Prepared by Wally Lazaruk

Article Summary

1. Clarify your priorities.
2. Incline your mind to want things that are good for you and others.
3. Take care of yourself.
4. Feel already satisfied.
5. Appreciate the fullness of life.
6. Associate rewards with whatever you would like to motivate yourself toward.

Motivating ourselves is challenging at the best of times, but even more difficult during a pandemic.

Dr. Rick Hanson in his Foundations of Well-Being program and in his book Resilient offers several action strategies to encourage us to establish and to accomplish our goals:

1. Clarify your priorities

• Identify the key goals in your life in a word or phrase: e.g. Health. Friendship. Finances. Learning. Career. Marriage. Spiritual/Inner development. Having fun. Creative expression. Exploring life. Service.
• Rank these aims in order of importance. Ask: “ If I could attain only one aim, which would it be?” That’s your highest priority.
• Reflect routinely on your true priorities. Let your top priorities draw you in their direction.
• Ask: “Am I giving my time, attention, and energy in proportion to these priorities?”
• Keep letting your true priorities speak to you. What do they say?
• Determine what realistic changes you can gradually make in your time, attention, and resources.
• Build your priorities into your daily schedule and monthly budget.
• Find a sense of enjoyment and meaning in these priorities and let them live inside you.

2. Incline your mind to want things that are good for you and others.

• Evaluate your desires, wants, and goals.
• Train your brain to lean naturally in a good direction.
• Want things that are good for you and others: e.g. core values or priorities such as good health, inner strength development, constructive relationships, enjoyable retirement, career, effective financial management, creativity, contribution.
• Know in your heart what is true for you.
• Reflect on how you go about pursuing those goals.
• Pursue wholesome ends with wholesome means.
• Feel the goodness of practicing your core values or priorities.
• Imagine the rewards of achieving these priorities.
• Feel better for yourself and for others.

3. Take care of yourself.

• Cultivate good physical health: good sleep; vegetables, protein, and vitamins; exercise; minimal intoxicants; take care of issues as early as you can.
• Cultivate good mental health – step back to observe your mind. Calm down stress and upsets. Take in the good of positive experiences. Practice self-compassion.

4. Feel already satisfied

• Internalize the experiences of contentment.
• Focus on what is sufficient, on what is functioning.
• Let the sense of enoughness sink in.

5. Appreciate the fullness of life

• Recognize the nurturing fullness of the natural world, including its offering of oxygen to breathe and food to eat.
• Enjoy the abundance of nature, the many kinds of living things enabling you to live.
• Consider the fullness of the material universe … your body consisting of countless atoms, already present, already made, nothing you need to do to create them…the fabric of matter, and energy, space and time, from which you are woven already.
• Rest in this fullness, simply receiving it.
• Be mindful of so much appearing in awareness in each moment: sounds, sensations, images, emotions, and thoughts.
• Relax and recognize the inherent fullness of ordinary experience itself.
• Allow the sense of fullness to fill you.
• Recognize that it is all right that experiences keep passing away, since they are continually replaced by new experiences.
• Let yourself feel filled by whatever arises in awareness even as it passes away.
• Already so full, let go of wanting anything more.

6. Associate rewards with object of motivation

• Repeatedly associate rewards with whatever it is you would like to motivate yourself toward.
• Pursue wholesome ends with wholesome means by training your brain to lean in a good direction.
• Stay with a good course of action, even if it is not immediately rewarding.
• Pursue opportunities, even in the face of challenges.

Resources:

Dr. Rick Hanson: The Neuroscience of Lasting Happiness

Resilient: How to Grow an Unshakable Core of Calm, Strength …

Being Resilient During Coronavirus – Dr. Rick Hanson

Summary prepared by Wally Lazaruk in March 2021 with permission from Dr. Rick Hanson to use/adapt his text and guided meditation material.