A couple months back, I took a great trip. I was in Chicago actually participating in a – I guess for lack of a better way to describe it – a self-help type of workshop. It’s called LifeBook. The concept behind LifeBook is to really bring conscious attention and focus to your life.

You basically spend four days going through twelve areas of your life including: your health and fitness, your intellectual life, your emotional life, your parenting, your social life…

In each of those categories, you think through four areas:

1. Q: What are your primary beliefs about this area of your life?
2. Q: What is your vision. What would the ideal look like in this area of your life?
3. Q: What is your purpose – what would that do for you – trying to achieve that vision?
4. Q: What is the strategy that you have for achieving that vision?

It’s four days of basically bringing very focused attention to those areas of your life and making sure that you’re on track. That you’re who you need to be to achieve your visions. And you’re doing the things that are necessary to achieve them.

It’s very much in line with something many of you have heard me say before; that really your experience is your best teacher. Far better than anyone else can ever teach you. Because of that, it wasn’t a lot of them telling you what your beliefs should be or what your vision should be or what your purpose should be or what your strategy should be. It was about pulling it out of you.

It was a great, great experience. Best of all, you don’t need to fly to Chicago to do that. You could simply spend a day or more doing the very same thing. I’m quite certain that you would get a lot of value out of that.

Leveraging the Important Aspects of Your Personality

But what I want to talk to you today about is really leveraging certain elements and knowing certain elements about yourself so that you can go further, get there faster, and experience more success that you are right now.

If you think about it, the greatest achievers in life – like the Napoleons, the Di Vinci’s, the Mozart’s – always managed themselves well, which is what made them great achievers. You have to learn to manage yourself. You have to learn how to develop yourself. And you have to learn where you make the greatest contribution.

So some areas that I know would do you a great service is some clarity about a few important areas of your life.

What is Your Motivation Strategy?

So the first thing I want to talk to you about is your motivation strategy.

I’d like you to think of something that you do consistently. Maybe if you exercise consistently, that would be a great example in your mind. Think about why do you do that? What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about it? Why you do what it you’re doing?

If you don’t exercise every day, you could think about something else, like starting your own business. Ultimately what we’re trying to do is boil whatever it is down to first thing that comes to mind: Q: Why do you want to have your own business?

What you should notice is either that you are moving towards something – moving towards some sort of pleasure – or you’re moving away from some sort of pain.

Let’s take the exercise example. Some people exercise because they want the feeling of the energy, have great energy. They want to have an amazing body. They want to live a really long time. Those would be “towards.”

Some people though exercise because they don’t want to be fat. They don’t want to die young. They don’t want to be slow. They don’t want to… whatever.

This is important. This is really important. The goal for you is to know what’s your primary strategy. Do you move towards pleasure or do you move away from pain?

Was the reason that you wanted to start your own business because of the pleasure that you believe having your own would have; or was it to get away from some uncomfortable situation you you may be in? When you think about growing your business, is it because you don’t want your business to stay small; or do you want it to grow big?

When “Move-Away” Loses Its Motivating Power

This is an issue that I’m actually working through myself right now. What I’ve realized is that I’ve gotten to the place where I’m at today primarily from a move-away strategy. I decided to get in shape when I got fat enough and didn’t want to be fat. I didn’t want to be poor, so I did things to become quite wealthy. But it was always more about moving away than it was moving towards.

The reason why I’m personally going through this right now is that what I’ve discovered about myself is that moving away from is a very powerful strategy… until you don’t have anything to move away from.

For me personally, the moving away strategy is no longer as effective because I’m very happy with what I have in my life which means that I’m left with two choices. Either change my personality or change the way that I motivate myself by starting to move more towards instead of moving away.

So think about those things over the next couple days. In the next post, we’ll talk a little more about your motivating factors.

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