Walking to Create a Motivational State

An excerpt from my book Walking Your Blues Away: How to Heal the Mind and Create Emotional Well-Being

Walking Your Blues Away

Chapter 10

Walking to Create a Motivational State

People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing—that's why we recommend it daily.
—Zig Ziglar

In his 1937 classic Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill shared the secret that steel baron Andrew Carnegie used to transform himself from a penniless Scottish immigrant into one of the richest men in America. That secret, Hill reveals, is to bind a clear vision of a future you want (in the case of his book, a future filled with riches) with a strong and positive emotional state.

         Hill wasn’t the first to observe how motivational states work. Three centuries before Christ was born, Plato wrote Protagoras, a story of a discussion between the sophist Protagoras and Plato’s teacher, Socrates. In this classic example of Socratic dialogue, the two men struggle with questions such as, “Why do the sons of good fathers often turn out ill [or good]?” and “Surely knowledge is the food of the soul?”

         Socrates speaks directly to motivation and results, asking Protagoras, “And what is done strongly is done by strength, and what is weakly done, by weakness?” Plato tell us that, “He [Protagoras] assented.“

         Following lengthy discussion of how people are raised and what they learn, one of the conclusions the men come to is that people are more strongly motivated by what they consider close than what they consider far away, be it in distance or in time.

         Or, as King Solomon is purported to have said a thousand years earlier, “When desire cometh, it is a tree of life” Proverbs 13:12.

         We are all, always, choosing between moving toward pleasure or moving away from pain. Every single minute is filled with one or the other: we’re never neutral.

         Moving away from pain is the “hottest” of these two, but strategies that move us toward pleasure provide long-term, compelling, inexorable motivation. A good analogy is that moving-away-from-pain strategies are like lightning, producing rapid but short-lasting (and sometimes painful) jerks away from what we fear, whereas moving-toward-pleasure strategies are like gravity—inexorable, continuous, and ultimately a means for bringing us to our goals.

         The key to making powerful moving-toward-pleasure choices and connecting them to our goals is anchoring a positive vision of the future we want with a powerful positive emotional state. Motivational teachers over the years have proposed many fine techniques to accomplish this—putting up note cards with motivational slogans on mirrors or refrigerators, reading a motivational statement every morning and evening, listening to tapes of motivational speakers regularly—but all eventually bring us to the same place: creating a powerful vision of the future that is bright, shining, and desirable.

         Using the Walking Your Blues Away technique, you can build and anchor strong positive motivational states. The process is straightforward:

1. While walking, visualize possible future states.

2. Select the one that seems optimal and that you want to focus on.

3. Hold it while you’re walking.

4. While walking and holding this future ideal, remember times in the past when you were able to accomplish similar things or had great successes or desires fulfilled.

5. Allow the emotional state of the positive memories to fill and suffuse the hoped-for future state.

6. See yourself in the picture clearly—how you’re dressed, what you’re doing, how you’re standing.

7. When the positive future state is clear and makes you smile, stand up a bit straighter and feel powerfully good. Create a word, sound, gesture, or posture to anchor the state.

8. Repeat the anchoring reminder a few times until it once again brings up the feeling of success in your body, then finish your walk.

         Having done this, you can then put reminders up around the house—the cards on the refrigerator or mirror with a word or two that remind you of your future goals. Whenever you see these you then assume the posture and make the sound or gesture that re-accesses that state, remembering your goal and letting the full positive intensity of the enthusiastic emotion fill you.

        Over time—often over a surprisingly short time—you’ll discover that you are achieving your goals. Programming your unconscious mind like this, you’ll begin to see opportunities and chances where before you would have missed or ignored them. You’ll find yourself moving toward your positive future as if it were drawing you in the same inexorable straight line that drew Newton’s apple from the tree.