A YOUNG NOVELIST FOUND MY e-mail address through a friend and wrote to me about his problems motivating himself. He had been reading 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself, but he had to confess that he was currently stuck.
“I lose faith in myself,” he said, “and when I lose faith, I can’t write. It’s discouraging. What would you do?”
I told him that his thinking seemed to have turned everything around backwards. Faith doesn’t have to come first, it can come later. In fact, faith is not always necessary. Just write. Write badly if you have to, but just write. Forget about faith in your writing. It is no big deal. Faith will be your afterglow; it is not something you need up front.
Victims become passive when they can’t find faith, or confidence, or courage to do something. Then they tell themselves they don’t have the power to do it.
Owners know that faith and courage only appear later in reflection. Action comes first. Action comes before the courage to act. Faith and courage are rewards—not requirements—for action. The power to do something often shows up halfway into the doing of the thing, not up front.
“Do the thing,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “and you shall have the power.”
I know this sequence for courage because most of my life had been wasted waiting for the power to show up. Or the faith. Or the courage. I thought I had to have it up front before I could act. Before I could be bold. But I had the whole process of this power reversed. Had I not awakened and seen the light, I’d still be waiting to this day for the faith.
“If a thing is worth doing,” said G.K. Chesterton, “it’s worth doing badly.”
The action itself is the source of courage. Doing it is what erases the fear of doing it.
I once told my coach Steve Hardison, in an admiring voice, “You can do things other people are afraid to do.” He acknowledged that that was true. But he then said, “And the only reason I can do these things is because I have done them. Doing them is how I learned to do them.”
In working with corporations’ salespeople over the years, I have noticed that there is one thing that motivates a salesperson more than anything else. It’s something that is so motivating that it fills a salesperson with almost unstoppable confidence and energy. What is it? It is making a sale.
After having made a sale, a salesperson is more confident and energetic than at any other time. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to squander the energy in celebration of the sale instead of using it to immediately face the sales challenge they fear the most.
“How can I motivate myself to sell more?” a salesperson asks.
“By making a sale,” I reply.
“Well that’s just it: I’m too low on motivation to do that. How do I get my motivation level up to where I want it so that I can make a sale?”
“Get right into making the sale, and your motivation will go right up where you want it.”
That sounds like double-talk to the salesperson. So I often use an exercise metaphor. We are more familiar with this dynamic when it comes to exercise.
“How do I motivate myself to run in the morning?”
“By running in the morning.”
“But I don’t feel like running.”
“That’s because you’re not running yet. If you were running, pretty soon you would feel like running.”
Fear is overcome by doing what we fear to do. Action defeats fear, just as scissors cut paper. And paper covers rock, and rock breaks scissors. It’s the circle of life. But you’ve got to start it yourself. It won’t happen on its own.
The action you take doesn’t even have to be perfect. It will begin to feed itself the power it needs to continue. Like starting a car by pushing it. You start it by moving.
Courage has a second wind. Once into it, you’ll get more into it. Too much fearful worry prior to the action is the only thing that can stop this process.
When you were a child, you knew this. It was intuitive. You just put your fear in your back pocket and jumped. Remember? At one point, you just pushed off on that bike. At one point, you just jumped off the high board into the deep end of the water. You didn’t worry about whether you had what it took to jump. You just jumped.
Somehow, as grown-ups, we have talked ourselves into assuming that we can’t do anything we’re afraid of doing; that being afraid to do it is the same as being unable to do it. But a little practice at just doing it shows us that this was a false assumption. Action generates courage, not the other way around.
Go off by yourself somewhere and sit down with a spiral notebook. (Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino says the spiral notebook is the most high-tech invention of our lifetime because you can take it anywhere, you don’t need an electrical outlet or batteries, and you can write anything into it.) Write down 10 things you would do in your life if you had absolutely no fear. Then pick one of them to do.
The thing you’ve picked to do might make you afraid just thinking about it, but that’s okay. Don’t think about it. Thinking about it is what is making you afraid. Just get started doing it. Without thought.
All courageous people have fear. They just do things anyway, hollering with a combination of joy and fear, like Butch and Sundance jumping off the high cliff into the water below.
You will find, as you descend toward the water, there is a joyful rush. You’re feeling your fear while you are in action conquering it. And as you continue in action, the fear dissolves, like a fist full of salt in the river. What remains for you is pure joy. It’s the joy of being someone you were not. That’s reinvention.
You reinvent by doing things “you” wouldn’t do, and in so doing you realize there is no fixed and permanent “you” at all.