Week of Motivation

You can do it!
We're intrinsically motivated here at The Happy Homunculus.  We're so intrinsically motivated, that we were able to make ourselves more motivated.  Dios mio!

During the last week, we started arguing with our own mind with the goal of increasing our intrinsic motivation.  We completed six Daily Mind Games, inspired by the book Motivational Interviewing, that were carefully engineered to re-frame our internal biases and make us more open to changing our behavior.

I know it worked for me.  My homunculus said it worked for him.  So, why wouldn't it work for you?

Week of Motivation

Day 1: Benefits of Change - talk up the good reasons to change.
Day 2: No to the Status Quo - remind yourself why not changing is uncool.
Day 3: Characteristics for Change - note your skillz.
Day 4: Expertise for Change - get more skillz.
Day 5: Intention to Change - make a promise to yourself.
Day 6: Small Change - Make a change, a small change.

Next week, our goal will be to improve our moods (and our performance) by working on being more optimistic. I recently read a great book entitled Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman that reviews the current science about optimism and how we can change our thinking to be more optimistic.  The Daily Mind Games for next week have been inspired by this book.

What's the point you may ask?  Well, an optimistic style of thinking has been linked to improved mood, better health, longer life, and greater success.  Neat-O!  Sounds like something my homunculus could use...

Links: Check out other Weeks of Metacognition

3 comments:

Maddie said...

Thanks for the helpful article.

Anna said...

Thank you Vince!

These Week of Motivation posts were the simple answer I needed. I have been spending about 8 months falling down an ascending escalator moving deeper and deeper into a state of mind that has been negatively affecting my relationships, my happiness, my health, my self-respect, and my career. Despite feeling like I had all the reasons in the world to change, I just couldn't bring myself to do so. I knew everything I was doing was bad but I couldn't come up with the right way to move forward with all of that information and instead kept falling into more discouragement with every time I thought about why I "should" change. The Week of Motivation exercises helped me focus my thoughts about why I need to change and the critical step was in helping me think about why I CAN change! That was the key! I am happy to say that I have just actually crossed off the first few tasks on my to-do list of little tiny changes to eventually add up to my goal. The weight I no longer feel by just completing these small tasks is invigorating and definite motivation to keep moving forward.
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I immediately subscribed to the Happy Homunculus and look forward to reading more.

Best wishes.

Vince Panzano said...

Dear Anna - I can't express how nice it is to hear that these thought experiments were helpful for you. Thank you for the incredibly rewarding positive feedback. Your kind words mean a lot.

And when you're feeling "low-mo" again (which will happen because it happens to everyone), check out this: http://www.happyhomunculus.com/2012/04/mental-reboot-script.html



I wrote that as a message to myself to try to get motivated again! There are also links to some specific articles with more thought experiments to try in a pinch.

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