What comes to mind when I say "motivational speaker"? You're probably in the majority if you think of someone who dresses like Herb Tarlek on the 1970s television show "WKRP in Cincinnati" and carries on like the loudest, most obnoxious preacher you've ever heard. That's the image, even if it's not the reality.
And what do those motivational speaker folks talk about? Why it's changing your life through a positive mental attitude. "You can do it," they say, and they're right.
Think about those biographies of folks who've achieved great success against mighty odds. They stayed optimistic no matter what happened. Think about those people you've met who've achieved great things. Odds are they've got that positive mental attitude as well.
The motivational speakers will tell you that you can learn to have a positive attitude. And they're right about that, too.
You don't have to take their word for it, either. There's a lot of good science that supports the core of their message.
The first lesson from science is that the subconscious mind doesn't process a negative instruction. Send your subconscious a message like "Don't eat ice cream for dessert" by repeating it over and over and the poor, old subconscious hears "Eat ice cream for dessert." That won't get you the result you want.
Do it this way instead. Use a positive phrase to get a positive result. Try "Eat fruit for dessert." That's far more likely to get the result you want.
The second lesson is that praise and other forms of reward are great tools to get someone to try something or to get them to keep doing something. When that child of yours cleans the room they live in, praise them. Tell them they did a good job. They're more likely to clean the room again.
But be careful not to wait until they do the job perfectly to deliver the reward. Praise small wins. Praise effort. Think about how it was when that same child learned to walk.
You probably encouraged the slightest movement that looked like it might turn into walking. You didn't wait to praise until the child was old enough to walk down to the convenience store for a bag of chips. If you had, that child might still be crawling.
Here's one more tip before we leave the topic of praise. Praise and other rewards are most effective when they're delivered inconsistently. That's right, IN-consistently.
Lesson number three is that how you interpret what happens to you is important. The first person to put this all down in writing in one place was Dr. Martin Seligman in his book, "Learned Optimism." Seligman is a psychologist who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Here's a brief review of a big lesson from that book.
When an event happens to you, good or bad, you can describe that event to yourself and others along three dimensions. Did you cause the event or did something else cause it? Is what happened to you temporary or permanent? Is the event a common occurrence or is it rare?
If the event is a bad thing, you could say that you caused it, the situation would never change, and that things like this happen to you all the time. Seligman points out that would lead you down the road to helplessness and depression. But reverse those and the effects change, too.
Interpret that bad event as something done to you, that you can fix or deal with, and that is a rare occurrence, and you get very different results. Now you're on your way to putting an optimistic spin on the same situation.
The fourth lesson from science doesn't have anything to do with how you think, at least not directly. It has to do with how you act. Many of those motivational speakers have been telling us that "to be enthusiastic, act enthusiastic." That works, too.
Take smiling. It doesn't just make the folks around you feel good. It makes you feel good, too.
Dr. Paul Ekman is the world's leading expert on facial expressions and the emotions they convey. He's discovered that the basic emotions generate the same facial expression regardless of what language a person speaks or what culture that person is a member of. In other words, facial expressions for basic emotions like anger, sadness, fear, disgust, contempt, and happiness are the same whatever the country.
In his research at the University of California Medical School in San Francisco, Dr. Ekman has also discovered that consciously changing your facial expression can change how you feel, at least for these basic emotions. Try assuming a smiling expression, all the way up through the eyes, and see if you feel happier. Other psychologists back to William James support the "act yourself into feeling" concept.
The scientists and the motivational speakers agree that there are things you can do to improve your outlook. Even better, they've shown you some tools for developing that positive mental attitude. What all this means is that you've got some very basic tools to work with if you're having tough times or if you're just feeling a little down. The rest, as they say, is up to you.
