In this article, I’m going to talk about a state of mind to guarantee your success in anything you undertake.
Most people who want to achieve something, create a sense of significance and urgency. That creates a great motivation and strong push to act toward their desires.
Creating a sense of need to reach a goal is an effective way to push yourself toward your goal. It forces you to take massive action and make strides. But this is not the best position to put yourself in.
The Wrong Approach To Motivation
When you act on the basis of need, you invoke a primal force within you to motivate you. That force is fear – the fear of loss, or the fear of missing out. Fear is a very powerful motivator because it’s rooted in the depth of our psyche. Its root goes back to the time when our ancestors had to escape the predators or forces of nature to survive. As a matter of fact, a lot of people respond well to this motivator when it comes to getting started.
The Self-esteem Damage
Despite its effectiveness, this forceful approach is like whipping cattle to move. This can have a very negative impact on your mental and physical health in the long run. When you use the feeling of need to move toward your goal, everyday of your journey is stressful. Everyday is the day that you have failed to be with what you desire. You suffer day in day out to reach your perceived happiness. You sacrifice every moment of happiness along the way, for that elusive happy ending. Every setback along the way is a blow to your self-esteem.
Some people think treating your goals as if your life depended on it makes them more effective – far from it. Fear-based motivation, in fact, may sabotage your final success or its full potential. You are so focused on the end result that you try to take short cuts or cut corners to reach your goal faster. You may do that either intentionally or subconsciously. These low quality steps will only jeopardize the end-result
Even if you reach your goal using such a cruel and stressful motivator, you cannot reach to higher levels. Your psyche has taken such a punishment along the way. So it’s not aboard for another round of beating for the next level of success. You feel like stopping and retiring. Even though effective in short term, using fear for motivation is no way to treat yourself.
The Right Approach
The most powerful position is when you take massive action but don’t care about the result. I know; it seems like a very strange state of mind; even paradoxical. But if you achieve this state of mind, you will be unstoppable.
The pragmatic reason that such a mindset makes you unstoppable is that it helps you in 2 practical ways:
- To reach great goals, you need to take massive action, which what this state of mind requires.
When moving toward worthy goals, you are bound to run into obstacles and have setbacks. This mindset will make you immune from setbacks, because you don’t care. Note that not caring doesn’t mean you don’t want to succeed. It simply means you don’t measure your worth with your success. In other words, you protect your self-esteem. - This Taoist mentality protects you from setbacks. It reminds you that your journey is what you should cherish, not your goal.
But, how about massive action?
If you don’t use fear to motivate yourself, how can you create a great and continuous motivation? The much needed motivation to compel you into massive action.
I will talk about that in the next articles…