When it comes to creating success (however you define it) some people think they know which actions are the best actions to take and yet their actions fail to produce the results they truly desire. Others feel they have no idea what action to take and so they remain paralysed, never moving forward on what they want to create. Regardless of which side of this spectrum you find yourself, this next conversation will give you an important perspective about how you can begin to get your motivations correct so that truly inspired action (action that produces real results) can occur more naturally.
I would recommend that you do not underestimate the significance of this conversation because the more you truly understand it, the more you will have the power to drastically change the trajectory of your life. This blog is meant to be read with active reflection on its meaning. You must think about what you are reading to get the most benefit. These posts should never be skimmed. They are to be studied. To grasp these ideas fully takes intellectual and emotional effort. This is your reminder to read, reread, pause, reflect, and repeat.
We have talked about the importance of having a correct why as the motivation for action. As I mentioned in an earlier post, correct action is less about choosing the correct action and more about choosing the correct motivation. This is because action is always flowing out of our motivations. This occurs regardless of whether we are aware of what these motivations are or not. Action cannot be turned off. Even sleep is an action. Inaction is impossible so long as you are in a physical body. The quality of our action can, however, be elevated by deliberately altering and adjusting our motivations. As our motivations change, so do our choices. These new choices lead to new outcomes.
Most people do not examine the why’s of their actions nearly enough. Instead, they may skip the whys and attempt to accomplish their goals anyway, unaware that their actions are being motivated by false why’s. They will carry on for years experiencing little to no change in the quality of their lives. They focus on trying to do more actions or different actions but they consistently fail to realize that it is the reasons for their action that must be altered if any meaningful success is to be achieved.
Even if you are someone who accepts the idea that getting your motivations correct is of critical importance, you may still struggle to actually do it if you have yet to learn its many subtleties. My intention with this blog is to give you what you need to be able to actively develop the skill set of correctly aligning your thoughts, emotions and actions. Each blog post is piece of the puzzle that forms a tapestry of success principles and axioms. This tapestry becomes your new “success” operating system, so long as you consistently apply what you learn over time.
What is a false why/motivation?
Simply put, a false why is a reason for doing something that is based in falsehood. For example, if you believe that you must make a lot of money in order to be valuable, your drive to make money is based on the lie that you are not valuable. The idea that you are not valuable has no rational basis in reality. This underlying belief driving your pursuit of money is untrue and so it is a false motivation. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make more money. It is the soundness of the motivation that is important.
The “How?”
You must understand that your “why’s” always determine the “how’s”. It never works the other way around. Motivation always precedes action. Mind precedes matter. Energy precedes the physical. All action is motivated by something. Even if you are forcing yourself to do something you are not inspired to do, there is a reason for this choice that preceded your action. We have a reason for everything we do, even if we are not aware of what that reason is.
This means that if you have false motivations for your actions, you will take actions consistent with these false motivations. Many of these false why’s are running unconsciously in the background of your mind and, since you do not know they are there, you have no choice but to continue expressing them in action.
When we talk about the “how,” we are talking about the actual steps or action plan. The “how” is the actionable pathway for achieving what you want to create. It is the method, the procedure and the physical movements.
Once you know why you want what you want, you certainly still need a pathway (how) to make it happen in your life. However, the misconception is that you can force a “how” to be known to you before the timing and energy is right and before your thoughts and emotions are correctly aligned. The pathway for fulfilling what you want can/will only be revealed to you once you have delved deep enough into your why’s and clarified them correctly.
Do you understand the significance of what is being said here? The results you have in your life today are a product of past thoughts. These past thoughts produced action which then produced the results you have today. If we understand this correctly, we would be very interested in getting our thinking correct today because it is the thoughts we are having today that motivate the next actions we will take. In this way, our current thoughts create our future results… for better or worse.
The “Why?”
The “why?” is, therefore, the most important thing to focus on because it is the starting point to all creation. You don’t have to “get” a why as some gurus like to say. You already have a myriad of “why’s” motivating everything you do. Everything you say or do is motivated by a why, even if this why is not something of which you are consciously aware. The real work you have to do is to become conscious of these why’s so that you can give more attention and energy to the truest motivations within you. You must clarify the why’s that already exist within you so you can release the false why’s that are displacing your true why’s and focus instead on your true why’s.
Most of a human being’s life is driven by unconscious motivations. These motivations come from your beliefs about who you are and what is true about life. They come from thoughts, decisions and ideas you’ve had in the past that have become the filters through which you experience reality. By seeing an unconscious why clearly, you can choose to change it. When you don’t see an unconscious why clearly, you won’t be able to change it. The moment you acknowledge it is the moment you have a choice. If it goes unacknowledged, you continue having no choice.
The challenge here is that you can have an ostensible why that is rooted in a false thought or belief of which you are not even consciously aware. For example, you may unconsciously feel like you are unwanted because, when you were young, some event occurred and you came to this conclusion about yourself. This belief then shaped the rest of your life with every subsequent choice/decision you made. You became, for yourself, an unwanted person and lived your life as though this unwantedness was the true reality about you. This false belief displaced your true why’s and now you needed to find some way of fixing or overcoming that you were unwanted, which of course was not even true to begin with. You then held an ostensible why that was false. For instance, your ostensible why may have been to make more money or to get into a relationship or to lose some weight, but really, all of these goals were motivated by an unconscious need to fix the untrue belief that you were, in this example, unwanted.
To make this even more clear, imagine there was a situation that occurred when you were 4 years-old. Perhaps your mother was 30 minutes late picking you up from school. She had always been there on time to pick you up right when school was finished. However, on this particular day, she just didn’t show up. You were unable to understand all the possible explanations for why your mother did not show up on time to get you. You were only 4 years old. You didn’t understand all the complexities of life. You just knew that your mother wasn’t there. For 30 minutes, you experienced this strange new feeling and you came to a simple, child-like conclusion that your mother didn’t care about you anymore and so you were unwanted. Even if she picked you up on time every day after this one, the damage had already been done. You were now unwanted and would spend the rest of your life unconsciously gathering proof that your mother didn’t care about you and that you were unwanted, without any awareness of the moment this feeling began.
It may be hard for some to imagine but it is these kinds of conclusions in moments like these that shaped the rest of our lives. The specific events and conclusions are different for everyone, but the mechanisms that drive them are the same for all. Luckily, there are learnable and applicable methods for uncovering these unconscious past decisions and rectifying them.
In the next post we will focus on a powerful practice you can use to expand and deepen your awareness allowing you to begin resolving these issues.