Goals – Say it out loud!
People who are unable to motivate themselves must be content with mediocrity, no matter how impressive their other talents.
Andrew Carnegie
It doesn’t matter what you want, what you’re trying to do or where you want to go. If you’ve focused your intentions and settled on a goal you have to form actionable steps to get there and take action. The single most effective technique I know of to motivate myself to do this is to “say it out loud”!
When you speak or write your goals in some sort of public way you put yourself out there. You’ve invited consequences, both good and bad and it’s like putting your ante on the table. It’s not terrible to fail, but if you’re seen to not attempt once you say something out loud, that’s going to sting.
From the quote above, Andrew Carnegie obviously understood that information, analysis, creativity, even a good actionable plan are not enough to achieve a goal, but that it is a necessity to be able to motivate yourself. I can’t think of anything more motivating than the prospect of public and personal awareness that I didn’t at least attempt the things I set out to accomplish. It’s the kind of open ended consequence that serves to remind you that sitting still will guarantee the mediocrity Carnegie mentions.
I’m not going to tell you everyone’s response to your expression of a goal will be supportive, helpful or even that there will be any responses. Some will minimize you and/or your goal for any number of reasons usually having nothing to do with you or your goal. By speaking your intended goal out loud you become familiar with this and learn to deal with it…my suggestion is mostly to ignore any non-specific, emotionally driven negative assessment of your goals. If someone has specific, actionable advice it may be worth considering.
What I will say is that saying your goals out loud and reminding yourself of them regularly increases your expectation of yourself to rise to meet them. The steps you take to do that can encourage others to do the same and help you. It’s the first and simplest way to begin believing in the outcome you want to see.
If you have a list of goals I encourage you to make a blog post or twitter tweet or to do something that makes it clear that you’re on a road to make something happen.
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Bloggers = 21st century Cave Painters
What could a blogger possibly have in common with a paleolithic cave painter? The blogger uses a computer and networking technology light years beyond the resources available 30,000 years ago. Cave paintings utilized only the most rudimentary of tools and pigments.
When you get beyond the ‘how’, you realize the goal is very similar – to communicate with your social group. Art can be viewed as the very first technology human beings developed with a goal of communicating and motivating themselves and their social group. Some may dismiss it as a primitive use of pigment on stone, but this would be a misinterpretation.
All the base needs of a paleolithic, human social group including food, shelter, and every substantive decision that group makes might be influenced by the efforts of a few or one individual. That individual would have had special knowledge of plants and mineral pigments as well as skills in applying them. An individual’s point of view and ability to make a persuasive, encouraging illustration for viewing by their group might make the difference between starvation and abundance. Today a blogger needs some skill with a computer and an ability to collect information and write, photograph or video tape their subject. With this in mind the comparison doesn’t seem so far fetched. Being able to visualize a solution and coordinate a group through communication seems to be a very old and very specialized human skill.
Next time you read a blog post it might be worth considering what was the motivation of the blogger? Did it seem like they were genuinely interested in communicating a worthwhile comparison? substantive information? a different point of view? or was it merely a few words they typed out to pass the time or try to attract your attention?
So much of what we encounter in a day’s time is filler or not relevant to us. When you look at your circumstances from the point of view of your base needs, a creative insight might make a difference in how you approach changing how effectively those needs are filled. With that in mind, it’s just as important to be discriminating about who you let paint on your cave wall or computer screen.