Video Transcript:
Hi there my friends, I am Cornel Manu, founder of AmbitionOasis.com. Today we are going to talk about how to become motivated.
Maybe you are here because you have a hard time chasing your dreams. Or maybe you procrastinate a lot and don’t seem to find that fire within to push yourself forward. Or maybe you are going through a tough time and you need some inspiration to lift yourself up. Either way, I am going to give my best trying to answer this question so I provide something valuable for you.
So how do we become motivated? To answer it in details I split the question into 3 parts.
The first part is: What is motivation?
It might seem like an obvious answer, but I bet is not the answer you might expect. If you ask me, motivation is the sum of all emotional reasons for us to do something. I am going to repeat this because it is so important. Motivation is the sum of all emotional reasons for us to do something.
You notice the fact that I say emotional reasons and not rational reasons. That’s because we are emotional creatures and we are driven by what we feel. Regardless of how intelligent we are, how much IQ we have and what college did we attended, most of our decisions are based on how we feel.
In fact, studies show that emotional intelligence is the most important factor in determining the quality of people’s lives. Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, control and express your own feelings.
We can simplify this even more. If we would merge all emotions into just two of them, we would have pain and pleasure. We do things in life to gain more pleasure and to avoid pain.
That gets us to the second part, which is: What holds us back?
You might ask: Ok, but I really desire my goals and I want to achieve them. Why I am not there yet if emotional reasons are everything I need?
The answer, again, is very simple. When we lack motivation or we procrastinate a lot, it’s usually because we are emotionally stuck. That means we have pain and pleasure that push us in a different direction.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say that I want to lose weight because I am overweight. The pleasure is thinking about how sexy I am going to look, how confident I will feel in my own skin, how proud I am going to be of my body. That’s the pleasure that attracts me to losing weight. But when it comes to dieting and working out, I see them as a burden. I don’t like them and I see them as punishment. Probably I starve myself and put myself through incredible physical stress, which simply means pain. And like I said before, we unconsciously do anything to avoid pain. So we are going to sabotage ourselves at every step to avoid doing the workout and dieting. This is an emotional conflict, where one part of us push us in one direction and another part of us push us in opposite direction. The result is that we don’t make any progress at all.
Or let’s say that I want to make a lot of money, but I love to sleep. And I don’t like to work extra hours. Or I want a beautiful and loving relationship, but I am afraid to get my heart broken and I consider real love doesn’t exist. All of these are emotional conflicts that keep us stuck exactly where we are, and sometimes even pull us backward.
And now to get to the last part: How to get more motivation?
Based on everything we described, the solution to get motivation is to have your emotions pointing in the same direction. You have to use pain and pleasure to your advantage.
For example. In the losing weight case, I mentioned earlier. Instead of seeing workout and dieting as a painful experience, I’d rather focus on how painful it is to stay overweight. How bad it makes me feel, how insecure, all the mocking of others. This way I use pain to motivate me to lose weight. And I can also make working out and dieting fun. There are a lot of fun and easy ways to stay healthy and move your body, you just have to do a bit of research. Now, both pain and pleasure are helping me going after what I want.
Regarding the financial situation example, where I want to make more money. Instead of focusing on how hard it is to work, I focus on how bad it makes me feel to not have money. How my heart gets broken thinking about not being able to provide for the ones that I love. Not being able to make the positive impact in people’s lives that I am meant to make. All of this pain is what I need to push myself forward financial independence.
If you think about the one that you want to spend your life with, instead of focusing on the possibility to get your heart broken, which happens in any loving relationship, think about how painful it will be to live without him or her just because you were too afraid to try or open your heart. That in itself is a strong enough motivation to pursue the love of your life.
I gave these simple examples to illustrate how you can use the powerful emotions of pain and pleasure to your advantage. You control what causes pain and what gives you pleasure by changing on what you are focusing on and what it means.
Let me leave you with a little exercise that you can apply right now to become motivated toward your goals. Take a clean sheet of paper and write as title the goal that you want. Split the paper with a vertical line in the middle, and on the left side write down all the feelings you would have if you don’t achieve this goal, and on the right side all the feelings you would have if you do achieve this goal. Make it as painful as possible on the left side and the most enjoyable on the right side. This way you create an emotional pattern that will propel you towards your goal, using both pain and pleasure to your advantage.
Thank you for watching and I hope this was useful for you. It is my first video here so subscribe if you want to get notified when new videos arrive. Also give it a thumbs up and leave a comment bellow and I will be sure to check them out. If you want even more inspiration, head over AmbitionOasis.com and read free life-changing articles. To your success and fulfillment.
