legal adviser.

Williamson told me many stories about serving with Patton, and how
truly extraordinary a motivator the general was. Most of the Patton
quotes in this book come from Williamson's own memories of his
service with the great general. Williamson told me about how he himself
had lost his leg to bone cancer, and how the doctors had erroneously
forecasted his death twice. His inner strength, he said, often came from
the inspiration he received in his days of serving with Patton.
"Frequently, General Patton would stop at my desk," recalled
Williamson, "and ask, 'How long you

been sitting at that desk? Get up and get out of here! Your brain stops
working after you sit in a swivel chair for 20 minutes. Keep the body
moving around so the juices will run to the right places. It'll be good for
the brain! If you sit in that chair too long all of your brainpower will be
in your shoes. You cannot keep your mind active when your body is
inactive.' "

That one principle—an active mind cannot exist in an inactive
body—became Bobby Fisher's secret weapon in winning the world
championship of chess. Who would have guessed that swimming
underwater would make you a better chess player? Certainly not the
overweight, worn-out chess "genius" Boris Spassky.

Sometimes, all you need is the air that you breathe to motivate yourself.
Going for a run or a walk or simply deep breathing gives the brain the
fuel it feeds on to be newly refreshed and creative.

Paint your masterpiece today

Paint your masterpiece today

Think of your day as a blank artist's canvas.
If you go through your day passively accepting whatever other people
and circumstances splatter on your canvas, you will more than likely see
a mess where art could be.

If the mess troubles your sleep, your next new day will begin in a state
of fatigue and mild confusion. From such a state, your canvas will be
splattered all the more with shapes you don't like and colors you never
chose.

Thinking of your day as a painter's canvas will allow you to be more
conscious of what is happening to you when you flood your mind with
nothing but Internet gossip, commercials on the radio, the latest murder
trial, your spouse's criticisms, office politics, and pessimistic musical
lyrics.
If you'll allow yourself to step back far enough to realize and truly see
that your daily canvas is filling up with all these negative things, a
certain freedom occurs. It's the freedom to choose something better.

The more conscious we are of our freedom to paint whatever we want
on our canvas, the less we go through life as a victim of circumstances.
Many of us aren't even aware of our own victim status. We read
whatever's on the coffee table, listen to whatever's on the car radio, eat
whatever's handy, scan whatever's on the Internet, talk to whomever
calls us on the phone, and watch whatever's on the television—often
too passive to even click the remote control.

We must be aware that we have it in us to change all that. We can paint
our day our way. The best time management—or "day-painting"
—course I ever took was taught by Dennis Deaton. His seminar's main
point is that we can't manage time—we can only manage ourselves.
"Clear the clutter from your mind," Deaton says, "and remove the
obstacles to greater success."

While most time management courses feel like courses in engineering,
Deaton has captured the spirit of the artist in his teaching. His
prescriptions for managing your day all stem from goal-creation and
living the visions you create.

Wake up and visualize your day as a blank canvas. Ask yourself,
"Who's the artist today? Blind circumstance, or me? If I choose to be
the artist, how do I want to paint my day?"

Upgrade your old habits

Upgrade your old habits

Super motivation is much more difficult to achieve when we are held
back mentally by bad habits. Trying to move toward the life we want
while dragging along our bad habits was described in the Scottish rock
group Del Amitri's song lyrics, "It's like driving with the brakes on, it's
like swimming with your boots on..."

But here's the catch: Bad habits simply cannot be broken. Nor can they
be gotten rid of. Ask the millions who continue to try. They always end
up, in the words of Richard Brautigan, "trying to shovel mercury with a
pitchfork," because our bad habits exist for good reasons. They're there
to do something for us, even if that something ends up being
self-destructive. Down deep, even a bad habit is trying to make us
operate better.

People who smoke are trying, even through their addiction, to do
something beneficial—perhaps to breathe deeply and relax. Such
breathing is needed to balance stress, so their smoking is a way in which
they are trying to make themselves better. Bad habits are

like that—they are based on a perceived benefit. That's why they're so
hard to just "get rid of."
That's why habits must be respected and understood before they can be
transformed. What created the habit must be built upon, not killed. We
must go to the beneficial impulse that drives the habit, and then expand
on that to make the habit grow from something bad into something
good.
Let's take drinking as an example. I've known people who used to be
drunk all the time who are now sober all the time. How did they do it?
Couldn't we just say that they just got rid of their drinking habit? Not
really. Because, without exception, the recovered people I know
replaced their drinking with something else.
Taking all of one's courage, relaxation, and spirituality from a bottle of
alcohol is a very damaging habit. But to simply eliminate it leads to
even worse problems: shakes, DTs, fear, dread, paranoia. A total void.
People who join Alcoholics Anonymous, however, replace their "false
courage"—once found in a bottle of alcohol—with real courage found
in the meeting rooms of AA. The completely artificial sense of
spirituality formerly found in a tumbler of spirits is replaced by the true
and deeply personal spirituality found in working the 12-step program
of enlightenment.

The superficial but highly emotional relationships the
alcoholic had made in his favorite bars are replaced by real friendships.
Replacement is powerful because it works, and where bad habits are
concerned it's the only thing that works. I've known people who quit
smoking without intending to. They took up running, or some form of
regular aerobic exercise, and soon the breathing and relaxation they
were getting from the exercise made the smoking feel bad to their bodies.
 They quit smoking because they had introduced a replacement.

People who diet have the same experience. It isn't staying away from
fattening food that works—it's introducing a regular diet of delicious,
healthy food that works. It's replacement.

Subconsciously you don't think your bad habits are bad! And that's
because they're filling a perceived need. So the way to strengthen
yourself is to identify the need and honor it. Honor the need by
replacing the current habit with one that is healthier and more
effective. Replace one habit, and soon you'll be motivated to replace
another.