100 Ways
1. Get on your deathbed
A number of years ago when I was working with psychotherapist Devers Branden, she put me through her "deathbed" exercise. I was asked to clearly imagine myself lying on my own deathbed, and to fully realize the feelings connected with dying and saying good-bye. Then she asked me to mentally invite the people in my life who were important to me to visit my bedside, one at a time. As I visualized each friend and relative coming in to visit me, I had to speak to them out loud. I had to say to them what I wanted them to know as I was dying. As I spoke to each person, I could feel my voice breaking. Somehow I couldn't help breaking down. My eyes were filled with tears. I experienced such a sense of loss. It was not my own life I was mourning; it was the love I was losing. To be more exact, it was a communication of love that had never been there. During this difficult exercise, I really got to see how much I'd left out of my life. How many wonderful feelings I had about my children, for example, that I'd never explicitly expressed.
At the end of the exercise, I was an emotional mess. I had rarely cried that hard in my life. But when those emotions cleared, a wonderful thing happened. I was clear. I knew what was really important, and who really mattered to me. I understood for the first time what George Patton meant when he said, "Death can be more exciting than life."
From that day on I vowed not to leave anything to chance. I made up my mind never to leave anything unsaid. I wanted to live as if I might die any moment. The entire experience altered the way I've related to people ever since. And the great point of the exercise wasn't lost on me:
We don't have to wait until we're actually near death to receive these benefits of being mortal. We can create the experience anytime we want.
A few years later when my mother lay dying in a hospital in Tucson, I rushed to her side to hold her hand and repeat to her all the love and gratitude I felt for who she had been for me. When she finally died, my grieving was very intense, but very short. In a matter of days I felt that everything great about my mother had entered into me and would live there as a loving spirit forever.
A year and a half before my father's death, I began to send him letters and poems about his contribution to my life. He lived his last months and died in the grip of chronic illness, so communicating and getting through to him in person wasn't always easy. But I always felt good that he had those letters and poems to read. Once he called me after I'd sent him a Father's Day poem, and he said, "Hey, I guess I wasn't such a bad father after all."
Poet William Blake warned us about keeping our thoughts locked up until we die. "When thought is closed in caves," he wrote, "then love will show its roots in deepest hell."
Pretending you aren't going to die is detrimental to your enjoyment of life. It is detrimental in the same way that it would be detrimental for a basketball player to pretend there was no end to the game he was playing. That player would reduce his intensity, adopt a lazy playing style, and, of course, end up not having any fun at all. Without an end, there is no game. Without being conscious of death, you can't be fully aware of the gift of life.
Yet many of us (including myself) keep pretending that our life's game will have no end. We keep planning to do great things some day when we feel like it. We assign our goals and dreams to that imaginary island in the sea that Denis Waitley calls "Someday Isle." We find ourselves saying, "Someday I'll do this," and "Someday I'll do that."
Confronting our own death doesn't have to wait until we run out of life.
In fact, being able to vividly imagine our last hours on our deathbed creates a paradoxical sensation: the feeling of being born all over again—the first step to fearless self-motivation. "People living deeply," wrote poet and diarist Anaïs Nin, "have no fear of death."
And as Bob Dylan has sung, "He who is not busy being born is busy dying."
2. Stay hungry
Arnold Schwarzenegger was not famous yet in 1976 when he and I had lunch together at the Doubletree Inn in Tucson, Arizona. Not one person in the restaurant recognized him.
He was in town publicizing the movie Stay Hungry, a box-office disappointment he had just made with Jeff Bridges and Sally Field. I was a sports columnist for the Tucson Citizen at the time, and my assignment was to spend a full day, one-on-one, with Arnold and write a feature story about him for our newspaper's Sunday magazine.
I, too, had no idea who he was, or who he was going to become. I agreed to spend the day with him because I had to—it was an assignment. And although I took to it with an uninspired attitude, it was one I'd never forget.
Perhaps the most memorable part of that day with Schwarzenegger occurred when we took an hour for lunch. I had my reporter's notebook out and was asking questions for the story while we ate. At one point I casually asked him, "Now that you have retired from bodybuilding, what are you going to do next?
And with a voice as calm as if he were telling me about some mundane travel plans, he said, "I'm going to be the number-one box-office star in all of Hollywood."
Mind you, this was not the slim, aerobic Arnold we know today. This man was pumped up and huge. And so for my own physical sense of well-being, I tried to appear to find his goal reasonable.
I tried not to show my shock and amusement at his plan. After all, his first attempt at movies didn't promise much. And his Austrian accent and awkward monstrous build didn't suggest instant acceptance by movie audiences. I finally managed to match his calm demeanor, and I asked him just how he planned to become Hollywood's top star.
"It's the same process I used in bodybuilding," he explained. "What you do is create a vision of who you want to be, and then live into that picture as if it were already true."
It sounded ridiculously simple. Too simple to mean anything. But I wrote it down. And I never forgot it.
I'll never forget the moment when some entertainment TV show was saying that box office receipts from his second Terminator movie had made him the most popular box office draw in the world. Was he psychic? Or was there something to his formula?
Over the years I've used Arnold's idea of creating a vision as a motivational tool. I've also elaborated on it in my corporate training seminars. I invite people to notice that Arnold said that you create a vision. He did not say that you wait until you receive a vision. You create one. In other words, you make it up.
A major part of living a life of self-motivation is having something to wake up for in the morning—something that you are "up to" in life so that you will stay hungry.
The vision can be created right now—better now than later. You can always change it if you want, but don't live a moment longer without one. Watch what being hungry to live that vision does to your ability to motivate yourself.
3. Tell yourself a true lie
I remember when my then-12-year-old daughter Margery participated in a school poetry reading in which all her classmates had to write a "lie poem" about how great they were.
They were supposed to make up untruths about themselves that made them sound unbelievably wonderful. I realized as I listened to the poems that the children were doing an unintended version of what Arnold did to clarify the picture of his future. By "lying" to themselves they were creating a vision of who they wanted to be.
It's noteworthy, too, that public schools are so out of touch with the motivational sources of individual achievement and personal success that in order to invite children to express big visions for themselves they have to invite the children to "lie." (As it was said in the movie ET, "How do you explain school to a higher intelligence?")
Most of us are unable to see the truth of who we could be. My daughter's school developed an unintended solution to that difficulty: If it's hard for you to imagine the potential in yourself, then you might want to begin by expressing it as a fantasy, as did the children who wrote the poems. Think up some stories about who you would like to be. Your subconscious mind doesn't know you're fantasizing (it either receives pictures or doesn't).
Soon you will begin to create the necessary blueprint for stretching your accomplishments. Without a picture of your highest self, you can't live into that self. Fake it till you make it. The lie will become the truth.
4. Keep your eyes on the prize
Most of us never really focus. We constantly feel a kind of irritating psychic chaos because we keep trying to think of too many things at once. There's always too much up there on the screen.
There was an interesting motivational talk on this subject given by former Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson to his football players before the 1993 Super Bowl:
"I told them that if I laid a two-by-four across the room, everybody there would walk across it and not fall, because our focus would be that we were going to walk that two-by-four, But if I put that same two-by-four 10 stories high between two buildings only a few would make it, because the focus would be on falling. Focus is everything. The team that is more focused today is the team that will win this game."
Johnson told his team not to be distracted by the crowd, the media, or the possibility of losing, but to focus on each play of the game itself just as if it were a good practice session.
The Cowboys won the game 52-17.
There's a point to that story that goes way beyond football. Most of us tend to lose our focus in life because we're perpetually worried about so many negative possibilities. Rather than focusing on the two-by-four, we worry about all the ramifications of falling. Rather than focusing on our goals, we are distracted by our worries and fears.
But when you focus on what you want, it will come into your life.
When you focus on being a happy and motivated person, that is who you will be.
5. Learn to sweat in peace
The harder you are on yourself, the easier life is on you. Or, as they say in the Navy Seals, the more you sweat in peacetime, the less you bleed in war.
My childhood friend Rett Nichols was the first to show me this principle in action. When we were playing Little League baseball, we were always troubled by how fast the pitchers threw the ball. We were in an especially good league, and the overgrown opposing pitchers, whose birth certificates we were always demanding to see, fired the ball in to us at alarming speeds during the games We began dreading going up to the plate to hit. It wasn't fun. Batting had become something we just tried to get through without embarrassing ourselves too much.
Then Rett got an idea.
"What if the pitches we faced in games were slower than the ones we face every day in practice?" Rett asked.
"That's just the problem," I said. "We don't know anybody who can pitch that fast to us. That's why, in the games, it's so hard. The ball looks like an aspirin pill coming in at 200 miles an hour."
"I know we don't know anyone who can throw a baseball that fast," said Rett. "But what if it wasn't a baseball?"
"I don't know what you mean," I said.
Just then Rett pulled from his pocket a little plastic golf ball with holes in it. The kind our dads used to hit in the backyard for golf practice.
"Get a bat," Rett said.
I picked up a baseball bat and we walked out to the park near Rett's house. Rett went to the pitcher's mound but came in about three feet closer than usual. As I stood at the plate, he fired the little golf ball past me as I tried to swing at it.
"Ha ha!" Rett shouted. "That's faster than anybody you'll face in little league! Let's get going!"
We then took turns pitching to each other with this bizarre little ball humming in at incredible speeds. The little plastic ball was not only hilariously fast, but it curved and dropped more sharply than any little leaguer's pitch could do.
By the time Rett and I played our next league game, we were ready.
The pitches looked like they were coming in slow motion. Big white balloons.
I hit the first and only home run I ever hit after one of Rett's sessions. It was off a left-hander whose pitch seemed to hang in the air forever before I creamed it.
The lesson Rett taught me was one I've never forgotten. Whenever I'm afraid of something coming up, I will find a way to do something that's even harder or scarier. Once I do the harder thing, the real thing becomes fun.
The great boxer Muhammad Ali used to use this principle in choosing his sparring partners. He'd make sure that the sparring partners he worked with before a fight were better than the boxer he was going up against in the real fight. They might not always be better all-around, but he found sparring partners who were each better in one certain way or another than his upcoming opponent. After facing them, he knew going into each fight that he had already fought those skills and won.
You can always "stage" a bigger battle than the one you have to face. If you have to make a presentation in front of someone who scares you, you can always rehearse it first in front of someone who scares you more. If you've got something hard to do and you're hesitant to do it, pick out something even harder and do that first.
Watch what it does to your motivation going into the "real" challenge.
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