Page 105 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

“How do you feel about tonight’s game with the Trail Blazers?” a reporter

once asked basketball star Kobe Bryant. “It’ll be a war out there,” he said with a
twinkle in his eye.

We don’t have to wait for something tragic or dangerous to attack us from
the outside. We can get the same vitality going by challenging ourselves from
within. A useful exercise for self-motivation is to ask yourself what you’d do if
you had Anthony Burgess’s original predicament. “If I had just a year to live,
how would I live differently? What exactly would I do?”

73. Use the 5 percent solution

Many years ago, when I first began considering the idea of changing my life,
I went through some emotional mood swings. I would get very high on an idea
of who I could be, and I’d set out to change myself overnight. Then my old
habits would pull me back to who I used to be, and I would become demoralized
and depressed for weeks, thinking I didn’t have what it took to change. As the
weeks went by, I finally caught on to the idea that great things are often created
very slowly, so why couldn’t great people be created the same way? I began to
see the value in small changes, here and there, that led me in the direction of
who I wanted to be.

If I wanted to be someone who was healthy and had good eating habits, I
would introduce a salad here, a piece of fruit there, and take the creative process
very slowly. Now I almost never eat red meat, but it didn’t happen by simply
ruling it out one night. (All the times I tried that, my stomach, which used to far
outrank my mind in my internal chain of command, would rule it back in the
first time I smelled a barbecue in the neighborhood.)

Pyschotherapist Dr. Nathaniel Branden is known for the effectiveness in his
therapy of using sentence completion exercises. By asking his clients to write

out or speak six to 10 endings, quickly, without thinking, to a “sentence stem,”
he allows people to explore their own minds for their hidden power and
creativity.

A typical sentence he might ask you to complete six to 10 times would be,
“If I bring 5 percent more purposefulness into my life today…” Then you, the
client, give your rapid endings to the sentence. That’s how you find out what you
think and secretly know about your own power to add purpose to your life. One