Motivate This!

About the Author

Steve Rizzo, affectionately known as the "Attitude Adjuster," provides the skills organizations need to get to a better place at work and in life. Once a national headliner with opening acts like Drew Carey, Rosie O'Donnell, and Dennis Miller, this former stand-up comedian takes motivation and confidence-building to a whole new level. Rizzo walked away from his stellar success to positively impact others, sharing his blueprint for realizing dreams, achieving personal excellence, and attaining professional satisfaction.

Main Idea

In "Motivate This!: How to Start Each Day With an Unstoppable Attitude," comedian turned motivational speaker and author, Steve Rizzo, asks readers to embrace the simple message that attitude is, in fact, everything. If you can do that, you will discover increased productivity, greater enthusiasm, new levels of success, and a higher degree of happiness. The Common Sense Success Strategies will help you reframe your perspective so that you have the energy, motivation, and positive attitude to succeed despite any circumstances. In short, you will go from "woe is me" to "WOW is me!"

Table of Contents

• It's All About How You Feel
• The Wrath of Self-Curse Talk
• Enjoyment: A Shift into High Gear
• Nourishing Your Soul
• Honor Your Values
• Seven Common-Sense Success Strategies

It's All About How You Feel

Your beliefs, positive and negative, are formed over a period of time throughout a consistent way of thinking. In other words, your thoughts create your beliefs. Your beliefs cause you to feel a certain way. The feelings you have on any given day, good or bad, dictate the tone of your attitude. The attitude you have on any given day regulates your overall degree of motivation. This entire process eventually leads to the choices you make and the actions you take.

The key to starting your day with an unstoppable attitude to succeed -and to keep that motivation going throughout the day- is to make sure you are feeling good during the process of whatever you are trying to achieve. Feeling good is the fuel that drives motivation.

"A State of Feeling Good is the foundation on which everyone should build their business and their life. The way that you feel in any given moment is dependent upon and evoked by what you are thinking or saying out loud in any given moment. Your emotional state is the direct result of your thoughts and the tone of your thoughts becomes your life experience." - Steve Rizzo

The Wrath of Self-Curse Talk

Nothing can kill motivation and stifle your attitude more than self-curse-talk. The thing to understand about self-curse-talk is that it reflects your internalized negative feelings about yourself rather than an empirical truth. Just because you feel it or say it doesn't make it true but if you believe that it is true, that's all that matters in the world.

Your subconscious does not know the difference between true and false. It cannot make independent judgments and instead understands your thoughts to be what they are-just thoughts. If you do not recognize and squash a negative thought when it pops up, your subconscious takes it as truth, thus affirming that negative feeling and further solidifying a belief system that will have negative consequences. That's what self-curse-talk does. It distorts your reality.