Triggers:
A New Approach
to Self-Motivation
Stanley Mann, C. P. C.
A Solution Coaching and Training
Prentice-Hall
Chapter one
How to Motivate Yourself to Do Anything with Triggers
Motivation is an inner idea or emotion that prompts you to take action. It is a vital ingredient of success: To achieve your goals, you must work actively toward achieving them. Many excellent plans have foundered on the rocks called "I'll do it tomorrow." You may have fine goals and a creative plan to achieve them, but unless you actively pursue them, your dreams will die stillborn. You have to work your plan. You have to get out and do it.
People who are not motivated to do what is needed are losers. A loser keeps putting off what needs to be done. As a student, a loser doesn't do his homework and then prays he is not asked questions in class. When called upon to perform, he may try to throw up a smoke screen by talking about irrelevant topics, or he may simply retreat in embarrassment.
As an executive, a loser has reached the limit of what her present company can offer and fails to look for another company with more opportunities. She remains unfulfilled, with many of her skills wasted.
This happened to one of my clients who worked for a small family-owned advertising firm. She designed many successful ad-vertising campaigns that markedly improved the company's financial position. Furthermore, she made some reorganization suggestions that heightened the firm's efficiency and made the company more competitive. However, as brilliant as she was, she never could become head of the company-that position was reserved for the owner's two sons.
She languished at this dead-end job for years, lacking the motivation to make herself either change companies or start her own business.
A talented artist friend has promised to paint a landscape for an influential woman who could further his career. He has started painting the landscape, but only works on it in bits and pieces. He may never get it done. He dreams of becoming a successful artist, but his talent is wasted for lack of sufficient motivation.
The dreams of dreamers can lead to great achievements. It has been said that the world is divided between dreamers and doers, but this is not true. The world is divided between dreamers who only dream and dreamers who also do. All great people are dreamers and more. They actively pursue their dreams, and most of them enjoy the pursuit. Not only do they put in the time and effort, but in spite of frustration and disappointment, they continue in their pursuit. They know how to motivate themselves.
How many times have you had something you wanted to do but couldn't get yourself to do it? How many times have you started to do only a little piece of a project every once in a while, but never finished it? How many times have you let a good idea go to waste because you lacked the motivation to put it into effect? How many times have you seen somebody else succeed using the same idea that you had?
Simply wanting to do something, even if your desire is strong, is not always enough to cause you to act. Many people wish to do things but never act on their wishes. The world's newsrooms are filled with reporters who would be authors, but they never write a novel. Many workers in unsatisfying jobs never finish the education or training they need to move on to better positions. Many lonely people never get around to meeting with friends. Any many people, dangerously out of condition, never start an exercise program.
Such people often are accused of not wanting what they say they want. Yet I have seen too many people who display an intense desire to pursue their goals and yet fail to do so because they cannot put their will into action.
This chapter shows you how to program your mind to turn on, at your command, the essential requirement for success: motivation. You will learn how to make and use triggers, a simple, powerful mental technique. Then, by using a system called double triggering, you can convert mere desire into action by tapping into your own natural resources. This will enable you to act on your dreams, to do things you have never done or finish things that, up until now, you have kept starting but never finished. You will be able to do things you never thought possible.
I tried everything I knew to get myself to write. Simple willpower did not work. Behavior modification techniques were a little better, but too boring to keep me writing. I did do some writing, but it soon became a struggle again. I began making excuses and kept putting it off, finding other things to do that I enjoyed more. The underlying problem was still there. I did not enjoy writing enough to be eager about it, so I gave up in four days.
It wasn't until years later, when I learned about trigger techniques and their amazing power to help people change, that I finally was able to motivate myself to do anything I wanted.
HOW TRIGGERS TAP YOUR HIDDENPOWERS
A trigger is anything that brings forth a memory or emotional feeling. There are five kinds of triggers-visual, auditory, sensory, gustatory, and olfactory. Marriage albums, for example, are visual triggers that awaken those special memories of that event. Couples with a special song have an auditory trigger that arouses emotions and evokes all the other senses in that set of memories, causing the lovers to recall the sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and feelings of special times and places.
Another example of an auditory trigger is the old joke about the comedians' convention. Everyone there knew all of the jokes by number. So all the master of ceremonies had to do was call out "number twenty-one," and he got a laugh. If he called out "forty two," he got another laugh. The numbers were triggers for the actual jokes.
Triggers can be established easily. You can use any sound, sight, or even a touch. You could also use an odor or flavor, but these generally are too cumbersome to use for our purposes.
PSYCHOLOGICAL "MONEY IN THE BANK": YOUR VAST RESERVOIR OF HIDDENPOWERS
You can transform your life by using this system to motivate yourself. Inside you is a vast reservoir of strengths and abilities you can draw on. When I use the term reservoir, I am speaking of those internal human resources such as enjoyment, trust, caring, enthusiasm, and courage. Infants are born with the motivation to get all their needs met-to suckle, to be held, and to be cuddled. You know strong these drives are when you see a baby contentedly nursing or cooing as it is being held, and how strenuously it screams if this is withdrawn. Eric Berne, author of Games People Play, talks about our inborn "stimulus hunger," a general desire to have our senses stimulated. Later, nature adds the motivation for sexual pleasure to our drives.
As you continue to grow, you channel these drives into pursuing many gratifications. As a child, you may have played in a sandbox, made roads and tunnels to run your toy cars on, tenderly rocked your doll, flown your kite high in a bright blue sky as you felt the string tug in your hand, walked through the woods while marveling at nature, or read about faraway lands where people have fascinating customs.
Childhood joys are potent. When you were a child at play, you were not only enjoying the moment, but also creating valuable habit patterns and learning how to enjoy life in general-valuable additions to your reservoir.
Further resources come from experiences when you were determined, persistent, courageous, or confident. These experiences are part of you and, just like "money in the bank," are the reservoir you can draw on to transform yourself. Having such qualities in your reservoir is what is meant by such statements as having "character," "grit" or "the right stuff." They are there for you and you can make a trigger for any of these qualities. It does not matter how far back you have to go to recall them. What's more, you can even use imaginary experiences as resources for qualities you need.
HOW TRIGGERING HAS HELPED OTHERS
Here are some real life examples, taken from my professional practice, of how this system has been used with different targets being transformed by various inner resources.
At my Clinical Training Seminar at the
During one session, as part of their training, four students worked with each other to increase their motivation, using the same methods I have been describing to you, except they were applying them to each other instead of to themselves. Having explained the procedure to the class, I asked them to think of something they would like to do more often.
"I'll lead the first one as a model for the class," I said, "and then you will pair up and work on each other. Now, who will begin?" "I have something," said Rachael. "I used to play the piano a lot, but since I had my baby, I haven't been practicing as much as I want to. She's four months old now and I tell myself to practice, but I never seem to get around to it anymore. I used to really enjoy it."
"Okay, Rachael. Make yourself comfortable and we'll take care of that for you."
Turning to the class, I explained, "Her target is to play the piano more frequently. Now, we need something from her reservoir. What do you really enjoy doing, Rachael? Something you look forward to and do almost every chance you get?"
She thought a moment before her face lit up with a big smile. "Playing with my baby," she said. "She's so much fun." Rachael was easy to work with because she had an expressive face that revealed when she was thinking of her reservoir.
I could tell by her expression what was going on inside her. I instructed her through the TRIGGERS system.
Her eyes fluttered open and she excitedly told us that she had also figured out how to find the time to practice. This was a bonus benefit for Rachael. However, it is not necessary to do this during this procedure because, once you create the desire, you will find the time on your own.
Another student, John, voiced a concern he had: "Might you not switch the two feelings, so that you'll dislike what you used to like and like what you didn't like before?"
"A switch wouldn't occur," I answered. "What you are doing is mixing and combining the two sets of experiences-the target and the reservoir-so that the stronger influences the weaker. However, it is possible to make both experiences unenjoyable. So it is important that the reservoir experience is stronger-the stronger, the better."
"You mean if the reluctance is stronger than the drive that's in the other experience-if the negative is stronger than the positive then you might end up not caring to do either one of them?" John asked.
"Yes, theoretically that is right," I replied, "Although I never heard of it happening."
The next person to try double triggering during that training session was Russ. He was willing to reveal his target to us, but—for the sake of demonstrating that this method works on any target (unless you have a phobia about it). After checking with him that an irrational fear was not stopping him, Rachael did double triggering with him without any of us knowing his target.
This way of working can be useful to protect privacy in groups where people know each other and a client is embarrassed or shy about letting others know his or her problem. Instead of saying what it is, he can merely state in general terms the change he wants. This avoids the possibility that others might change their opinion of him and treat him differently. He does not have to worry about what others might think of his personal problem.
Since we knew that Russ wanted to do more of something, Rachael went through the same procedures with Russ that I had gone through with her, but she had to talk in generalities instead of being specific.
At the next session, he reported that the double triggering had worked splendidly. He had been feeling "lazy" about going to his karate lessons, but since his double triggering session, he had at tended enthusiastically. As his reservoir, he had used reading. "I jump into a book any chance I get," he said.
At a later class, Russ used an advanced
trigger technique (described in Chapter 7) to get over his
HOW A TARDY WORKER USED TRIGGERS TO CHANGE A THREATENED DEMOTION INTO A PROMOTION
Besides using triggers with students, I use them with my clients. One man, who worked for a major automobile company, was getting in serious trouble because he was always tardy in submitting his reports. His boss had been lenient with him for years because my client was such a skillful engineer that it made up for his late reporting. In the past, both he and his boss had put paperwork low on their "must-do" list.
Later,
We used the double-triggering technique to solve his problem. When he came to see me, he confided, "I just can't get the feeling that writing reports is the real work. It's just a game." When I asked him what he enjoyed doing the most, he told me that he played bridge every chance he got. He had even been in games that lasted all night. This was used as his reservoir, and writing reports was his target. Triggers were made for each one. Then he checked to be sure his positive trigger was stronger. Next, he double-triggered, transforming his distaste for writing reports into the interest and enthusiasm he felt when playing bridge.
Later, he happily told me that his job had become fun again. He churned out a steady stream of reports about his crucial work on reducing auto pollutants. His boss was delighted with the change in his work. Instead of being threatened with a demotion, my client was given a promotion and was awarded a nice fat bonus.
HOW TRIGGERS WERE USED TO REVITALIZE A DEAD-END CAREER
An executive in the dead-end advertising job also use double triggering to advance herself. The resource she used from her reservoir was her love for her young son. This woman would go to any lengths to care for her little boy. For instance, she searched for just the right nursery school for him, gladly spending the hours and energy needed to make a thorough research of the available schools.
When it came to her job, her target was to look for a better career opportunity. She used the double-triggering technique and began to feel almost as eager about taking care of herself as she did about taking care of her son. With the use of triggers, she landed a job with good promise, and with her natural talents, she easily won recognition and soon had a position worthy of her talent.
HOW A LONE WOLF USED TRIGGERS TO BECOME A SUCCESSFUL ORGANIZATION MAN
Another interesting example is the case of the owner of a large business. He was a lone wolf who used triggers to make himself a successful organization man.
Having invented a specialized tool that came into great demand, he started his own business. Single handedly, he built it into a large successful company. He spent hours alone at his desk going over figures and making detailed plans about his business. He enjoyed running his business this way, and this enjoyment helped make him such a successful businessman.
However, his company had gotten so large that he had to hire managers and delegate responsibility. This meant that he had to make a change in his business style. He had to meet frequently with his managers to give them his advice and guidance so they could benefit from his superior business judgment. The trouble was, although he wanted to do it, he did not enjoy meetings and did not attend them as he knew he should.
Nor did he want to reduce the size of his business to the one-man show it had been, because it would cost him an important competitive advantage.
When we talked over the problem, it boiled down to the fact that he wanted to keep his large organization intact and he wanted to enjoy his work as he used to.
"If only I could enjoy meeting with my managers the way I enjoy working alone in my study. I'd be all set," he said.
It was a simple matter to make a positive trigger for working in his study, and then another target trigger for meeting with his managers. His positive trigger was easily stronger, and when he double triggered, his feelings about meetings were transformed. He could easily imagine himself enjoying working with his people.
When he went back to work, he found himself having a good time working in this new efficient way. He always welcomed an opportunity to share ideas and work out solutions. His managers were also delighted that the "boss" became so accessible to them.
HOW OTHERS HAVE MOTIVATED THEMSELVES WITH TRIGGERS
Here are some other examples of how the triggering technique was used to help people reach their goals. One woman, who desperately wanted a divorce, needed to brush up on her typing skills so she could support herself. She disliked typing, so I had her double-trigger typing and her love of needlework. This transformed her feeling about typing so she not only did the needed practice, she also was surprised at how much she enjoyed typing and her job. She gained enough financial independence to start a new life for herself as a free woman.
Another nine-year-old girl I was seeing in family therapy was getting excellent grades in mathematics, but disliked social studies and was barely passing. When I asked her if she would like to enjoy social studies, she wrinkled up her nose and rolled her eyes for a while before agreeing she would. I combined her feelings about mathematics (which she "loved") with those about social studies. Then I had her picture herself learning social studies in the future. She now gets above average grades in social studies, while still maintaining excellent grades in mathematics.
There are countless applications for this surprisingly simple but powerful system. So practice this technique to motivate yourself to do something you want to do but feel some reluctance to go ahead with or just can't seem to find the time for.
You will find that this double-triggering method is far superior to ordinary willpower.
More sophisticated variations of the double-triggering technique are explained in Chapter 2, and additional applications of it will be described throughout the book. This will enable you to use triggers to improve many other areas of your life.
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The book gives detailed step-by-step instructions
so you can use TRIGGERS to change your life.