Motivation: From Willpower Myths To NLP Strategies

Motivation isn’t missing—it’s miswired. We dive into a practical, humane way to rebuild drive by treating motivation as a system you can design, not a feeling you wait to feel. Drawing on decades of NLP practice, we unpack why willpower fizzles, how vague goals quietly sabotage action, and what to change when progress plateaus. Along the way, we contrast corporate SMART goals with a richer approach that connects outcomes to values, identity, and clear sensory language your brain can actually use.

We break down eight structural elements that move people from stuck to steady: well-formed outcomes, criteria and values that supply the emotional “why,” beliefs that either unlock or block capability, and metaprograms like move away versus move toward, options versus procedures, and internal versus external reference. You’ll hear how the Bandura curve explains early wins, mid-journey stalls, and the identity shift required to break through. We also explore the biology underneath motivation—stress, sleep, nutrition, and dopamine—and how to engineer small wins and anchors so hard tasks feel lighter and momentum returns.

Then we tune the challenge-skill balance to find flow, use reframing to turn setbacks into guidance, and edit submodalities—the brightness, distance, and sound of your inner pictures—to make goals feel compelling instead of abstract. The result is a repeatable blueprint: align your outcomes with what you value, install beliefs that support who you are becoming, match strategy to your patterns, and let feedback refine your route. If you’re ready to replace push with pull and build resilience that survives real life, this conversation will give you the tools to start today.

Enjoying the show? Subscribe, share with a friend who needs a motivation reset, and leave a quick review to help others find us. Contact use for additional help at susan@nlptrainingconcepts.com

Transcript

Welcome And Motivation Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:05

This is the brain this is the brain language podcast. This is the brain language podcast. This is the brain language podcast. This is the Brain Language Podcast.

SPEAKER_03 0:16

Welcome to the Brain Language Podcast, where we discuss NLP concepts to help you in your business and your life. I'm Morgan Job.

What Psychology Says About Motivation

Expectancy Theory And Willpower Myths

SPEAKER_00 0:23

And I'm Susan Stageman. And today we're going to talk about being motivated about motivation. I had this idea from a conversation I saw on television. Somebody was being interviewed, a psychologist about motivation. And what struck me about it, Morgan, was they say, okay, well, if you don't feel motivated, do this. Or if this happens, then do this. And I thought, really? First of all, if you're not motivated, how are you going to make yourself do something? It's all so much. Do you know what I'm saying? It's so much based on people being able to control their behavior. And what do we know about that so far? The almost 40 years I've been in NLP, people don't have control over their behaviors. There's a lot of things that they want to do and be in charge of, and yet they don't do it. And that got me thinking: well, what does NLP have to offer about motivation? And so I put this together. Now, I did a little research on Google. There are over 22, 20 theories about motivation. So I guess there's more than one way to approach this. A lot has been written about it. And so much has been written about it. It's almost overwhelming. I mean, how, if there were 22 plus theories of motivation, Morgan, how would you choose the one that's going to work for you? Or do you would you be motivated to go through 10 or 20 of them to see which one's actually going to work? And to me, it's rather overwhelming just to think about what you would do if you actually suffered from lack of motivation. So then I did a little research on well, what is motivation? And how it's defined is internal and external forces that initiate, direct, and sustain goal-oriented behavior. And the word motivation, which by the way, in NLP is a nominalization, right? It is a verb that's actually been changed into a noun. So, but they say motivation is the energy behind human action. So it can be passion, enjoyment, can be rewards, and that can be money or praise. Those things cause people to be motivated. It can also be motivated by biological needs, uh, cognitive processes, the emotional states. I mean, think about some of the things that you're motivated by biological needs. You have to go to the bathroom, you're cold, you put on, you know, a sweater or socks or all of those things that we are motivated because our body says we need this. So we all have motivation. It's not that motivation exists or doesn't exist. It just means that you need a certain strategy, uh, certain combination of elements that are going to help you go forward, take the steps to go forward. One theory is expectancy theory that suggests that people feel motivated when they value a promised reward or their efforts will make a difference. Expectation can fuel desired results. But how many times, Morgan, do we hear of people, or maybe this has happened to yourself, where people didn't expect something to happen. They wanted it to happen, and then it did. So expectancy isn't always what motivates us. Sometimes people are motivated to do something because of something, even though they don't have a high expectation that it's actually going to work. So it's not about willpower. Some say that it's wired in our brain by personal satisfaction, curiosity, and passion, or reward or pressures like winning a medal when we just finish the Olympics and people when we watch these young athletes do their thing. Obviously, they were highly motivated to do the work that it would take to be at that level of accomplishment. So any thoughts that you have, Morgan?

SPEAKER_03 5:07

Yeah, I like this this idea of there's never a lack of motivation. There's always motivation. You're either motivated to do something or you're motivated to not do something.

SPEAKER_00 5:19

That's right.

SPEAKER_03 5:20

Right. So it's like if you're if there's something that you say you want to do and you're not doing it, it's like, how do you maintain the motivation to not do that?

Why Goals Fail: Language And Fear

SPEAKER_00 5:29

That's exactly right. In fact, I think I even mentioned this later on in my show notes that well, how do you motivate yourself to not do something? Because it's it's the unified field, which we'll talk about later. If you say I want to be motivated, I'm not motivated, those two at the same logical level have the same structure. So that's why people flip back and forth, but I'm getting ahead of myself. So motivation can be disrupted by a lack of clear goals. And a lot of that has to do with going back to the outcome frame, having it made into the language that's positive, specific, sensory-based, etc. And people will say, well, you know, I should work out more. First of all, that's not motivated, motivating. And then I'll work out three times a week is much different. First of all, the brain loves math, so it responds to that three, whereas I should work out more, which is passive language and more, which is a comparative deletion. So that's the first problem. Second problem is the fear of failure. And this is the idea that we're afraid that we're not going to succeed, so we avoid and procrastinate. And we will run a program that says, well, if I'm if this isn't going to work out, then why should I try at all? And there's a lot of people that run that.

SPEAKER_03 7:14

Yeah. Well, there's a fear of that's it's like a block, right? It's it's an emotional block. They have motivation, but the fear is blocking them. And so one approach I've had is had let them clear the fear.

SPEAKER_00 7:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 7:29

And then the motivation rises.

Instant Gratification, Burnout, And Stress

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Yes, yeah, excellent. So another one is that instant gratification. I've seen so many people, and I didn't even mention this in my show notes, but here's another one: this instant gratification where people are in time rather than through time. So many things that we would love to accomplish as a goal or an achievement are through time processes. Learning for one thing is through time. And oftentimes, people they start learning in LP, they want to know it all now. Well, the nothing they've learned in their life was like that. Yes, they're enthusiastic about what they think. There's an expectation about what they can do with it, but they want it now. And then they get frustrated when it doesn't come as easily as they would like it to. And the other thing is, you know, our phones give us that easy dopamine hit. So we oftentimes get into this instantaneous, oh, it should be like this, and it's not that way. And a lot of long-term goals are things that you have to do through time, it's not something that happens overnight. Then burnout, which of course is a boundary issue, but overworking without breaks, taking time off. Our brain doesn't work very well when we're exhausted. So it doesn't prioritize when we're exhausted. And when we're tired and we're at our wits' end, our prioritizing is about survival. It's not about motivating to go forward. And then the the other thing uh I learned, did you have anything about that?

SPEAKER_03 9:20

You know, that ties really into the stress response because that burnout occurs when when you've been stressed for too long. Yes, like chronic stress. But like stress can be like I can see how it really interferes with the motivation, although it can motivate you. But your last comment about survival, it's probably motivating you more from a survival standpoint, rather than something you want to do or you see may benefit you in some sort of um abstract way, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:49

Yeah, yeah, very good. And then, of course, this one, which I thought was interesting, low dopamine levels. So, and you just mentioned stress, lack of sleep, poor nutrition, they can all reduce dopamine so that it makes everything seem like a chore. And yeah, so you do the things that have to get done, and then everything else gets put on a back burner. So when I was listening to this particular psychologist, he was saying, okay, well, just let's just set SMART goals. All right, smart goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Well, how many times, Morgan, have we set goals, right, that meet all of those criteria and yet they don't get done for some reason. And of course, going back to the I want to run more, we set a goal I will run three times a week for 30 minutes. So, what I added to this was okay, there's a specific movement toward language, if that makes sense, that you're moving towards something. And instead of saying, I don't want to be, you know, I want to run more because I don't want to gain any more weight or something like that. It's too loosey goosey.

SPEAKER_01 11:09

Yeah.

SMART Goals Versus Finding Your Why

SPEAKER_00 11:09

Then there was this two-minute rule. And I thought, okay, so this is like large goals are achieved per getting progressively smaller goals. So you have a lot of little goals and you get to the bigger goals by adding those all together. This was the two-minute rule. When uh your motivation is low, commit to just two minutes of action. Okay, well, that would work, I think, if you're not at survival. If you're survival, all of that gets put aside. Because if you're, let's say you're at survival, you don't know where your next meal is coming from, but you're trying to write a book. Okay, well, unless you're writing a book about how tough it is, um, maybe you should be looking for a situation that where you can get immediate cash. And that could be something on the back burner for right now. Small steps do create momentum, but again, if you're at survival, you're not going to be as motivated to do some of these other little things that I would consider a luxury. Does that does that make sense?

SPEAKER_03 12:20

Yeah, it kind of reminds me of like Maslow's hierarchy. Like until certain needs are established or fulfilled, then these other things that you might want to be motivated towards are just not available to you.

SPEAKER_00 12:33

Yeah, exactly. And I've seen people, I've coached people over the years that get ahead of themselves on that. And they need to be taking care of business and not off on a tangent doing some of these other things. That foundation has to be laid and solid before you can build on it.

SPEAKER_03 12:54

Yeah. I could jump back a little bit and talk about SMART goals for a second. So I I worked in corporate for many, many years, and it's particularly in learning and development field. And this smart goals is all over the place. It's like a corporate mantra, right? Okay. And I never liked it. I was I tried a number of uh occasions to get people to change it because I wasn't total, it didn't seem to be totally effective.

SPEAKER_01 13:22

Right.

SPEAKER_03 13:23

And I one of the main things I thought was missing is why. Like why I want to do this. I can have a specific measural achievable, relevant, time-bound goal that my boss really wants me to get, but I could care less about it, and I'm still not going to be motivated.

SPEAKER_00 13:40

There you go, exactly. Yeah. And you know, Gordon McKinsey, I think I've mentioned this before in the podcast, when he wrote that orbiting the giant hairball, he was the creative director for Hallmark for 30 years. And that whole book was designed to help people who were being dragged down by the hairball, which he analogized to a corporation. And he said, find the goals that get your heart beat beating faster, that you can develop for passion that are connected to the organization in some way. He said, then you're going to be more motivated to do the things that you need to do in order to be successful in the hairball, in the corporation, which I thought was a unique way of looking at it. So, yes, I'm glad you said something about that.

SPEAKER_03 14:33

Yeah, smart is really sterile. There's no emotion in it.

Dopamine, Anchors, And Reframing

NLP’s Structure Of Motivation

SPEAKER_00 14:37

Yeah. Well, um, the next thing is to find your why. All right. Now, of course, the why is guess what? It's your values. Why is about what you believe, what your values are. And we'll talk about values here in just a minute because that's part of the reason the SMART goals don't work. If you're developing SMART goals in, say, a company or a corporation, but it doesn't meet your values, it can cause a lot of stress. And then stress, you know, lowers your dopamine levels. And so you're going back to the idea that, so what they're smart, I'm still not motivated to get them or go for it. So, yeah, values are important when you're connecting your goal to a deeper reason. So I'm going to talk about the obvious structure of NLP, structure of motivation in our world of NLP, is the obvious one is the well-formed outcome. Well, it's goals for what purpose? Outcome for what purpose? What's the deeper reason? If you attach it, if a goal or is attached to something you value, then you're going to be more motivated. Go for it. So it's, you know, finding your why. I get it. All right. Then leveraging dopamine triggers. So when you break down tasks into smaller steps and celebrate your progress along the way, or pair difficult tasks with something enjoyable, like listening to music, if you can do that while cleaning, I used to do that all the time. In fact, way back in the old days when I lived in an apartment, I was young. Well, my dorm room, I could clean my dorm room to one pass-through, but it was small. The dorm room was one pass-through for the music from Hawaii 5.0. You know how that went. I mean, you know how that. I'm not gonna sing it because I'm not very good at that, but it was I could get going and get that done before anybody's business. So I I understand how that can work, especially music, because music can be highly motivating and takes your mind off of it, kind of works. What is that? It's an anchor. All you're doing is collapsing an anchor with something you don't want to do or are not motivated to do, with something that makes it more enjoyable. Duh, okay, so there you go. And then finally, reframing, and that of course is an NLP tool, which is shifting your mindset and the idea, there's a presupposition in NLP. There is no failure, only feedback. Looking at when something doesn't work, well, what else could it mean? Setbacks are clues, they're not reasons to quit. And people who have a real strong outcome that meets the well-formedness conditions, guess what? That provides a framework with which they can adjust to feedback and also be flexible when it comes along. I mean, that's that's the unified field. Through time, take a step, get feedback, take another step, get feedback, take another step. So it's an ongoing process. You're not stuck in time in a situation and not knowing where you're going or where you've been. So let's go ahead and talk about the structure. So that's what psychology says. And we put in our, you know, some of the things, attach them, some of the NLP things. But let's go ahead and talk about the structure of motivation in our NLP world. And this is where NLP has separated or diverged from a lot of other psychology because NLP says everything has a structure. And if you know the structure, it's a map, right? If you know the map, um, you can change it. And any element of the map, see or feel, you can change it. And it changes your emotional state, changes your perception of it, and things that you want become a lot more easy and possible. So I found eight elements, and actually, as I continue to work on this, I found more, but I'm gonna hold it down to eight because I didn't want to use the other nine hours we have to do the podcast. However, the obvious one is da-da, a well-formed outcome. So, what do we know about well-formed outcomes? They have to be stated in the positive, positive language, they have to be seeer, feel, sensory-based, and they have to be self-initiated, maintained, and ecological. It has to fit into the reality you find yourself. If you have that, if you have a clear outcome, motivation becomes a lot easier to to start and maintain.

SPEAKER_03 19:44

Then that's like a really common one that I work with people on is defining in a positive in a positive terms what they want.

SPEAKER_00 19:54

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 19:55

Most people know what they don't want.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 19:57

But it's very difficult to be motivated to achieve what you don't want.

SPEAKER_00 20:01

That that's right. Because guess what? You already have it.

SPEAKER_03 20:05

Yeah, right.

Beliefs And The Bandura Curve

SPEAKER_00 20:07

So criteria are hot buttons and they incite emotional response. So, you know, with the outcome and the criteria, what's important to you about something, and they come in hierarchy. So we'll address that in just a minute. Values, your principles and standards that guide behaviors, decisions, and actions. They define what an individual or society considers important, desirable, and right. Honesty, integrity, freedom, kindness, those are all values. And they act as a compass or a guide for life choices. They will impact relationships, career, and personal growth. Values are large, vague concepts. There's a lot of information, a lot of experience that goes into values, and they direct a person's thinking and behavior, but they have a lot of information in it. And what's really interesting about values, you can have two people with the same values, but have very different behaviors. And in my experience with relationships and coaching people in relationships, you know, at one time somebody said, Well, just find somebody, don't worry about the behavior, just go for the values. But as people find out, you may have the same value, but they do very different behaviors. And sometimes it's the behaviors that you want to be aligned with rather than the values, or you want the values to trigger the same behaviors. All right. Next one, number four beliefs. These are generalizations that come from experience. And Morgan, as you know, we get acquire beliefs from other people as well as our own experience. Now, I wanted to talk about the Bandura curve. You had brought that up when we talked about this concept of motivation originally. And the Bandura curve is part of this. It's the relationship between what people expect to do and how they actually perform. Bandura studied, uh, his studies revealed a very important pattern in the interaction between mental maps and behavioral performance. And we call that in NLP. Dills calls it the Bandura Curve. So, with the Bandura curve, you're looking at what people expect to do and how they actually perform. Bandeur's studies revealed that important pattern in the interaction between mental maps and behavioral performance, which was known in NLP as the Bandura Curve. So the Bandura curve is an important aspect of beliefs that have to do with motivation. Now, when we talk about the Bandeur curve, in the first part of the curve, people oftentimes don't expect to do very well because they haven't done something, but their performance starts to improve because they access latent resources that they have not been using but go into uh success in whatever they're trying to do. But at some point they run out of or they top off that resource or resources and they start to go into a plateau. And in that plateau, people will start to question whether they actually can do something. And then with trial and error, developing new strategies, they will start to make progress again. And in the first part of the curve, they're creating beliefs about capability. In the second part of the curve, they're creating beliefs about identity. I am this person. So the Bandura curve, as related to beliefs and generalizations, is a key to our motivation. When we get to that plateau, people can become very demotivated. And what needs to happen is they need a new strategy. What got them from point A to point B is not going to get them from C to D. They have to change how they do something. So this is an important aspect when you're motivated about developing something, creating something, getting something.

SPEAKER_03 24:35

So this is where the this concept of like you're getting feedback, you're not failing.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 24:42

And it's telling you what you've been doing has been working, but no longer, and you need to modify your approach.

Metaprograms That Drive Action

SPEAKER_00 24:48

That is correct. And so that's when coaching or a guide of some sort can be very helpful. And I know John No, who is I love his little book, Principles of Peak Performance. I think it's something like that. I've got it up here right above my desk. He says that if the difference between success and failure is the cost of a guide or a coach, then it's worth it. You know, if they can help you get to the next level, then the money you spent was worth it. So, anyway, that's the Bandeur curve. Very, very important. Now let's talk about number five metaprograms, deep sorting patterns that filter and sort the billions of bits of information that come at us every second. We have to have a way of categorizing this. A lot of it is deleted or simply ignored, but they're designed to maintain subjective coherence. The key metaprogram, in fact, there's in the lab profile, which is what I teach, the key meta programs and motivation are criteria, move away from move towards, options and procedures, internal, external, and sameness difference, and initiate weight. So all of those are part of the motivation section of the lab profile. Then flow, the balance between challenge and skill. And then seven, the unified field, motivation versus not motivation. We've talked about that just a few minutes ago. How do you motivate yourself to be unmotivated? So addressing the higher logical levels of beliefs and values, identity and capability, which are resources for any behavior or lack of it, will create change. And if you divide the unified field in half, that'll just perpetuate that seesaw phenomenon, whether I'm motivated, now I'm not motivated, I'm organized, I'm not organized, has the same structure. And then finally, number eight, submodalities. Remember, Morgan, when we did that exercise in class, the compelling behavior exercise, where you compelling behavior, what compels you to move forward or to go get something, has a different submodal structure than something that doesn't. And so you want to know what those are. Okay. So make sure that you have a clear outcome. The goal is not enough. If you go through those questions of the outcome frame and meet the criteria, positive language, sensory-based, self-initiated, maintained, ecological as part of your protocol. I call that the blueprint of where you're going. Then criteria. I've seen so many people, Morgan, fail at achieving something because it didn't fit their values and criteria. Instead, look to the criteria that motivate you. What's important in your life? Criteria operate in hierarchy.

SPEAKER_03 28:04

Yeah, it's like people pursue other people's goals in a sense sometimes. And they feel very let down when they if they actually achieve it because it doesn't chuck the box for them.

Flow: Balancing Skill And Challenge

SPEAKER_00 28:16

That is correct. And I remember one story of a woman who she decided she would sell cars to put her kids through school, but it was ruining her health. And uh the long hours actually kept her, it made it riddled with conflict because her family obviously she was doing it for the family because it was a high criteria. But on the other hand, it kept her away from her family long hours, seven days a week. There was a lot of sacrifice that went into that. And as time went on, she got unwell because of it and because of the stress. She had the value of helping her kids go through college, but on the other hand, it was making her sick. So those are the kinds of things that you have to pay attention to. What's the price that you're going to pay for being motivated to do something? Then beliefs. Do you believe you can achieve your goal? And remember, beliefs are not real, they're just generalizations. And there's going to be evidence that supports them, but there's also going to be counterexamples. So if you if you say, Well, I want to achieve this, but I don't think I can, so I don't want to do the work, et cetera, et cetera, you know that how that goes. If you go for the counterexamples, well, when is this belief not true? You know, what are the counterexamples to your belief? Every time I go to get a job, I get shot down, I get turned down. Okay, so what are the counterexamples to this? And sometimes you have to look at little minutiae, but all you have to do is find one counterexample and it makes the belief not true. And it begins to weaken the power of it and open to believing something new. And the use of universal quantifiers or universal statements have counterexamples that can strengthen the opposite of what you think you believe. So those are some of the questions you might ask yourself. Instead of saying, Well, this is what I believe, and that's why I can't do it. Well, what do I have to believe instead of the opposite? Then, of course, our meta programs move away from move towards. Here's the interesting thing about move away from move towards. If you are moving away from something, you're very motivated to move away from the situation where you don't have enough money to pay your bills or rent, whatever. And what's interesting, you can set a goal. Say, for instance, you're making$2,000 a month, you want to make$5,000 a month. The closer you get to$5,000, the less motivated you'll be because you're moving away from something. You're not moving towards, you can say I'm moving towards$5000, but the farther away you get from the negative experience, the less you'll be motivated, the less you'll work. So only the true move towards will motivate you to actually achieve the goal. Just keep that in mind. And that move away from move towards pattern, it is deeply wired in people. So you have to be conscious, and there are ways to change it. I've worked processes to help people change meta programs. So I know that it does work. Um, but they're this one's pretty deeply wired.

SPEAKER_03 31:53

It seems like a way meta program will get you started, but a towards will sustain you.

The Unified Field And Identity

SPEAKER_00 31:59

Yes, that yeah, that's a good way to put it. Unfortunately, most people, once they get out of the pain, you know, they because they're moving away from pain. Once they get out of the pain, they're they're not, it's not important to them. They're happy. That's why people will say, Oh, I want to make$10 million a year. It's just a number inside their head. Most people, unless they they're somewhere in that goal, in that income bracket anyway, revenue bracket, they have no idea what it takes to make that kind of money. So it's just a number inside their head. Once they get out of where they are, they feel more comfortable and then they don't feel like they have to, they don't have to work so hard, and they don't. So internal, external. Remember the external person, if you're external, you need external feedback as to how you're doing. It's not low self-esteem, it's just the way your brain is set up. Internal pattern has its own standards of comparison. The external person needs a coach to achieve their goals. The internal person needs a coach, but they won't listen to them. So just keep that in mind. All right, options and procedures, the adrenaline drip for the procedures, the endorphins for options. Usually accomplishing something will require a procedure. Options, this is where options people get stuck because they don't have a procedure. All business and money is made through procedure. So if the option person is bouncing up and down and back and forth with success, not success, that sort of thing, it could be that they need a procedure that they're willing to stick with. And then, of course, in the Bandura curve, once they reach a certain plateau, they're going to have to get another procedure and follow it to be able to get to the next level. But the results will give you motivation. And then the sameness difference. You know, how long will you go before a major change? You know, sometimes people chomp at the bit, as they say, to change a job or be in a relationship or that sort of thing, but that little clock inside of them isn't going off. And if you know the pattern for yourself in a particular context, that'll explain why you don't move. And finally, the initiate weight, this is some of you know this as proactive, reactive. The weight pattern procrastinates, analyzes, considers, looks over all of the choices, etc., may or may not do something. If you find something in your life that you're proactive about, then use that to anchor to the things that you need to be motivated. All right. Now, flow. The flow is the perfect balance between skill and challenge. Now, Chick sent me high. Uh, the flow, the psychology of optimal experience says that if you're anxious, your skill is too low for the challenge. If you're bored, your challenge is too low for your skill. So, depending on how you feel, you may not be motivated because the challenge is too great. So you have to get your skills up to par. But if you're bored, you need to find a new challenge because your challenge is too low for your skill. And then finally, the unified field, the who, what, where, when. Here's the important questions. Who do you need to be to accomplish your goal? What do you need to believe? What values do you need? What do you need to know how to do? What skill? The neurological levels really help the alignment by Robert Dills really helps with this. Because, as I said before, if you think of the unified field as a big circle, if you take motivation, not motivated, procrastinate, whatever you want to call it, what you do is you split the unified field in two because those two have, yes, they have different results, but they have the same structure. So going to a higher logical level where you look at, well, to be motivated, who do I need to be? To be motivated, what do I need to believe? What values do I need? What do I need to know how to do? All of those are higher logical levels than behavior, which is where motivation is. And using that with the Bandura curve and your strategy to develop a belief that you can do it, and then this new strategy to know that I am that person helps people get the kind of motivation that they need to accomplish something.

SPEAKER_03 36:51

In this idea, it seems like, as you said, that motivations found at the behavioral level. And it seems like people often focus on the behaviors and the environment that allow for that behavior.

SPEAKER_00 37:03

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 37:04

If I understand correctly, you're saying like questions about who am I that does this or accomplish this, and what do I believe about myself and about it? And what's what's the get, what's the value here that's being fulfilled? And then what do I need to to know how to to do the skills?

Motivation As A System

SPEAKER_00 37:23

Yes. Those are the kinds of things, you know. Sometimes we talk about this in class. Einstein said something like, This is not a quote, it's he said, you can't solve a problem at the same level of thinking that created the problem. It was a little more complex than that. But that was the basic gist of it, which basically means that there's a lack of systemic thinking. So when you take all of these things that we've talked about, including the submodalities, which I'm going to address here in a second, if you take all of those together, you create a system that helps you get what you want. So motivation isn't just about behaviors. It's not just about setting goals. It is a system where all of these elements come together to produce some kind of behavior that a person can use to get to where they want to go or to get what they want. But it's like a puzzle. I know I do a lot of jigsaw puzzles. I love them. I think they're good for the brain. They're good for pattern recognition, all kinds of positive things. But if you look at motivation, you say, this is the puzzle of motivation. All right. Okay, well, guess what? You have to have all the pieces for it to make sense. You can't just say, okay, I can set goals, I can do the smart goals, or I can do this, or I can do that. It's more than just one thing that you're doing. It's a combination of things put together. It's like driving, right? You know, you can steer, but that doesn't mean you can drive. You can accelerate or break. That still doesn't, you have to do all these other things. You have to look at your road, the signs, other traffic. You have to check your rear view mirror, you have to steer and accelerate and break. All kinds of things go on. Motivation is, I think, very much like that, where it's a combination of a lot of different things that come together to produce something that you really want. So then the last one is submodalities. Look at what compels your behavior. What is it that you see, hear, and feel? What's the structure of it? Not just, you know, the brightness, is it focused or defocused, those types of things? And then what doesn't say, for instance, you want to compel a behavior, you want the motivation to do something, but you don't do it. Okay, well, those submodalities are going to be different. And so what is it? How can you change something that you're motivated to do into the same structural pattern as things that you want to do, but you don't? And then change the submodalities for compel to the not compel to make you want to do it more. I mean, we all know, Morgan, I don't know whether you've ever done this, is that you know, to get more excited about something, oftentimes it'll work if just you bring it forward, right? It doesn't seem so far out into the future. And so I think that that is an important aspect of motivation, just the structure of the submodalities.

SPEAKER_03 40:38

Yeah, I use um quite a bit, I use those quite a bit associated with goals, but also dealing with emotions that are stressful to change. So this, I think this is one of the areas where NLP really shines, as you mentioned earlier, is the structure, is understanding that if you change the structure, you change the the product of whatever that is.

Submodalities And Compelling Behavior

SPEAKER_00 41:03

Right. So what I'm saying is that what is available to most people, say on the internet, you know, Google or whatever platform you use, there's nothing wrong in it. It just doesn't give you the whole story. And if you're doing all those things and you're still not motivated, you're still not getting your goals, okay. Well, then there's something else there that's in play that maybe is more important and more highly useful that needs to be in play for things to happen. In the presuppositions of NLP, anyone can learn anything. And I think that applies here. Anyone can be motivated, and you are now. Is it motivated to get the things that you want? Or you know, that that's another question. Uh, that's another 12 hours of podcasts. However, you know, we're here. So anyway, I do hope that people will take this into consideration, and it'll help them understand motivation a little bit more. And the interesting thing about it is this pattern can be applied to almost anything that you want. Organization, what are some of the other things that people say? Oh, I'm so unorganized. Well, it's the same thing. Organization, of course, is a normalization. And um, so you so you want to organize things in your life. But again, organized or not organized, you're splitting the unified field in half. And so you want to look at the unified field, the who and the what and the why and the how, as well as what it is that you want to do. So, wow, that was a lot, anyway.

SPEAKER_03 42:51

So there's a lot to motivation.

SPEAKER_00 42:53

There's a lot to motivation, but I was motivated to do this anyway, because I think it's important, it's a big question for a lot of people. And I think that you know, paying a little more attention to what the structure is, I think will help people. Now, let's do a little recap. First of all, getting motivated and staying motivated has a structure, and that applies to any goal. If you look at the various elements of beliefs and values, criteria, meta programs, you know, challenge versus skill, the unified field elements, who, what, why, how, and some modalities with the right combination, you can be motivated to do anything and do it. You know, that's one thing to be motivated to do, it's another thing to just do it. And just make sure that the reward you're going for is worth it. That's an important part of this. Is what you're going to get, you know, from or doing something that you're motivated to. Is that going to be worth it? And Morgan, I remember years ago, I was. Standing in a class as an assistant resource person, and one of the other resource people, we were standing in the middle, all these people were you know around us doing an exercise, and he leans over to me and he says, You know, at some point you just gotta do it, Nike. And so whether you're motivated or not, sometimes you just have to do it. And that's all that's my final comment on that.

SPEAKER_03 44:28

You know, I think that the gift of or the power of motivation is that if you have a goal and you uh genuinely fulfill a lot of these you know structures and you're motivated to achieve it, you take take on almost superhuman capability to deal with any obstacle. Like if something comes up that the first if you don't have the motivation, the first thing that shows up is like, well, I don't have enough money. Well, if you're truly motivated, you'll you might notice that you don't have a lot of money or enough money for this, but you go, okay, well, how can I get it?

SPEAKER_01 45:04

Yes, right.

SPEAKER_03 45:05

Your mind will go into overdrive to figure out how to overcome that. So it's like this resilience to any obstacle. And I think that's the gift or power of motivation.

Recap, Resilience, And Just Do It

SPEAKER_00 45:16

Yeah, yeah, that's so brilliantly said. I used to say that in that outcome frame, because I do think it sets out the parameters, like you're saying, to be motivated to do something because it's so clear. And I think that that's the power of NLP, that even when life says no, you say yes, I can. And I think that's what you're saying is that motivation behind doing something when things look grim, just is a testament to how powerful it can be. And yeah, anybody can have it. So I want to thank all of you for listening to the podcast. And you're gonna notice a few little changes. There is actually going to be a transcript and a blog that goes with this now. So hopefully it'll be a little bit easier to follow for some of you. I thank you all very much, and let me know if there's anything that you want us to talk about, and let us know how we can help you. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 46:22

Thank you for listening to the Brain Language Podcast. Subscribe to our show on iTunes or your favorite listening platform to keep up with our newest episode. Be sure to visit our website, www.nlptrainingconcepts.com, and find us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter by searching NLP Training Concepts to keep up with free resources, upcoming training, and fantastic content. Thank you for joining us and taking our minds to the next level. We'll see you next time.