Get motivated
The first stage of learning something new is to get motivated! Sounds easy? Well, for some things it is (who could not be motivated to learn about chocolate?), but for others you may need to try a bit harder. How many times have you set out with the best of intentions, bought yourself a ‘Teach yourself Bulgarian’ programme done the first couple of exercises and then left it on the shelf to gather dust?
So what motivates you?
What motivates you will be different from what motivates me. What remains the same for us all is that:
- Whilst other people can influence how we feel it is only us who can decide to do something – ultimately our motivation has to come from within.
- Without sufficient motivation to do something we will never succeed.
So would you like to know the braintrain.co.uk magic motivation formula?
We reckon before you set out to learn anything you should ask yourself these 3 all-important questions. Give yourself a score out of ten against each of the questions, and then work out the formula:
What do your results mean?
Your score |
What this means? |
15-20 |
The boiler is all stoked up. Full steam ahead. Remember to keep checking your motivation. |
10-15 |
You will probably get out of the station but you need to put some more coal on the fire if it is a long journey. |
5-10 |
Leaves on the line. Perhaps you might want to rethink the what and the why in particular. |
<5 |
Major engineering works required. |
What can I do about my motivation?
The challenge is what happens when the score is not what you want it to be. To find out what you can do to improve your score in each of these areas then just click on the ones you need help with.
If your what score was low….
Perhaps you are trying to eat the elephant all at once rather than
chunk by chunk?
Perhaps one of the reasons why you are feeling unclear
is that you are overwhelmed by the sheer size of the task at hand.
You are tone deaf, but you want to learn to play the guitar like Eric
Clapton. It is no wonder that you are unclear. You are trying to eat
the elephant all at once, and that will give even those with the biggest
appetite indigestion.
So where do you start? You need to break down your elephant sized goal into smaller, more specific chunks. E.g. I want to learn how to play chords C, D and E.
Maybe you know what you don’t want but
not what you do?
When
someone says don’t think about the purple monkey, what is the
first thing that comes into your mind? So if you are focused on what
you don’t want guess what might happen. The same is true for
getting clear on what you want to learn.
For example if you want to learn all about a particular subject to avoid failing an exam notice where your attention is. Alternatively you could focus on defining what success means to you and aiming for that instead.
Maybe you don’t know what you don’t know
I clearly remember my 17th birthday (the age in the UK when you can start driving). I had been washing cars and mowing lawns for months to save up for my first driving lesson, and then the morning came. I knew I was going to be a good driver. How could I not be when you look at all of the idiots that manage it. With all of the neighbours cheering me on, I strode confidently down the drive to meet my instructor Pete. I shook his hand and made for the driver’s door, ready to dazzle him with my natural ability. ‘Excuse me’, he said; ‘I sit that side’. ‘But this is my driving lesson’, I replied. ‘I know, and this is not as easy as it looks. So unless you want to embarrass yourself in front of all these people let’s go somewhere a bit quieter to show you what you don’t know’.
After about an hour I finally got my head round the 15 things I had never even thought of that I needed to check before I even left the kerb. By the time it came to actually drive I was exhausted and kangarooed up and down this deserted country lane for what seemed like an age. By the time I got home my head was ready to explode.
Skilled people tend to make things look easy, which can be a real pain when you need are trying to learn something. When your hear yourself saying ‘oh that looks simple, I am sure I could do that’, just check yourself. Only make this judgement when you have actually had a go, because it is only at this point that you will start to find out what you don’t know. This is the point when you get very clear on what exactly it is that you need to learn.
If your why score was low….
This one is really important, because this is where all of the effort, anguish and nervousness that can come with learning is made worthwhile. Just satisfying your personal curiosity, your indiscriminate thirst for knowledge, or increasing the range of questions you can answer at the local pub quiz is value enough. There are times, however, when you need something more than that to keep you going. Indeed, in the real world, for your job, or to get onto a particular college or university course you may find yourself having to learn stuff because you have to. Chemistry was certainly like that for me at school.
So what do you do to get yourself motivated? The answer is simple you need to find yourself a more exciting and rewarding purpose for what you want to learn. The way you do this is by associating your goal with things that are a whole lot more important to you, and the way Ask yourself why do you want to achieve this particular goal. The first answer might be a quite a practical one, like get a new job, or to get into the sixth form, so ask yourself again why do you want to do this. Ask yourself why about the answer to each question until you have been through at least five whys. By about the third why you should be starting to realise that what initially appeared quite dull and trivial is indeed pretty important.
If your how score was low….
There was a time when Roger Bannister was the only person in the world who believed a man could run a mile in under four minutes. Doctors and sport’s scientists in the 1940’s believed a four-minute mile to be beyond the physical limitations of the human body. Bannister challenged conventional training methods at the time, squeezed practice runs into his lunch breaks from medical school, and then, on a windy day in May 1954 on an athletics track in Oxford, he ran a mile in 3:59.4. All of a sudden what had been considered impossible was proved to be possible!
With this proof that it could be done, it was only six weeks before the Australian, John Landy, ran the mile a second faster than Bannister. In the six months that followed over 60 people ran sub four-minute miles, and the world record, held by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco, is currently 3:43.13. When he was asked the secret of his success, Bannister told journalists that it was as simple as finding ‘the ability to take more out of yourself than you've got.'
So when you are thinking something is too hard you might want to ask yourself:
- Could you do it if your life depended on it?
- What’s stopping you?
- Would you prefer failure or regret?
- What would happen for you to have to feel more like this was within your capability?