Motivation for smart people - part I
Do you ever feel there’s a greater being inside of you just bursting to get out? You can feel its presence sometimes, can’t you? Here is a part of an article, written by Steve Pavlina. He wrote an article on motivation awhile ago criticizing this technique of using physiology and locking in emotions as being a poor substitute for actually taking responsibility for your emotional state. Here is part one - Emotional motivation.
Emotional motivation
Tony Robbins says the key to motivation is state management. This means conditioning yourself to feel a certain way via techniques like anchoring (connecting an emotion to a physical trigger). When Tony pounds his chest while speaking, he’s firing off anchors he previously conditioned. The downside is that you need to keep firing off these anchors as well as periodically reconditioning them to keep your motivation up. That means lots and lots of chest pounding.
As another motivational method, Tony suggests writing down the pleasure you associate to a task as well as the pain of not doing it. Again the idea here is to stir up your emotions, so you’ll be motivated to take action. This type of motivation is usually short-lived, even when the emotions involved are very intense.
I studied and practiced these kinds of emotional motivation techniques extensively during my 20s. In the long run, I didn’t find them particularly effective. My intellect saw right through all the chest pounding. The logical part of my mind was ultimately dissatisfied with attempts to induce motivation through emotional manipulation.
Have you ever seen one of those rah-rah motivational speakers? If the speaker is good, s/he will have an emotional effect on you and get you to feel motivated. But within a day or two, that emotional boost fades away, and you’re back to normal. You can listen to hundreds of motivational speakers and experience an emotional yo-yo effect, but it doesn’t last. I think this is especially common with technically minded people. We’re accustomed to thinking with our heads. We’re still emotional creatures on some level, but our emotional B.S. detectors periodically scrub our minds free of anything that doesn’t satisfy our logic.
Да, здорово.