By Alexis Louise Reda
Feeling unmotivated? Everyone tends to be one way or another – that is the nature of human endeavor. In trying to bring your immaterial thoughts into this physical world, the transformation or manifestation process can be foggy. But what if we told you that there is a process for fostering maximal adherence to any endeavor?
There are 6 factors, in a particular arrangement, that influence our adherence to any plan, for any goal. They are, in order: inspiration, motivation, intention, discipline, habit, and passion.
Let’s get to it:
Inspiration is the kick. That’s that media clip that has your brain light up. You think, Let’s DO THIS!!! I can be like that! Tell me more, I WANT this, let’s GET this! …It fizzles out in many hours, though.
Inspiration is very effective to get you on the track at the start of say, a diet, or a project you are working on – but it is only the spark of potential action that has not yet manifested. Needless to say, you still need that spark to gain intrinsic feedback, relaying to you how much you actually want to accomplish that specific goal. In fact, inspiration could be the very thing that helps you define what your goal precisely is.
In 2 or 3 days, you cannot rely on inspiration for most of your propulsion fuel – it is simply unsustainable, unreliable. It is time to welcome motivation.
Motivation is the pull. It is the desire to do something about that goal which inspiration has lead you to define. It is not as intense as that kick which inspiration could provide, but it lasts longer.
This is the time – within the next few hours to days after inspiration has hit – when you realize that the road to your goal requires not only bursts of absolute gamma-level bliss about your goal itself, but requires a process. That realization suddenly focuses you a bit: you fathom that a process requires a plan, and that the plan might feel uncomfortable and not fully solidified yet.
You can expect some instability at this stage simply due to the very nature of motivation: It progresses in waves.
Your process is still abundant with uncertainty in this early state; so understand that in this phase, your process entails the constant review and acknowledgement of what your desire still is. Because of the lack of solidity, you will naturally flow through peaks and troughs of the now-evident process endeavor. Trial and error are involved here: you are testing your limits in many respects. You know there is some kind of journey required to get you from here to there, and so you try to find resources that will maybe solidify into a plan that will stick and take you the whole way to your checkpoint. During the peaks, you will find yourself smashing the daily goals of your plan like they are nothing! Bask in this glory while it lasts, because other days, you will find yourself depressed by the restrictions and sacrifice your commitment calls for. These tend to cycle in several day streaks.
So what happens during the inevitable several days you find yourself in a trough? Oh… you think, maybe I’ll go off plan just this once… and then you find yourself falling into Default patterns of behaviour when you feel the pang of regret which may likely accompany your decision. Are you ready to handle that? But there is another level of power which we can implement during the troughs of motivation’s ebb and flow. Welcome intention.
If you are an avid inquirer of anything quantum, you are likely well aware of the concept of intention.
Intention is the plan. Precisely the awareness of the plan – a deeply etched feeling of it’s meaning to you. It is the backbone of your process.
When motivation falters, often your ability to remember why you are doing this plan is what is needed to keep you going. You will need this skill especially in the first few months. Staying process-focused instead of dead-set on end goal is vital. Nonetheless, staying committed to this necessitates you time and time again to propel yourself out of the troughs of motivation’s ebb and flow, and intention needs to be paired with some nitrous booster to bring it into the physical realm. What is this metaphorical nitrous? Discipline.
Discipline. One of nature’s sacred limited resources defined by discipline is willpower. Thankfully, as quantum beings we are able to renew this resource with rest – cutting ourselves a bit of slack, releasing restrictions that don’t serve you, etc. But you’re on a plan now! And so you must remain on track for a special reason which you’ve outlined for yourself; and with that, a little more structure, maybe a little sacrifice is granted for a temporary period of time. Therefore you need to use this resource – but you need to use it wisely.
You probably didn’t need to go so far as to willpower yourself into starting this journey – inspiration gave you the first push, and that worked. And that’s good. Then the first few days might have been severely uncomfortable, but at least the novelty of it and your goal in mind helped motivation stay high…until you neared the one-week mark and those unexpected troughs hit hard. If you hadn’t quit by then (as most people do), it means you probably cultivated your intention clearly enough to keep you going. But at this stage in the game, maybe 2 to 5 weeks in, inspirational photos and motivational mantras just won’t cut it. You realize this is becoming quite challenging, and in all honesty, though staying positive is always important, there are gonna be dark times.
Dare I say, you might have to use some force to stick to the plan, because stress accumulates, it affects your perception of everything, and maybe you’ve abandoned all your friends and family for the time being.
Dark times will happen, regardless of how much you practice mindfulness in this life. As a human being, you seek challenge even unknowingly, and that challenge we crave leads us to these goals and plans in the first place! You know you will find challenge here. So try not to look perplexed or get depressed when you saw it coming – in fact, you wanted it deep down inside. Dark times are a blessing – they teach you the most about yourself, inside and out. And anyway, there are situations in the world that are much worse than what you are choosing to put yourself through.
Habit. Eventually we get to this stage and this is a huge checkpoint. After about 6 weeks, many components of your processes become automatized and make your plan so much easier to execute. Now, when someone badgers you with their questions about why you are so stern or rigid in your life right now, you may just answer: It’s just what I do. (Hopefully, you can say it proudly and with a genuine smile. This is only possible if your intention is true.)
A few weeks ago, you may have just questioned yourself in this way! Nearly quit, but thankfully you didn’t.
Hopefully your process had been planned intelligently enough so as to not turn you into an unpleasant person. More on this another time… There is one more stage that could happen past the point of habit, maybe near the end of your plan…
Passion. Not everyone gets here (—in this article or otherwise!); nor does everyone need to. But when it happens, it’s a beautiful thing. A sense of ease comes with passion. You know you have developed a passion for something when you nearly go overboard with how much you love doing the daily actions this particular thing requires. You love it so much, you can talk about it seemingly forever and people may show all sorts of mixed feelings towards that! You are always down to learn something new about it. It simply makes you happy. Maybe you become a source of inspiration for others without even trying.
If you have reached the stage of passion, there is no work. There is no trying. Welcome to the highest level of motivation.
And for all the other wonderful things you embark on in your life, big or small (though all equally significant), know that the process of working through these logical levels of motivation will get you, in each of those endeavors, to exactly where you need to be.
NSCA. (2019, July 9). The Five Constructs of the Motivation Process, with Mike Israetel | NSCA.com. [Video file]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/yry6joA9I3I