| Fire Up Your Motivation -------------------------------------------------------------------- If you asked my friends to describe me, a good cook isn't a phrase they would readily associate with me. 'Tis true... I'm no Nigella Lawson in the kitchen. But... ... (Drum roll, please). Last night, I whipped up some aromatic coconut rice pilaf, spicy Malabar chicken, green beans with mustard seeds and a homemade mango sorbet. Not bad, if I may say so myself. In fact, in the last month or so, there's been a marked change in my culinary efforts. Gone are the feelings of dread I used to associate with having to cook. Now, I actually want to cook! The principle behind this transformation is the exact same principle you can use to motivate yourself to achieve your business and personal goals. It's the ABC's Delicious magazine. More precisely, it's the close ups and tantalising full page pictures of vine ripened sweet tomatoes, the sublime sun beams shining through the kitchen window and the beautifully presented dishes staring straight out of the page at me. And have you noticed? Everyone looks happy in these pictures - the featured chefs are smiling, the people in the print ads are having the time of their life using some obscure sauce. Even kids have a serenity about them. A cooking magazine obviously isn't going to motivate you to pursue your goals. What's important, as I mentioned earlier, is the principle behind them - using attractive visuals as a motivator. If you're pursuing a goal, try firing up your motivation with the following suggestions. Make your mental images big, bright and colourful. In fact, if it was a still image you are seeing in your mind's eye, imagine it as a moving image or movie. Make sure that what you are visualising is something pleasant that you want, not something that you are trying to avoid. Adjust those images. Discover what else you could change to make it even more motivating for you. If the picture you are visualising is black and white, make it colour. Perhaps you could make the colour more saturated. If it's framed, make it panoramic. And vice versa. To make it even more enticing, you could add sound - for example, music or the conversations that might take place along with your mental image. Try adjusting the volume. Is the sound coming from a particular direction? What if it was surround sound? Does that make it more attractive or less? You might even want to add other representational systems like smells, tastes and sensations to go along with your mental visual and audio. In Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), we call the components of your senses submodalities. Submodalities in the visual representation include brightness, saturation, size, distance, sharpness and focus amongst others. In auditory, they include (but are not limited to) volume, pitch, tone, tempo and timbre. Kinesthetic submodalities includes temperature, texture, intensity, rhythm and so on. By noticing and then changing your submodalities, you can lessen or intensify the response to your thoughts. Visualising isn't going to make your outcomes materialise in a puff of smoke. However, by tweaking your visual, auditory, kinesthetic (even olfactory and gustatory) submodalities appropriately to make it more compelling, you will be more likely to take the necessary steps to make your outcome a reality. Please Note: Many of my coaching clients first contact me because they feel they lack motivation. However, it is not always as straightforward as motivation. Often, it has to do with conflicting values, lack of information, personal beliefs and a whole range of other possibilities. In the coaching process, I help my clients uncover and address these. Motivation flows on automatically as result. If you'd like to see a few short case studies of clients who initially thought their problem was a lack of motivation but discovered it wasn't quite as simple as that, read Case Studies One and Two on Clever Fox's Coaching For Women website by clicking here. Now if you'll excuse me, I have dinner to prepare for tonight's guests. Until next time, all the best! Kathleen Alexander Clever Fox 1/9 Grange Road, Kew VIC, Australia 3101 T: + 613 9817 3482 E: kathleen@cleverfox.com.au To find out about Clever Fox's NLP based coaching and training programs please visit www.cleverfox.com.au and www.coachingforwomen.com.au. Or call us on on +613 9817 3482.
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