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so make sub-goals easy. Failure motivates high esteem people
(Raynor & McFarlin, 1986). Use failure as a cue to try harder.
STEP FOUR: Enrich your self-concept: both with wonderful
fantasies of possible successes and with visions of ways you
might fail.
Read inspiring stories which you can relate to your life by using
American Guidance (1977), The Bookfinder. Find other motivational
books, such as My Power Book by Dan and Marie Lena (1991), Ziglar's
(1975, 1987) See You at The Top or Top Performance, or Robbin's
(1991) Awaken the Giant Within, which are mentioned in chapter 4.
Any of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books (Canfield & Hansen, 1991-
6) are touchingly inspirational.
Observe successful people, role play taking risks and succeeding,
and gain knowledge increasing your expertise. Do everything to
increase your ability and confidence, because believing you can
succeed increases your motivation.
Nurture positive, confident, optimistic attitudes. See method #9. A
self-doubting pessimist can hardly be highly motivated. Imagine in
detail how wonderful life will be when you succeed, how pleased
you'll be. Do this every day.
Using the methods outlined in chapter 4, learn to think "I am
responsible" (note relationship between outcome and effort), "I am in
control" (note you can change), "I have ability" (note how success
increases as your skills develop) and "I value being successful" (note
the pay offs of doing well). These beliefs lead to hard work and pride.
A negative, defeatist attitude towards oneself is likely to be
detrimental, to involve a lack of confidence, to reduce motivation, and
so on, so work on improving your self-concept if that is a problem (see
method #1 in this chapter). However, high self-esteem does not lead
to high achievement. Rather, doing well academically and socially
leads to increased self-esteem (Nielsen, 1982).
Research suggests that optimally motivated persons have a
balance between their positive selves and negative selves, i.e.
their positive expectations and their frightening awful possible
outcomes. Both dreams and fears are needed; dreams draw us to
success and visions of failure scare the hell out of us when we
goof off (Cantor, Markus, Niedenthal, & Nurius, 1986). Some anxiety
is helpful.
Anthony Robbins (1991), a motivation writer, expresses a similar
idea. He says we should associate massive pain with not changing and
massive pleasure with changing, and do it now! The examples he gives
of massive pain include having an agreement to eat a can of dog food
if you go off your diet, the humiliation of publicly admitting you have
failed (reporting to a support group how you are doing or jumping up
