It is true that the promises of self-help books are exaggerated. Getting rich quickly requires long-term plans, and not all life's problems can be fixed, but you can reduce many difficulties through fairly straightforward steps. These steps are not necessarily easy.
It can be said that these steps consist of setting goals, creating better habits, learning more, and taking action, but let's say that you are successful in your life, and the important aspects of your life are going well. We're not saying it's necessarily perfect, but at least it's good except for a few marginal details.
What is left?
1. Fighting for something like feeling hungry and wanting to eat:
Logically, when your efforts to solve your problems lead to success, you should feel happy and relaxed, but people rarely react rationally to this end. In fact, we feel positive when we strive to achieve something. Strangely enough, after obtaining it, we feel that it is meaningless.
It's like feeling hungry, when you're hungry all you think about is food. You start imagining how delicious the meal you're going to have and how you'll eat a lot of food, but once you get the meal you feel like you can't eat as well as you imagined.
Yes, there is some pleasure in eating when you are really hungry, but once you are satiated, the pleasure ends, and the reason is that there is nothing in and of itself that is satisfying. You simply did not want anything but food when you were hungry, but after you are satiated you feel the need to do other things like sleeping or traveling and entertaining yourself.
This example is undoubtedly understandable. Everyone has experienced hunger, so we used it to illustrate this phenomenon, but you may not have experienced financial security, great physical appearance, or strong relationships in your life, so you might think that these things are different and that they will always give you a feeling of happiness if you have them, but in reality, it is not the same as eating after feeling hungry.
As soon as you get anything, the pleasure begins to diminish gradually until it is gone.
2. The strategy of self-destruction and rebuilding:
The situation is different when we talk about self-development. This is because the experience of struggle in life is accompanied by a feeling of pain and deprivation, which adds to your life an amount of motivating tension. This stimulating tension is not always pleasant, but it provides a framework for your efforts and directs them toward achieving what you are striving for.
After you finish the big issues you fought for, the motivating tension often goes away, and the result is that although you don't want to go back to the struggle with the struggle, you do want to get back that sense of enthusiasm that motivated you to develop yourself and improve aspects of your life.
One of the strategies people use to regain enthusiasm or that energy is self-destruction; Meaning that you destroy the aspects that you worked so hard to build so that you can build them again. For example, many romantic relationships and many marriages fail because both partners are bored with each other, and people suddenly leave their jobs after they settle down.
The obvious problem with this strategy is that it takes you back to the starting point, and of course, restores the motivating tension, but you will again deal with the difficulties that you worked so hard to overcome. Fortunately, this strategy is rarely used by people, although it is frequently used in movies and series for dramatic necessity.
3. The strategy of setting more difficult goals i.e. blowing up the achievements intellectually and not actually:
Instead of a strategy of self-destruction, we suggest that you follow the strategy of creating new struggles mentally; This strategy yields better results because it does not destroy what you have worked so hard to achieve, rather, it makes you live in the same deprivation psychologically; That is, the same condition that is associated with the struggle to achieve something.
With this strategy, we have, for example, someone who is in good shape but seeks to improve their fitness and reduce their body fat percentage to a minimum, or someone whose income is 200 thousand dollars annually, but wants to earn a million dollars. In the sense of what was pleasing in the past, it is no longer so, and the struggle begins anew.
What we are treating here is not a growth mindset, but rather the stimulus effect you feel through what might be called the mental synthesis of the deprivations that come with struggle.
Of course, some people are able to achieve maximum excellence without having to mentally blast all previous achievements, but we suggest this strategy for those who feel that they lack motivation after achieving a certain achievement.
Can you have motivation without struggle?
The struggle to achieve something is obviously painful, but motivation is what we want to have. Since most of our stress-inducing experiences come in the context of painful struggle, we automatically associate the stimulating tension with the pain associated with the struggle; That is why we try to avoid creating new situations of struggle, both real and imaginary. Therefore, the distinction between pain and motivation means a change in the philosophy of life in which you believe.
This philosophy means being able to shift your focus from the stress of trying to solve the problems in your life and focus on abstract goals that you clearly know will not improve your life alone. The form that these abstract goals take varies depending on what you are seeking, for example, if you are seeking to provide a service, it means that you have a mutual interest with the people you serve in the context of each of you struggling to satisfy his need.
As for mastery, it is another thing, in which the pursuit of excellence is the goal in itself while rejecting the idea that excellence will alone be enough to improve things. As for the creative vision, it is a very advanced stage, which is to transform an idea that exists in your mind only into a tangible reality because you believe in it.
Nothing we say is completely new. The psychiatrist “Victor Frankl” considered love the supreme goal in man's search for meaning in life. As for the writer “Stephen Covey”, he made service the eighth of his habits, and all the world's religions encourage something beyond the work of self-improvement.
However, we believe that what has not been fully discovered so far is how a person moves from a pattern of overcoming difficulties and self-improvement to a pattern of service, mastery, and creativity as the dominant form of self-motivation in life.
Should everyone switch from a style of struggle to a style of service, mastery, and creativity?
We might suppose for the sake of argument that some people realize that creative vision, mastery, and service are goals that transcend human self, so we should all have done it from the start.
But we don't think this fact makes sense for two reasons:
- Even if you have enough money, fitness, friends, etc., these things do not necessarily make you happy, then you will not succeed in convincing a person who sees his life full of suffering that he would be happy if he cared more about service or perfection.
- We may have real psychological needs that we miss, so our suffering during our struggle is as real as hunger, no matter how pure the nutrients we need. The theory of self-determination is one of the accepted explanations of human motives that identify three basic human needs: independence, competence, and relationships. The need for these three elements is similar to the need for food. Therefore pain in order to satisfy it is real pain and cannot be considered an imagined pain.
Thus, for people who see their lives as a very painful struggle, the solution is to provide means to alleviate this suffering. Saying that self-development is the only solution to all problems is not acceptable. A person has aspects of his life that he cannot improve, while some problems can be mitigated, difficulties will continue to arise.
This is an unfortunate fact in life, but this is the reality, however, if you have some luck to overcome some difficulties and manage to develop yourself, your happiness will begin to diminish after getting what you have been seeking, and the reason is the dissipation of the motivating tension that was guiding and controlling your life leaving behind a feeling of emptiness that you desperately want to fill.
It makes sense to plan for this transition, even if you view your life as a struggle at the moment. A person who wants to save a lot of money for early retirement, but does not have a plan for his life beyond this step, is bound to have an unpleasant surprise.
Similarly, a person who wants to achieve a certain level of physical fitness, but does not know what will motivate him after achieving that goal, may run the risk of giving up exercise completely or going too far.
How do you know if you are past the struggle stage?
Theoretically speaking ,the aspects in which we struggle should be the most visible aspects of our lives, so it should be easy to know when the struggle is over, yet our motives to downplay the importance of our successes, both in our imagination and on the ground, perpetuate the feeling that the struggle lingers in our thinking for longer than it actually has. In addition, we always have a basic level of insurmountable difficulties.
To live without struggle is not to never have a hard time, but to realize that there are not many things to worry about and work to improve. This last point is also relative, because the interpretation of it varies from person to person. You may not enjoy the feeling of malaise on the plane, but you can't help but admit that this feeling is a natural fact associated with your boarding, while for another person it may be something that pushes him to improve his income so that he can fly in class First.
Conclusion:
There is always an implicit assessment of what we must strive for in life and the distinction between these aspects and the aspects that are just aspects to live with in our lives. However, we believe that the main indicator that you are on the verge of a shift of mind is boredom; That is, when the motivational tension begins to wane, the tension that set the rhythm of your life and at the same time you cannot regain your enthusiasm.
This may seem bad at first, but think about the doors that open in front of you after reaching this stage. You are now ready to start thinking about the next step.
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