I remember when I first learned about personal motivation. I thought to myself, “What if I could use the power of advertising to convince myself to do things that I wanted, rather than what advertisers wanted me to do?”
Advertising and marketing are very powerful cultural influences. New understandings of human psychology are continually being applied by salesmen, copywriters, and marketers everywhere. Unfortunately, this is true of my favorite field, NLP and Hypnosis, which originally studied great therapists in order to help people be happy and sane. Usually this application of psychology to marketing is seen as good or neutral: “people need to buy stuff to meet their needs, we’re just making it easy for them to know what will serve their needs.”
Yet we all feel like advertisers are lying to us. The slogans, promises, and taglines of large corporate entities lack any meaning or authenticity whatsoever. We are used to products not working as advertised, or even not looking like what’s on the box.
The products we buy from such advertisements don’t really seem to serve our needs. The GDP goes up every time a parent gets too busy to care for their children and has to hire a nanny. Does the nanny serve our need? Kinda, but we’d really rather be with our kids and not have to work so much. We clearcut forests to make subdivisions. Does this serve our need for housing? Sorta, but now we feel even more alienated from nature and have to pay for what was free by going to “exotic” locations where life still freely roams.
My own field of therapy and coaching is in many ways an outsourcing of friendship, family, community, and religion. We are too busy working so that we can make enough money to buy stuff from marketers. So we liquidate our social capital, hire back our friendships, and call this progress.
Self-Motivation: Should We Cultivate Desire?
Just as marketing amplifies our desires for products that don’t exactly meet our deepest needs, self-motivation usually amplifies our desire for goals that don’t exactly meet our deepest needs.
Many self-development bloggers and authors recapitulate Napoleon Hill’s maxim that intense desires lead to intense results. They they advocate for the cultivation of intensity of desire in conjunction with a positive vision of the future. But is this a good idea?
Desire is a signal that a need is being unfulfilled. Desire tends to naturally intensify if you have been ignoring the signal or incorrectly meeting the need.
When you are somewhat hungry, you simply eat and the desire is satisfied. If you feel deathly hungry because you forgot to eat both breakfast and lunch and it’s now 8pm, that’s because you’ve been ignoring your body’s need for nourishment.
Should you cultivate an intense, burning desire for food? Should you visualize a large juicy steak and repeat “I now draw to me HUGE quantities of delicious food in massive abundance!” I don’t know anyone doing this, yet many people are doing something parallel with regards to their financial goals, their career goals, their fitness goals, or (for young men in particular) their dating goals. Why are we attempting to over-meet our needs through such “motivation”?
When Enough is Enough
Marketers are known for manufacturing “needs” that don’t really meet our needs. Does anyone need high-fructose corn syrup fizzy water? Soft drinks are an enormously popular manufactured “need.” But manufactured needs don’t meet our true needs. In this case, drinking soda does not meet the body’s needs for nourishment or hydration, so the need remains unfulfilled and the hunger and thirst gets stronger, so we drink more, etc.
Marketers also associate things like sex, power, fame, and happiness to products that do not in any way meet our needs for sexual expression, self-efficacy, acknowledgment, or meaningfulness. We get confused by the clever advertisements and associate beer to sexiness at an unconscious level, even though drinking alcohol is a direct cause of such unsexy things as developing a beer gut, vomiting, fatal car accidents, sleeping with strangers, addiction, and abuse.
By linking soft drinks to fun and beer to sexiness, we attempt to meet our needs by consuming something that will never do so. This drives us to try harder. We drink even more soda and beer, to have even more fun, sexy times. It doesn’t work, so we try harder. Pretty soon we have diabetes and a failing liver, sitting in front of the television watching reality TV and we wonder “what happened?”
Similarly, we attempt to “motivate” ourselves to be high-achievers, to make a lot of money, start a business, train for a marathon, etc. by pumping ourselves up and associating unrelated emotions to these goals. Making a lot of money we think will get us love, or appreciation, or the ability to help people. Starting a business we think will get us fun, creative work. Running a marathon we think will keep us fit, and make us feel special. But when we make the money, we feel empty. When we start the business, we feel overwhelmed and out of our element. When we train for the marathon, our joints hurt and we feel tired all the time.
We think that we are naturally lazy, but in fact we are pushing ourselves to do things that are not truly meeting our needs. We push even harder, only to cause even more problems. It’s time to stop pushing and start listening.
The story of the rich, successful, yet unhappy man is so common as to be an archetype. No amount of wealth, power, fame, and “being the best” will ever meet our unmet needs for connection, love, appreciation, oneness, peace, and joy, for these are states of being, not doing. The good news is that these states are much closer than you think and don’t require achieving any of that stuff to experience in an ongoing way.
In Boulder there is a coffeeshop that sells a white chocolate and peppermint tea drink called the “Peace of Mind.” I love the irony of going in and purchasing “a large peace of mind–to go.” Peace of mind cannot be purchased and no one can give it to you, but yet you can experience it for free at any time.
Why do we think we need motivation? If we are actually meeting real needs, then the simple and direct meeting of those needs makes us naturally feel good and satisfied. We think we need to be motivated because we have inner objections which we vilify. Our right hand fights against our left. When we end the inner conflict by accepting all parts of our self, we naturally meet our needs and feel peace of mind more and more in an ongoing way.
Motivation is for Losers
In the battle against the self, no matter who wins, you lose! By pumping yourself up artificially with enthusiasm, inspiration, or passion, you are fighting and dominating other, more soft and sensitive parts of yourself that object to your empty quest for achievement. This “motivation” creates an inner war, assuring that you will lose. You cannot achieve happiness, joy, peace, love, or oneness–these states of being are your true nature when you listen to your true needs and simply meet them.
This artificial amplification of desire is like forcing an inhale. In fact, the word “inspiration” comes from the same root as “respiration,” and means both “to breathe in air” and “to be moved by the Spirit.” As most creative people know, while you can set up conditions for the Muse to inspire you, you cannot force it. (See my previous article “Where Does Inspiration Come From?” for a longer treatment of this topic.)
Let’s Do Something!
Here’s an exercise for you to start putting these principles into practice.
Let’s say you desire to start a successful business. You normally amplify your desire by visualizing extreme success daily, picturing your luxury megayacht, your Porshe, people lavishing you with praise, etc. Even if you get all of these things however, you will not be satisfying the underlying needs and may still feel empty. Why not fulfill your needs directly instead of wasting all that energy on “success”?
You can begin to learn what those needs are by first acknowledging the desires you have. Say “part of me really wants to own a luxury megayacht in the British Virgin Islands.” Welcome this part and know that it has some deeply positive purpose for wanting this for you.
Then take a deep breath, relax, close your eyes, and go inside. Notice where this part of you lives: do you feel it in a particular place in your body, or see yourself in your yacht off to your left side, or hear someone saying “nice yacht!” in your right ear?
Ask this part of you “what do you want?” and wait for a response. If it says “success”, ask this part “if you have success, fully and completely, what do you want through having success that’s even more important?”
You can continue this questioning until you uncover the deeper needs this part wants for you by “motivating” you to go for the yacht. If you continue to go further, you’ll find at the core of what it is wanting, there is a state of being like peace, oneness, OKness, love, or joy.
See the book Core Transformation for a much more precise and detailed process for doing exactly this.
You can also hire me for a Core Transformation Coaching session to begin unmotivating yourself and instead welcoming and fulfilling your true needs. I’m currently taking clients on a sliding scale basis from $30-75 for a 90-minute session. Most of my clients have said something to the effect of “this is the most powerful psychological work I’ve ever done.” If you are interested in this kind of deep transformation, please email or call me: andrewmcduffee [at] gmail [dot] com -or- 303-520-8658. My goal is to train clients to be able to do this process by themselves so they can find wholeness without dependence on a professional helper.