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TheOtherDave comments on The Anti-Placebo Effect - Less Wrong
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The thing that made this most obvious to me was training my dog.
For example, when conditioning her out of a behavior I dislike, my intuitive approach seems to be to monitor the intensity of the behavior... I expect a steady stream of intense performances
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
to become a stream of less-intense performances
bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb
and then disappear altogether.
But in reality the intensity doesn't change much, and sometimes it even gets worse. I never get "bbb..." What declines is the frequency. That is,
BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB
becomes
BBBBBB_BBBBBBBBB_BBB
which, from my intuitive perspective, is essentially no progress at all... I don't notice.
And then on the other end, when the behavior is almost extinguished, I get
_____B___B_______B___
which, from my perspective, is an endless series of "oh good, we got rid of this behavior -- oh, crap, now it's back again, just as bad as it ever was! This isn't working!"
So it really really helped to keep a chart of the frequency of the behavior that I can look back at and realize that actually, we've been making steady progress all along, even though it completely doesn't feel like progress at all.
After my stroke, when I was relearning to walk/talk/think, that strategy was absolutely critical to warding off despair. I charted everything, and it made a huge difference.
After your stroke, what kinds of things did you chart specifically? In which areas was the progress most motivating?
Some examples:
How many times I could raise and lower my leg before being exhausted.
Number of steps I could take at a time.
Words I blocked on.
Number of times I became altogether unable to complete a sentence. (Though this was more approximate.)
Number of pushups I could do.
Distance I could walk.
Complexity of the hardest logic-puzzle I'd successfully solved.
How many words I could write before my hand was exhausted.
How coherently I could write (I still have somewhere a piece of paper on which I wrote the same sentence, over and over, on each line; it gradually morphs from a literally indecipherable scrawl to something indistinguishable from a normal-though-sloppy person's handwriting.)
These were, of course, at different times in my recovery.
Oh, and re: motivating... that's a much more difficult question to answer.
The charting techniques were "motivating" only in a prophylactic sense... they helped me resist a certain kind of "I'm not getting any better" despair that was otherwise very compelling and very demotivating.
Positive motivation to progress was much harder to come by, and I had a much less concrete grasp on it. I was often in a not quite apathetic, but highly disengaged state with respect to my recovery. Mostly I dealt with this by accepting it as just another intermittent deficit where I had to ride out the bad periods and take advantage of the good ones.
I think the closest I can come to describing it accurately is to say that motivation-to-progress was highly correlated with focus; when what I was doing was recovery, I was very motivated to make progress. What direction causality ran, though, I have no idea.