Most people want to achieve success in the areas of life that are important to them. Yet many never find the success that they seek, and spend their lives feeling unhappy and unfulfilled. Why is this?
One of the main reasons why some people succeed and so many don’t, is that those who well do are internally motivated, whereas the others are motivated primarily by external rewards. While everybody is externally motivated to some extent, if this is your main source of motivation, you’re probably setting yourself up for failure.
Internal Motivation
Internal (or intrinsic) motivation, as the name suggests, comes from within. An internally motivated person is inspired by staying true to their own core values, and doing the things which they love the most. When you’re doing the things that you enjoy, for reasons which resonate with your authentic self, it’s easy to remain motivated, and little willpower is needed to take the actions that are necessary to achieve your goals.
External Motivation
External motivation, on the other hand, comes from an outside the self. It includes things like money, recognition from other people, prizes, trophies and awards etc. While all of these things are nice, the problem with relying on them as your main source of motivation is that for the most part, the sense of fulfilment they provide is temporary. If you’re going down a path that’s not in alignment with your real goals, just because you want the rewards that you think it’ll give you, you may find that these rewards aren’t worth very much once you get them. At this point, your motivation to continue will suffer drastically, if the goal isn’t something that you’re also interested in for its own sake.
The Path To Success
For this reason, it’s important to set goals that are fully aligned with your real, inner motivations. If you should happen to receive external rewards for doing well in your chosen field, then that’s a bonus, but really it’s just the icing on the cake. Remember that life isn’t meant to be a struggle, and success doesn’t have to be difficult to achieve. In fact, the path to success is much easier when it’s a path that you’re motivated to travel for its own sake, as you don’t have to constantly force yourself to keep going by focusing on the end result, and you’ll enjoy the journey as well is the destination. And that’s not to be underestimated, since the majority of our lives are spent in the ‘journey’ phase, and it’d be a shame if you spent most of your time focusing on being somewhere else.
What If Your Motivation Is Blocked?
As we noted, internal motivation springs from within. Sometimes however, people have picked up negative beliefs that lead to self-sabotaging behaviours which stop them from taking the path they really want to take. This can lead to feelings of ‘blockage’ and procrastinating over even the things you want to do. Feeling a strong desire to do something, yet not allowing yourself to go there is an unpleasant experience, to say the least. In this case, using a brainwave entrainment recording can be of value, as such a recording makes it much easier to achieve a profound sense of relaxation, and to access the subconscious mind, where such self-limiting beliefs are stored.
By taking some time each day to listen to your recording, and to focus on how you’d like your life to be, it becomes easier to allow these old blocks to dissolve, and to let your natural sense of internal motivation to flow freely once again.
Source by Loren Mann