Page 69 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

a gift. Seeing illness as a misfortune, especially one that is undeserved,

may obstruct the healing system. Coming to see the illness as a gift that
allows you to grow may unlock it.

If you see your problems as curses, the motivation you’re looking for in life
will be hard to find. If you learn to love the opportunities your problems present,
then your motivational energy will rise.

49. Remind your mind

Perhaps you have noted an idea in this book, or another recent book you’ve
read, that you want to hold on to. It might be an idea that you knew, the moment
you saw it, would always be useful to you. You might even have underlined it
for future reference. But what if the book goes on the shelf, or gets loaned to a
friend, and is forevermore out of sight and out of mind? This is a very common
experience, but there is a remedy: start treating self-motivational ideas as if they
were songs.

You can find ways to rewind these ideas so they’ll play again and again until
you can’t get them out of your head. That’s how belief systems are restructured
to suit our goals. Place the thought you want to remember into the jingle track in
your brain so that it can’t get out.

You can create a new self by learning the beliefs you want to live by—one
thought at a time. Learn these thoughts as you would the lyrics for a song you
had to perform on stage. A friend of mine used to learn his parts in musicals by
placing index cards with song lyrics all over his office, home, and bathroom
mirror. He sometimes had them on the dashboard of his car. Why? He was
making a conscious visual effort to reach the backside of his own mind.

The trick is to keep this motivation going, to deliberately feed your spirit
with the optimistic ideas you want to live by. Any time a thought, sentence, or

paragraph inspires you or opens up your thinking, you need to capture it, like a
butterfly in a net, and later release it into your own field of consciousness.

For me, discovering an exciting idea in a book or magazine is a true peak
experience. It makes the world bright and comprehensible. I get that tingle in my
spine. I get that “Oh, yes!” feeling. The more I deliberately fill my mind with the
words and phrases that originally stirred the peak experience, the easier it is to
remember that life is good.