Try This When You Need Motivation

Motivation is often advertised as being a positive factor. It’s a way to push yourself forward and continue through all your trouble towards the end goal. When we look for motivation we go to YouTube to look for those orators who give us goosebumps. They seem to always say what we need to hear and they do it very well. They tell us we have what it takes, we can push through, we are strong. All these words raise the dopamine in our brain and we are able to ride that wave til kingdom come.

The moment before you receive the motivation you’re looking for, you are most likely feeling down or find yourself at a plateau in life. Your path has a newfound obstacle that’s causing you to lose the enthusiasm you have for your growth. The feeling of motivation has a rejuvenating factor to it. You use the pleasure from the dopamine hit as propulsion to strengthen your momentum.

Knowing this, I found that sometimes the positive-natured motivation isn’t always what I need. In life, we want to grow or change because we harbor animosity or aversion to our current environment or self-portrayal. As a kid I was small and particularly weak. My cousins and friends were bigger than me and generally could overpower me in the many sports that we would play. Using my lack of childish strength as an example. I grew up always longing to be stronger than my peers. Once I started to get older, I realized I wasn’t going to feel better or do better in sports unless I did more work outside of practice. So I started doing push ups at 12 years old and this then grew into weight training once I got to high school. Being around guys stronger than me was the motivation I needed to stay focused on myself in my quest to grow.

On the path to personal development, I think people can run out of motivational sources. It gets harder to find those bumps of dopamine, simply because we tend to search for it from the same sources. At this point is where a negative motivator could do us justice. I should take the time to give my definition of a negative motivator so this can make sense. Like I said previously, motivation is usually very positive and uplifting. Negative motivation does the same but in a more raw and personal way.

An example of positive motivation is looking towards your goal and thinking you can achieve it. Negative motivation is looking to your past, knowing you can’t allow yourself to go back. Positive motivation PULLS you toward your goal. Negative motivation PUSHES you toward your goal. Speakers like Tony Robbins or Zig Ziglar give us that positive motivation to help us feel better. On the other hand, someone like David Goggins demands that we use our pain and fear to push us through our obstacles. To forcefully expand our limits while using our past limits as our motivator.

We can look at negative motivation as a person that pushes us along when things get tough. For me, this person is the old me. The frail kid, longing to be big and strong like those around him. Family and strangers calling him “skin and bones”, telling him to “eat more and put meat on those bones”. That kid is the one who reminds me not to quit when things get hard. That kid pushes me along to hit one more rep. Think of negative motivation as your teammate helping push you and uplift you. This motivator is one you can trust because it's personal to you. The 1.0 version of you is rooting for you because that person wants you to grow just as much as the 2.0 version of you. The difference is that the 1.0 version will be there to help you along.

If we created a scale with our positive motivation and our goal on the right and our negative motivation on the left. We would use this scale to show that our negative motivator or our past self seems to push us along this scale toward our goal. The positive motivator to the right or the end goal, is more so pulling us towards it. However, because the road is not so simple and easy, there will be bumps, rocks, and straight up barriers stopping you in your tracks. Your positive motivation can pull you along only so much. This is when your pain, struggles, and fear come up behind you and set a fire to your heels. This fire forces you to push through everything in your way. When people say they had “a fire lit under their ass”, it translates that they had something force them to get up and get moving. This is that negative motivator.

Negative and Positive motivation scale

When we think of the pain or the fear we have along our journey we try to dismiss the thoughts and forget about them. I think we can use these thoughts to our advantage. The fear that you may not be good enough, could be the main reason you set out to become the best. The pain of always starting and stopping, may cause the realization that this may not be what you want and inspires you to start a new venture.

Our pain, fears, or struggles don't have to be a hindrance. Instead of them being the obstacle, they become the thrusters that propel us to our goals, smashing every barrier along the way.

-J