Friday, September 30, 2011
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
What's Holding You Back?
Positive Motivation Versus Negative Motivation
by DRAGOS ROUAS
What makes you move forward? Which are the most powerful stimulus for you? Are you doing stuff only to avoid potential dangers, or are you just curious? In today’s post I’ll talk about negative motivation versus positive motivation.
You may ask now: motivation is just the power which moves you to do stuff, are there anything like “negative” or “positive” to it? Isn’t this something related towhat you do, not to what motivates you? Well, in my opinion, your motivation is directly shaping you actions. If you’re positively motivated, your action will most likely have a positive outcome. If you’re negatively motivated, your action will have an undesirable outcome.
Negative is rooted on fear, while positive is rooted in service.
The Fear Root
Fear means you’re acting on the pressure of losing something, This is what fear is: the menace of losing something: your current context, your money, your life. Fear was for a long time a fantastic survival mechanism, and for that it was a good asset on our old life kit. It was fear which made the weaker one to run or to hide when a real threat was around. And fear made the weaker survive.
Our brain has a very deep connection with fear. Deep in our limbic brain (the oldest part of our brain, also called the “reptilian” brain) lies the centers of fear. On top of them other layers of our brain have grown. But the deeper core is still there and it can still be activated.
Fear can manifest in our life on various levels. Some of them are social norm, like “keeping up with the Joneses” (fear of losing prestige) or like blind competition (fear of losing market share). On a personal level, fear is manifested by the need to prove something (fear of being inadequate) or by revenge (fear of coping with a loss).
The Service Root
On the other side, service means giving to others. Offering support, knowledge, material or emotional assets. On the human evolution scale, service is a little bit younger than fear. It was only when the need for survival was met that individuals could gather in communities and start to experiment with sharing. Until then, fear was necessary in order to survive.
There is this inverse connection between fear and service: the lower the fear level, the higher the service level. If you’re not afraid you can easily go out and share, because, well, there’s nothing to be afraid of. If you’re afraid of something, you’re going to limit the contexts in which the danger could manifest, therefore, you’ll going to limit your sharing activities.
Another opposite to the fear is curiosity: if you’re eager to find out more, you’ll have to get rid of your fears. You can’t be curious if you’re afraid. If your fears will tell you that something bad will come out of this action you’re so curious about, you’ll never do it.
The Black Power Of No
Wether we like it or not, we’re still conditioned to act on fear. Our limbic brain is still stimulated by a variety of factors. We translated our old fears related to survival to our modern indicators of success: we’re afraid of being taken for less than we are or we’re afraid that somebody talks bad about us. We’re afraid that we’re going to lose something if we’re not talking “immediate and aggressive” action towards the potential danger.
Negativity is powerful. Every time you’re afraid, you’re giving your focus and power to the potential danger. All your energy must be there, because your reptilian brain is telling you’ll have to survive. Doesn’t matter for that reptilian brain if the fear was socially induced, if you scream “fear” it will be activated.
The more fear factors you have, the more energy you’ll have to allocate. And you’re going to pay attention to a lot of potential dangers. Sooner than you think, you’ll measure your success by the rate of your survival actions. And you’re becoming accountable to your fear sources. You’ll be actually driven by your fear sources. This is why a fearful person is so easy to manipulate.
The Difficult Honesty
If you’re not afraid of anything, you’ll have nobody to be accountable than yourself. All your energy is still inside you, there’s no threat you have to monitor. And so, you’ll have to assess your success by other metrics. The survival mode is off. There’s nobody to be afraid of. There’s only you. Honestly.
Honesty is difficult. Being accountable to ourselves is something we’re not used to. For millions of years it was so easy to feel good by only avoiding danger. Now it’s incredibly difficult to feel good by creating something. Avoiding dangers and creating stuff are mutually exclusive, of course. You can’t do both at the same time.
Motivation
Every time you’re going on a negative motivation, you’re giving away your energy, this is why the outcome will be most of the time undesirable. Except a few rare situations in which your fears are real, you’re only picking up socially conditioned fears. There’s no real danger there. You think you’ve done something appropriate in order to survive, but the danger was a fake. And you feel cheated. Frustrated. Ashamed.
If you’re braking the circle of fear, your motivations will be based on curiosity and service. Out of the fear circle, you can create and share. You can learn. You can experiment. You can enjoy.
Happiness and fear cannot live in the same individual. Because fear will always take historical precedence, there will be simply no energy left to feed the happiness. All the energy is going to the fear. You simply don’t have enough.
If you’re curious enough to investigate the root of your fears you’ll find out they are just shadows. Somebody else is projecting some twisted lights and your environment is all of a sudden filled with a lot of shadows. If the source of light is not twisted, the environment is clear and neat again, no shadows. All you have to do is to investigate who and why is projecting the light. If you don’t agree with what you see, nobody stops you to project your own light, and get rid of the shadows for good.
The difference between negative and positive motivation is the difference between surviving and living
Monday, September 26, 2011
Sunday, September 25, 2011
The Morning After...
What a wedding reception. Danced and drank my way into pain. LOL Tummy and feet. Had a great time! Wishing Connie and Gary the best!
I have got to get a move on shortly. Have a 4 hour drive to see another client. It's going to be a long day.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Fake it till you make it!
6 Ways to Act Confident -- Even if You’re Not
BY: Anne Marie O’Connor
Think Positively
“Negative thoughts are much more powerful than most people realize, and those yucky feelings can mess with your confidence,” say Jodi Lipper and Cerina Vincent, authors of How to Love Like a Hot Chick and Live Like a Hot Chick: How to Feel Sexy, Find Confidence, and Create Balance at Work and Play. Instead, focus on your good points. Remind yourself of your great sense of style, your quick wit or how good you are at crossword puzzles, for example.
Say Cheese
Whenever you’re feeling a little blue, flash those pearly whites, says Vincent. “A bold smile makes you appear confident to others, which in turn can make you feel more self-assured,” she says.
Stand Tall
“Acting confident is the easiest way to appear confident, and the last time we checked, confident people don’t walk around with their arms crossed, head down and shoulders hunched,” says Lipper. So stand up straight! Practice against the wall: Stand with the back of your head, your shoulder blades and bottom touching it. You should only be able to slip one hand between the wall and the curve of your back.
Get Moving
Hit the gym and you’ll feel more confident. Sure exercise has body benefits. But it can also boost your mood. According to experts, exercise releases endorphins, feel-good hormones that can make you feel happier and more confident.
Find a Role Model
Choose someone whose self-assurance you admire, recommends Astrid Harris, president of Astrid's Life Coaching in Dallas. It can be a colleague, a friend or even someone famous. When you’re in a situation where you’re not feeling confident, think, “What would my role model do?” Use that person as inspiration while on job interviews, first dates or any time you’re feeling less than 100 percent self-assured.
Be Persistent
“Think of a time when you have done something really difficult -- and play it over and over like a video recording before you do the task at hand,” says Harris. Another good tip: Break your problem into small pieces and attack each separately. Write down your ultimate goal -- your dream job, a life partner or a house. Then make a to-do list of all the steps it will take to achieve that goal. For instance, to put your career on track, you may need to update your resume, start networking, search job sites and apply for positions. Keep checking items off that to-do list and refuse to give up; eventually it will come to fruition.
BY: Anne Marie O’Connor
Think Positively
“Negative thoughts are much more powerful than most people realize, and those yucky feelings can mess with your confidence,” say Jodi Lipper and Cerina Vincent, authors of How to Love Like a Hot Chick and Live Like a Hot Chick: How to Feel Sexy, Find Confidence, and Create Balance at Work and Play. Instead, focus on your good points. Remind yourself of your great sense of style, your quick wit or how good you are at crossword puzzles, for example.
Say Cheese
Whenever you’re feeling a little blue, flash those pearly whites, says Vincent. “A bold smile makes you appear confident to others, which in turn can make you feel more self-assured,” she says.
Stand Tall
“Acting confident is the easiest way to appear confident, and the last time we checked, confident people don’t walk around with their arms crossed, head down and shoulders hunched,” says Lipper. So stand up straight! Practice against the wall: Stand with the back of your head, your shoulder blades and bottom touching it. You should only be able to slip one hand between the wall and the curve of your back.
Get Moving
Hit the gym and you’ll feel more confident. Sure exercise has body benefits. But it can also boost your mood. According to experts, exercise releases endorphins, feel-good hormones that can make you feel happier and more confident.
Find a Role Model
Choose someone whose self-assurance you admire, recommends Astrid Harris, president of Astrid's Life Coaching in Dallas. It can be a colleague, a friend or even someone famous. When you’re in a situation where you’re not feeling confident, think, “What would my role model do?” Use that person as inspiration while on job interviews, first dates or any time you’re feeling less than 100 percent self-assured.
Be Persistent
“Think of a time when you have done something really difficult -- and play it over and over like a video recording before you do the task at hand,” says Harris. Another good tip: Break your problem into small pieces and attack each separately. Write down your ultimate goal -- your dream job, a life partner or a house. Then make a to-do list of all the steps it will take to achieve that goal. For instance, to put your career on track, you may need to update your resume, start networking, search job sites and apply for positions. Keep checking items off that to-do list and refuse to give up; eventually it will come to fruition.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
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