ambition, motivation, and will power
You want to be someone who can do things, who want to do things, who actually does things? This article will answer some of your questions.
I am reading a book, Diet Cults. The author and the book itself is as cultish as the diet cults it writes about, nevertheless it is worth my time to read it.
On thing I found interesting is his “dissertation” about the importance and the effect of motivation in losing weight and maintaining the weight loss once the ideal weight is achieved.
What he is saying is that one needs a motivation, which I would rename, for the purposes of clarity, an outside or inside goal… According to the dictionary, “the reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way.” Or secondarily “the general desire or willingness of someone to do something”
But if you look at the root of the word, motivation is a power that moves you. Motivation is literally the desire to do things.
- MOTIVATION: Something inner, something emotional or soul based…
A subtle inner force.
- AMBITION is similar, but it has a definite goal in mind, and what pulls and moves a person is a desire to achieve that definite goal.
- WILL POWER means, again according to the dictionary: “the faculty by which a person decides on and initiates action” “a control deliberately exerted to do something or to restrain one’s own impulses.”
It is like a push to start… or alternatively refrain from starting.
So which one would you rather have?
If you have bad habits, which will pull you out and keep you out best?
Which will get you out of bed and pull on your walking shoes when you are tired and the bed is beckoning?
Which one will stop your hand halfway to your mouth with the cookie you swore would lay off?
My hunch is that it is indeed MOTIVATION.
Why? Because motivation seems to be an ongoing, 24 hours a day power, that gently moves you, or attempts to move you, until you are ready to move.
Ambition, because it is a wholly outside, worldly result, will make you a fanatic, a workaholic, an overachiever, much like greed. Ambition is so strong, that it may even make you step on other people to achieve what you set out to achieve.
And will power makes you brittle, and gritting teeth… no lightness, no grace in it. Forcing.
But, the question is, how to you get motivated if there is no motivation inside.
Thousands of motivational speakers have discovered that most people have no motivation, but would like results nevertheless. So they talk… but the effect of their talks is temporary at best.
The same is the purpose of the millions of inspirational memes on the internet: to motivate and inspire people, but without an inner source of motivation, they don’t even make a ripple on the dead inner surface of most people.
Why are people dead? Were they born dead inside?
My hunch is that no motivation is often born with… and the rest of unmotivated people, about 30% of that crowd, is the lasting effect of parental disapproval syndrome: on one hand wanting to please the parent, on the other hand only perfection pleases the parent, so people try and give up.
But what if you were born without motivation? According to my conversations with Source, entire cultures are people born without motivation.
Motivation is a sign that a self is present. A person with a self is further along in evolutionary terms than a person without a self. The self is a uniquely human phenomenon.
Each and every person can awaken the self… and I have students who have, or who are working on it…
Once the self becomes fully available, motivation, inner motivation becomes also available… And of course there are degrees.
On avarage, measured today, the self is opened up on average about 10%, the pool includes the 40% with not even an inkling of self, and the rest with different degrees of flowering.
I have found that reading my articles, and especially participating in my coaching program, inevitably awakens the self.
So what can you do if you don’t want to read my articles and don’t want to be in my coaching program?
You can do what the articles say you should do: find external motivation, or pray for rain.
And I have been testing a third method: altering your self-image… I’ll report on my findings in this same forum.
Originally posted here –