There are various methods we can employ to change.

1.       Whip It: Motivational change can be achieved by whipping yourself to change your habits and behaviors.

2.       Motivational Carrots: Rewards of carrots at landmarks upon reaching milestones

We have to be careful about what is negative about the habit when we use the whip. Negative can be reinforced like stopping smoking and going to the cancer ward in a hospital.

Positive reinforcement is achieved by images and experiences like taking your dream motorcycle for a test drive as a visual reward for achieving your goal of stopping smoking (financed by savings from a year or two up in smoke).  You could similarly apply this to a promotion or achieving a certain level of success from home study, etc.

So the idea is to reinforce positive changes by creating intense pain if we don’t change and using the carrot of intense pleasure for when we do change.  The driving force using both pain and pleasure helps us focus on creating positive new habits. Habits are hard to break and it is exciting to break through a barrier to a more successful you.  Naturally you need a certain amount of personal integrity to follow through and the carrot in front of us pulls while the stick behind  we run from.