Time Management 142 - The Three Driving Forces of Internal Motivation

Hello everyone, this is Helen Huang @ Organizing, based in Beijing, China. In order to better learn and practice the YiXiaoNeng Time Management System, after finished publishing 100 Chinese articles, I decided to continue writing and publishing a daily English article in another 100 days based on the "YeWuBin Time Management 100 Episodes" audio program. Today is the 142nd day.

Today's topic is: The Three Driving Forces of Internal Motivation

In today's lesson, I want to continue exploring the third level of motivation---the internal forces that motivate us.

All men and women want to be in control of their lives, of their fate.

There are three main elements of internal drive:

    1. Independence;

    2. Specialization;

    3. Purpose.


It is by achieving these three elements of your internal drive (Independence,  Specialization, Purpose), that you can master this control over your actions and make your life more valuable and meaningful.

What is independence? Simply it is making your own decisions freely and fully. If you are driven to complete a task because of your own willingness, then you can do almost anything.  However, if you are compelled to do it for other reasons, then it will not be easy to sustain your drive to succeed over time.

I talked about this in the earlier topic of procrastination. Remember it was the solution to procrastination that was the simplest to understand but the most difficult to execute: choosing happy and meaningful things to do in life.

Making decisions on your own is a very good way to start. If you always depend on external drives of reward and punishment, you can be motivated but only for a short time.  Your energy will eventually diminish and then disappear, leaving with you no will to go on.

The reason I can cultivate lots of good habits is because I have learned to like doing these things.  In particular, I enjoy writing in a diary. I enjoy having a cold bath. I enjoy running marathons. And I enjoy setting up management training courses on efficiency and time management all over the world. I chose to do all of these things for myself, freely and fully.

If you want to change our life, then you must choose to do things out of internal need and not for any external reasons. This is the first key point - Independence.

The second point is to be realistic.  Thinking you can become a great master in 3 days is a recipe for failure. However, if you wish to become a master of skills in 3,000 days, then that is a better and more realistic goal.

The idea is to select goals that you can continuously improve on through small progress each and every day. Rome was not built in a day, and water constantly dripping carves holes in stone. This leads to the second element of internal motivation - Specialization.

Once you have independently decided to focus on a task, then we need to continuously work to move closer to the target.

There are 5 steps to achieve "specialization". I talked about "deliberately practicing" in previous lessons.  Deliberate Practice is actually the same as achieving specialization. Deliberate practice forces us to become better and better at it, thereby achieving what is called specialization.

K. Anders Ericsson, a renowned Swedish psychologist, defined "Deliberate Practice," as necessary to improve performance in a particular area, requiring a life-long effort through determination, focus and even pain.

What is the objective of Deliberate Practice? Simply it is continuously improving our performance in a certain field, through repetition. We should strive to obtain feedback from as many people as we can, especially from a coach or mentor. It is better if they give us critical feedback which focuses on our weakness. We need pay to serious attention to our weakness.

However, there is a problem. Focusing on our weaknesses exhausted us both physically and mentally. Therefore, we must be prepared to accept critical feedback by bolstering our mind and body. You must prepare to resist debilitating thoughts or demotivating forces that come from this critical but necessary feedback.

Focusing on our weaknesses and then training them to improve them may not make us happy in short run, so we need to prepare to resist these demotivating forces, so that we can concentrate on the weakness. If we have cultivate strong psychological and mental strength, we will enjoy our training more, resist pain, and feel happiness more often.

Independence and specialization are central to our ability to achieve internal and sustained motivation. But purpose, is the most important of all. In the next lesson, I will share with you why I can cultivate so many good habits. We will explore this topic in detail. The topic is: how to set our objectives in life.

That's all the sharing today. Thank you being with me together today. Have a wonderful day!

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