Actions and Creating What You Want
How do we motivate ourselves to get into action? How do we live a life that makes a difference? The answer lies in motion.
I learned the snow angel metaphor from Steve Chandler, (“100 Ways to Motivate Yourself,” 2004). My movements create the angel. This is the connection between self-motivation and self-creation…. Get a vision of the whole universe as snow. You can create yourself any way you want by your movement. The movement of the actions you take will create the self you want to be. Aristotle knew how to create a self through movement. Here’s what he said: “Whatever we learn to do, we learn by actually doing it….By doing just acts, we come to be just: By doing self-controlled acts, we come to be self-controlled; and by doing brave acts, we become brave.” (Aristotle, as cited by Steve Chandler, 2004).
This visual of the snow angel is an effective tool for motivating yourself. Try focusing on using it each day and you will be surprised by the actions that you'll begin to take on issues in your life. What can you create by your actions/movements? In my role as a success coach and as a doctoral student of psychology, I read a lot of research journals about human behavior, motivation and goal realization. Resarch shows that it is more effective to create change by introducing new habits instead of focusing on self-discipline as a means to change. So, in other words, it's better to introduce something new into your life to take the place of a bad habit instead of trying to use discipline to stop the bad habit.
Experiments support the 21 day theory about habit formation and have shown that it takes approximately 21 days to transition old memory patterns into new ones. If you do an act consistently for 21 days, it will become second nature--a habit. (Didn't we already learn this from Aristotle)? Studies also indicate that when we try to change more than one thing at a time in our lives, we fail at significantly high rates as compared to those of us who select only one habit to change or create. So start today. Pick only one thing to change. Focus on introducing one new habit, and DO something different for 21 days. Article written by Julie DeVito, 2012.
