How’s this for an opportunity: free motivational tips from people who get paid huge amounts of money to motivate people. I’m talking adverts here, people, in particular the Christmas advertising campaigns crucial to the retail sector. Of course the ads are designed to get you to spend money, but many of the principles apply to motivation in general.

In the UK, analysts TNS have announced their list of most motivational Christmas ads on television. Winner was the Boots “Christmas gifts” campaign which features “predominantly female colleagues opening their secret Santa gifts to the soundtrack ‘Here Come the Girls’”. Second place went to Tesco’s “Finest Christmas” with Morrisons “Fresh Christmas” coming third.

Of course you might normally hate watching adverts – I do. But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re often carefully designed by experts in human behaviour and motivation. What can we learn from them?

Paul Baker of TNS says:

Christmas is a time which has a natural ‘feel good factor’ attached to it. Ads which draw on positive emotions tend to do very well in converting sales. What is common amongst all the top performing ads is their success in conveying a level of Christmas cheer which has a resonance with viewers across all demographics – generating high levels of both engagement and motivation.

Could you improve your own motivational toolset by studying and modelling some of these adverts? Maybe some adverts actually put you off certain shop. This is also useful information which might give you clues about what saps your motivation.

Companies are paying millions to design these ads and the results are there for you to study free of charge.

In the personal development world we’re always being told that our thoughts define our reality: “As a man thinketh” and all that. To a large extent it’s true.

But not completely. There are some things that no amount of positive thinking can alter and they aren’t all good. As the philosophers say: shit happens.

The danger with always making bright, positive pictures of the future is that we might forget to plan for some of these problems. Ask yourself: do you have a personal Disaster Recovery Plan? (In business the term Disaster Recovery has been pretty much replaced by Business Continuity but I can’t bring myself to say “Personal Continuity Plan”!)

I strongly believe that it’s worth taking some time out occasionally to consider how you’d cope if life threw one of these curve balls at you. Obviously there are an infinite number possible disasters and you can’t plan for them all; personally I don’t have a contingency plan for being abducted by aliens, you may need one.

You can and possibly should plan for some things which are within the realms of probability. What these are will depend on you but here are a few examples. Consider what you might do if:

• A storm took out your electricity for three days
• Your optician told you that you couldn’t drive any more
• You had to evacuate your house in the middle of the night because of a bomb scare
• The hard disc in your PC crashed
• An epidemic (swine flu?) means that essentials such as bread are in short supply

The answer might be “nothing”: you’d just muddle through. Or it might be that you already have a plan (you do backup your computer, don’t you?). In which case: great!

But if you’re like me there are probably a few simple things you could do to put yourself in a far better position to cope with some of these disasters. Perhaps have an overnight bag packed and ready, keep off-site backups, make sure the freezer is full, etc. That’s the sort of personal disaster recovery I’m talking about.

Don’t become a paranoid pessimist, don’t let disasters weigh on your mind. But perhaps once every few months it might be worth sitting down, thinking through a few possibilities and making a couple of plans.

Hopefully you’ll never need to put them into action.

Photo Credit: nesster (Creative Commons)

A little competition can do wonders for motivation. However it seems that too much can seriously damage it.

Researchers from the University of Haifa and the University of Michigan have been examining the effect of competitor numbers on results. In US university entrance SAT results they found a negative correlation between numbers taking the tests and average test scores. In other words, the more people taking the test, the lower the average result!

Although the researchers “took into consideration differences between the states in relevant socioeconomic variables”, they still wanted more focussed figures. So they carried out two sets of controlled tests with students and found the same results: if the students knew they were competing against a larger group, average results fell.

Dr Avishalom Tor of the University of Haifa said:

It is a well-established fact that subjective factors influence our motivation to compete. Our new studies have shown that objective factors, such as the size of a competing group, also have an effect on motivation

Introducing an element of competition is often used by managers and life coaches as a motivational factor. So the question now is, at what point does this become counter-productive? The point at which “I can’t beat all of them” outweighs “I want to win” is likely to vary from person to person.

The research also has potential economic and political ramifications. Does it apply at the company level? We’re always being told that increased competition in the market makes everyone work harder and benefits us all. But could too much competition actually result in a less efficient market? If so, many economics textbooks will need to be rewritten.

Today is the 1st of December. A month from now millions of people around the world will be making New Year resolutions.

Most will be broken within a few weeks.

As I’ve said before I consider New Year resolutions an excuse for failure. So I don’t make them. Instead I’ll be making some resolutions today.

These aren’t “early New Year resolutions”, that would achieve nothing. Instead I refer to these as old year resolutions. Everyone knows New Year resolutions are always broken, so if “old year” resolutions are the opposite then it makes sense for them to be kept. That may be simplistic but sometimes the simple things are the ones the subconscious mind clings to.

What do you think? Will you be joining me in making old year resolutions today? If you do, I hope you’ll be sticking to them long after most other people have broken their New Year ones.

I am, of course, a great fan of self-improvement. Anything that helps you get the best out of life without harming others is a Good Thing. For some people the services of a life coach can be a useful tool in the mix.

For some people. But for kids?

According to reports, life coaching for kids is something of a boom industry in Australia. Children as young as five are being signed up for life coaching by their parents at a cost of around AUD150 per hour.

I’ve got very mixed feelings about this. Kids can certainly benefit from early learning of skills such as goal setting, mind mapping, etc. But shouldn’t teaching this be the job of parents and schools?

Life coaching for teenagers, sure – if they’ll listen! – but kids in single figures? Shouldn’t they be allowed to play without worrying about the future? Or is this the perfect time to be teaching them good life habits?

What do you think?