Observing Motivation

What is stopping you from moving forward? Are you at a red light, stop sign, or tied up? We know how to observe. We know what our passion is. We even understand the importance of scheduling. Why are stuck frozen in fear?

Fear of success, fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of procreation. All of these fears come from the brainstem or lizard brain.  This brain deals with the three F’s. These are: ‘Fear’, ‘Food’, and ‘Procreation.’ 

Imagine that you are sitting next to a table, and there is some delicious chocolate on the table. Are you motivated to take a piece of chocolate and eat it? What if you are afraid of gaining weight, Do you still have the motivation to take the chocolate? What if instead of a piece of chocolate, someone has put dog poop on the table? Are you still motivated to eat this, or have you lost your motivation?

Now that we have examined our passion and examined how to schedule time for our passion, do you see how your motivation is tied to your schedule and your passion? Imagine a piece of chocolate on the table, and this is your passion, but you had no time to eat it because of bladder problems, screaming children, or orny boss, you won't have time to consume your chocolate. 

Motivation and procrastination are opposite sides of the coin. Motivation comes entirely from your passion and your schedule. Procrastination does not come from you being lazy. YOU ARE NOT LAZY!!! If your passion is on the table, you will schedule your hand to reach out,  pick it up, and devour it. You will be motivated to do this.  If you find that you have no motivation, then you haven't defined your passion, and you haven't set a schedule to live it. 

The only time that we worry about procrastination is when we have things that we do not wish to do. If you had just won the lottery for five hundred million dollars, and you have only thirty days to cash the ticket, would you wait until day 29 until you cash the ticket? Would you wait until day 31, slap yourself in the forehead, and say "damn I forgot to claim that ticket!" Would you call your significant other and say "Sorry Honey, I forgot to claim the lottery ticket yesterday."

There is no way that you would do this. Unless you don't care about money, you hate money, or you feel that money is evil and vile, but why would you be buying the lottery ticket in the first place?

If there was a plate with poop on it, and you had to eat it. You would procrastinate. You would say "I will get to this next year." or "I will do that later." Other things that can make us procrastinate are things that we do not enjoy, or that we feel demean our social value. 

If we have to wash the dishes, do taxes, clean our room, or do the yardwork, you may procrastinate on these. All of these things could be considered demeaning or lessening of social value. There is nothing wrong with doing these things, it is how you feel about them. So we will find ourselves procrastinating on things that we do not enjoy doing, and we feel demeaned in the eyes of others. 

Let's talk about garbage. How would you motivate somebody to take the garbage out? This is a prevalent problem in many households especially between wives and their husbands. Men know that it is their job to take the garbage out. It always has been, and it always will be. Men actually enjoy taking out the trash, but most do not know when they should be taking out the trash. These men think that they should take it out when it is overflowing. Women generally want the trash to be taken out when it is half full. 

We can nag and complain to motivate someone to take out the trash, but will this really work? The person will procrastinate or not be home on garbage day because they are not motivated to take the garbage out. 

As we have learned in earlier lessons from "The Chicken in the Box", your results can be much more successful if you avoid punishment as motivation. People will avoid being punished, and they will go toward the reward. This applies to you as well. We are not trying to teach you to motivate others yet, we are teaching you to motivate yourself. You will find that the first level of Kaivala Lessons will be more directed toward yourself as we find that this is a base that we all start with.  As we move on, and we understand ourselves better, we will be using empathy to understand others more and more. 

In order to figure out why our motivation is lacking, we need to examine ourselves in detail. Is it because our passion has become misdiagnosed? Is it because we are trying to please other people's passions? Is it because our passions have been bullied, beaten, or brainwashed out of us?

There is a series of questions that we need to ask ourselves to find resolve with. Get your stickies out! Write ten things down that you are having a difficult time motivating yourself with. Next write several things why you feel that you are avoiding these things. Is it because they are not your passion, but you have to do them? 

We all have things that need to be done in order to survive in the society and the world that we live in, but they are not necessarily our passions. Some of the things may be our passions, but we feel external pressures to use our time and energy elsewhere. 

With your stickies that have your passion written on them, write down ten more things that are stopping you from your passion on ten more stickies.

We only have so much mental and physical energy every day, psychologists have found that through tests, that if a person has to solve a complex math problem, the more complex the math problem, the more difficult it is to solve a moral problem. If we are busy doing trivial, but necessary things daily, we may run out of energy or motivation to pursue our passion. Constantly thinking in the back of our mind "If I only had more time." Now let's examine how we can adjust our life, so that we have more time, and motivation to get the things done that we wish. 

Lets examine all of the stickies from this lesson in detail. 

1. Identify your passions. 
2. Identify daily tasks that need to be done. 
3. Identify daily tasks that we do because of peer pressure.
4. Identify tasks that we do to maintain our personal health and energy.
5. Identify which of these we can eliminate and which ones need to stay. 

Once we have focused, identified our passion, and set our schedule, it will be much easier to motivate ourselves. You may have things with work, family, or community obligations that you may have  a hard time motivating yourself to do. Once you evaluate these and realize that your work, family, or community could be enabling your passion, it will be easier for you to spend time with these subtopics that are going to support your main direction. 

You also may find that the things you could not find the motivation to do were just things that you hated or felt forced into doing. Now you can take these things and eliminate them or look at them from a different point of view so you can find joy in these tasks or motivate someone else to do this for you, whether it is taking the garbage out or going to work. Now that you understand how to motivate yourself, you understand how to motivate others around you.

In the following videos we will examine how to use the stickies to identify our motivators, and how to make adjustments in our schedules so that we can live our passions. We will also give you some books to start reading. The challenge with all of this is to not judge or form opinions until your observation about motivation is done. In other words, do not jump to conclusions.

Please leave your comments in the comment box below. If you wish to contact us at any time, you can send an email to us using the contact tabs on the side of the screen. Please let us know how you feel: good, bad or ugly. If you think that we missed any information that we should include, please let us know. We learn and make ourselves stronger by listening to others! You are great and wonderful!