Most of the recipes offered for achieving a meaningful life are well-founded.
There are, however, a few necessary considerations:
- The prerequisites stated in the approaches, considered by said approaches to be the secrets of success, already exist in all humans. I mean: purpose, commitment, determination, discipline, overcoming, resilience, imagination, focus, habits, routines, and, above all, courage, and other attitudes. All we must do is reflect on past moments. We will find examples of times when we acted with each of these attitudes.
- Those attitudes are not taken oftenly, because the motivation to face and resist.
- Behind this, one finds energy, and the real secret is how to manage motivation.
Example of a life plan
1. Commitment to good health.
Purpose: to maintain physical and mental health.
Commitment: ensuring physical activity and good nutrition in order to secure minimally sufficient performance for the activities required by daily routines. Ensuring self-knowledge and emotional stability in order to secure peace of mind.
2. Commitment to the family.
Purpose: to maintain relationships that ensure the success of each member of the family nucleus.
Commitment: acting in such a way that it becomes necessary, accompanying and driving each other's initiatives towards a meaningful life.
3. Commitment to work.
Purpose: to find meaning in each of the actions to be performed, so that they serve as training in attitudes that are relevant to life and to the quality needed in the performed trade. To find or to create motivation to carry out the training, without backing down.
Commitment: doing what needs to be done at the right time, seeking to improve every day. Reviewing daily work in order to: realise the right path, find mistakes and successes, in other words, know what to learn and what to celebrate.
Acting in a disciplined manner to fulfil targets without question, with humility.
Whatever your purpose, goal or need, you need to train what you lack, and this is the most effective process:
THE ESSENTIAL, THE NECESSARY, AND THE DESIRABLE
Facing and resisting
Summary of the process:
- Make your plans in a way that you set small goals each day, always a bit beyond the line of comfort, so that you feel the challenge and the desire to pursue it.
- Do what must be done at the right time, without backing down. Competing against yourself. In a way that you may learn from your mistakes.
- Feel the journey, the daily victories, and the progress. That which is worthwhile.
- Build confidence by feeling what works.
- Build authority to do, getting things done, confidence to honour commitments.
- Build habit, so as to do what is difficult.
THE ESSENTIAL
The tools that have always worked.
FEELING
Learning to feel is infinitely more important in life than learning to think or to know.
“To feel is to create. To feel is to think without ideas, and, therefore, to feel is to understand.” — Fernando Pessoa
To know how to feel what is going on inside us, when we analyse our inner selves and what the outer elements provoke in us, overrides everything we have been taught about the value of knowledge.
Feeling is a language used from the beginning of life by every living being. There would be no life without it.
If you would like to know more about this, read “Feeling and Knowing” by António Damásio.
For us humans, knowing how to feel helps us understand the world around us, connects us with others and motivates us to act.
Learning to feel is a continuous process. With practice and patience, you can develop a greater awareness and understanding of your emotions and feelings.
“Feeling” to see the obvious:
- To see what the eyes cannot see.
- To unravel mysteries.
- To find answers to questions never asked.
- To understand what science and reason cannot explain.
- To understand what haunts us, what scares us.
- To understand the difference between the subjective and the objective.
- To understand that you do need to know, as well as what you need to know.
- To know what you need to do.
- To know what you can expect.
Knowing how to feel is the best way to avoid pain and sustain motivation. It prevents us from incessantly trying paths that do not lead us to the desired goals, it prevents the saboteurs from acting. It saves us time.
Then motivation ignites. And you just have to make sure it does not die down. How? By fuelling the fire with persistence and the wisdom of imagination. This is also the best way to fight laziness and procrastination.
Being attentive to what we feel, knowing how to work by valuing the positive feelings and cancelling out the negative ones—this creates a favourable environment for permanent motivation, for an easy journey.
If persistence is fundamental and depends on motivation, do everything you can to prevent it from withering away.
MOTIVATION
Motivation arises from the need to escape pain or find pleasure.
- When you feel a threat to your life, your ego, or your morals.
- When you feel the results of your behaviour or your thoughts.
- When you are pursuing a challenge.
- When you have “insights”.
- When you trust yourself or others.
- When you train to the limit of your abilities.
- When you face it and act, correctly or incorrectly.
- When you create expectations.
Motivation arises from:
- expecting the coming of things,
- overcoming obstacles,
- having the courage to resist frustration, which arises when something does not go well, intensifying the effort, and
- having the ability to learn from mistakes.
Motivation is directly proportional to the expected reward and the value attributed to the result, and it is inversely proportional to the patience to wait and the time needed to achieve the result.
The only worthwhile motivation is the one felt during the journey, feeling what went right, whether by moving forward or learning from mistakes. Our brains are set up to learn from mistakes, and doing this intentionally means boosting neuroplasticity.
The motivation you feel when you have a great idea, attend a lecture, or read a book, if not implemented wisely, soon wanes and ends. But if it is bolstered at every step, it brings pleasure, and this is what fuels self-confidence and discipline and leads you to the end goal.
Nothing is more motivating than achieving the impossible.
Find moments in your life when this happened.
Have you ever confessed to lacking motivation?
Have you ever felt that you have motivation for some things and not for others?
Nobody lacks motivation. The motivation of all living beings is to save energy and fight threats to survival. In humans, in addition to these, new threats and attractions have arisen because we have invented progress and technology. So, the motivation to get out of bed and get food (go to work) is not as great as the pleasure of checking a mobile phone or watching television. The excuses for not spending energy, which we all give or think, are much more convincing when they are products of a more sophisticated brain.
Motivation is like the fuel that helps you achieve your dreams. It is a process that initiates, directs, and maintains behaviour related to achieving goals. It is an inner force that changes throughout life, directing and intensifying an individual's goals.
A few tips to help you maintain and train your motivation like a muscle:
- Imagine your goals. Just as you do when you “daydream” about a business deal. Can you almost feel the day you sign the contract? That is visualisation.
- Understand why you want something. For example, is it to be the best in your field? To expand your business? Knowing your reasons and whether it is a challenge worth pursuing helps you stay focused.
- Analyse your mistakes. Making mistakes is normal. The important thing is to learn from your mistakes and not let them turn into failures. You can never be sure of the right path if you do not know how you lost your way or how you recovered.
- Set realistic goals. It is like a video game. You do not go straight to the hardest part. You go through the smaller levels first.
- Challenge yourself. Try to beat your own marks, like a personal high-score in your favourite game. Do a little more.
- Think about your big dreams. Do you want to be a professional footballer? A game developer? Keep those dreams in mind.
- Divide tasks into smaller parts. Do the most difficult at the start of the day. Playing a little bit every day is easier than trying to beat the whole game in one go, right? The same goes for studying or training.
- Listen to music. You know that song that gets you in the mood? It can help motivate you.
Remember, motivation is like fuel for your journey. Without fuel, it is hard to get where you want to go. So, keep your tank full and keep going!
Knowing how to balance motivation, finding in ourselves the levers that make this task easier, is the true intelligence for life.
Where to begin?
THE MOTIVATION PALACE
Among your many oracles, take special care of this one, he holds important information about what life has installed in ourselves.
Our mind is a palace of emotions.
It consists of several facilities, bedrooms, and living rooms. Some are bright, with slit windows that let in rays of sunshine that make the decoration shine. Some have flowers with dazzling aromas, armchairs made of soft fabrics.
There we had moments of socialising to the sound of unforgettable music, tasting delicious food, living moments of joy and euphoria.
On its walls, painted by our best attitudes, such as courage, compassion, gratitude, and altruism, we share feelings of passion, love, and friendship.
Then there are the places where you feel peace, hear the birds singing, listen to the sound of the calm breeze, the water flowing down the waterfall.
In short, in this wing of the palace we have experienced moments that we would like to eternalise.
As Professor Clovis de Barros says, quoting Nietzsche: “When life is good, you do not want it to end at that moment.”
This palace also has its basements, dungeons, dark, sad places, with mould, unpleasant, disgusting smells, where we learn about cruelty, envy, betrayal, and loss.
In these spaces, we experience pain, suffering, anguish, and sometimes depression.
There are also some hidden rooms that have left their mark over time. We do not know when they were built, they have no name, they generate unjustifiable feelings and influence our lives. We only discover them by revisiting the palace countless times and paying attention to the details. When we find their key, the light comes in and everything becomes clear. They become part of one of the familiar wings of the palace.
Between these wings there are also intermediate floors, where weapons and shields are stored, for the moments when we fight battles with enemies or saboteurs. These must be identified, one by one. Some of these floors reek of boredom, sometimes tending towards discouragement or awakening creativity, inviting us to climb to the upper floors.
This palace is so big that, in order to better live in it, we should draw a plan with the names of the rooms and their keys, so that we may find the way to them when necessary.
The names of each compartment and their keys should be listed in the form of a dictionary—they have an emotional meaning associated with them, experienced in moments from the past. They are triggers that set off the emotions we see fit to feel in the present. They are switches that can illuminate our past life in order to discover and overcome obstacles.
Even though this palace is so big, you can get anywhere almost instantly using the lift provided by “imagination”.
There is nothing good, nothing bad about this compound. There are facilities that can be used for or against, according to our convenience.
They can save us or condemn us.
They can mean heaven or hell.
Throughout our lives, we can keep building, remodelling, or demolishing our palace. The building material is “feeling”.
The quality of the journey to our higher purpose depends on our ability to use the lift of “imagination”.
Knowing yourself means knowing your motivation palace.
Knowing how to recombine the memories we experience in them means discovering “motivation”.
This process is the most effective way of learning from the past. Living in the present and enlightening the future is “intelligence for getting things done”.
With our objectives in mind, consciously revisiting each of the compartments of the palace that life has built within us—as well as discovering new compartments—is like writing a dictionary that is useful for almost everything in life. It allows us to make powerful neuro-associations.
You can associate anything that you strongly desire with a moment of great pleasure, joy, euphoria, peace. If it is something that you do not desire, associate it with fear, anger, disgust, anguish, or any seriously painful emotion.
Check your dictionary, use the triggers, the anchors that will set off these moments, over and over again, until you achieve the results you want.
Being a problem builder or a solution builder depends on the ability to focus on the things you want.
The quality of your life will depend on your ability to improve your “motivation palace” using your imagination.
You can change beliefs. You can acquire or get rid of habits.
If you want to have a good life, invest in your memories. Relive them, write them down, collect them.
Specialise in yourself.
With the map that shows you the routes to take, and your dictionary under your arm, you will be able to withstand any kind of life.
In this dictionary, you should pay special attention to the moments that relate to purpose, commitment, determination, discipline, overcoming, resilience, imagination, focus, habits, routines and, above all, the courage to act.
Use golden keys to open these compartments. Take care of them as if they were sacred places.
Relive moments when you had the courage to train and use them. Moments when you succeeded or failed, because you acted or failed to act. Whenever you have or you recall an emotion while you are living life, hurry and open up a new room in your palace.
I do not wish to convince anyone.
You will be convinced once you start recalling your stories, once you know how to use them and start living the life you want.
To live is to know how to maintain good emotions. This can be done by opening your “motivation palace” on the page that suits you.
Remember that the things you currently have were once among the things you would like to have.
Do not spoil what you have by wishing for what you do not have.
IMAGINATION
Imagination is undoubtedly the greatest weapon for achieving almost anything; it is the fantastic transformative power of our lives, capable of transporting us through time and space instantaneously, travelling from the past to the future, from galaxies to universes, being in several places simultaneously, or obtaining miraculous cures.
We can make quantum phenomena real with it. There would be no science without it. We can frame dreams, live other lives, go from heaven to hell with it. We can sustain affections with it, preventing them from degrading over time. Knowing how to work with it is an indispensable skill, it is the necessary investment for those who believe in the future. It is the basis of creativity.
No battle can ever be won if we cannot imagine victory.
Using our imagination, we can turn problems into opportunities, pitfalls into stepping stones.
We can change beliefs, we can create different visions for the same event.
In short, we can make more pleasing associations with what needs to be done, or painful associations with what should not be done, creating difficult but necessary habits.
This is the best way to manage emotions. Imagination can transform undesirable emotions into pleasant or indifferent ones, as well as energy-consuming emotions into moderate ones. It can facilitate the forming of habits.
Have you ever noticed that when you have a thought, you are imagining it?
Imagination is our ability to tell stories to ourselves. We like stories and are often inspired by them. It is about anticipating scenarios and shifting focus.
And stories make us travel through the most diverse worlds.
One of the ways to train your imagination is:
Playing with it. Performing mental experiments, as if you were in a gym or a laboratory.
Recalling memorable events. Imagine the sensory details, visuals, sounds, odours, touch, and taste. Use all the senses. Make it as real as possible. Repeat it more than once, until it becomes a habit. Do this with other occasions in which you have felt emotions.
Imagine yourself achieving success (focus on the result). Imagine yourself overcoming hardships (focus on progress). Imagine the pleasure you will feel when you win, in such intensity that it outweighs the pain imposed by the hardships.
Think about what could happen if everything goes wrong. Do you accept the worst-case scenario? Or do you have an alternative? Imagine the outcome and focus on the action.
Imagination turns the impossible into the possible. It gives us wings to fly and get where we want to go.
Anyone who has ever experimented with achieving something they considered impossible will never forget it.
You will never have what you want. You can only have what you can visualise.
Everything that is real now was a creative thought once. Everything that is a creative thought can be real.
How do you train this?
Firstly, you need to understand how the human mind and consciousness work.
FOCUS
How many times have you been told that you need to focus?
Focusing is the homeostatic system's greatest ability. If it did not specialise in focusing on threats, no living being would exist.
The problem lies in having the ability to shift the focus from non-existent threats or harmful pleasures to the real needs of modern life.
Knowing how to shift your focus using your imagination is your Superpower. Focus on the task. On feeling. Listening attentively.
Where we place our focus, we place our attention. And the object of our attention will be lit up.
When we take our focus off our target, our mind wanders and ends up overwhelmed by all kinds of thoughts.
Attention and Focus are now considered to be the true intelligence.
Knowing how to shift your focus means being the master of your life. It is also a way of training multiple skills. It is about achieving better results. It is about being able to use saved time to build true happiness, prolonging the moments that you have lived and that you would wish to never end.
But how many people in your life have taught you how to do this?
If everyone acknowledges its importance, how come it is not a compulsory subject at school?
And why is it so difficult?
- Firstly, because when it is intentional, it uses up a lot of energy. You cannot stay focused for more than 10 to 20 minutes.
- Secondly, because we were never taught how to turn it into a habit.
- Also, because most of the methods we have tried are difficult.
- And finally, because we do not practise.
If you need to practise for six to eight hours a day to become a skilled sportsman, writer, pianist, or some other professional, imagine if we practised focus (concentration) for the same amount of time?
On the contrary, we practise distraction, digressing for an average of 16 hours a day.
And when we are distracted, we find ourselves in the past or the future. And this creates anxiety.
A wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
To be good at anything, you need to practise.
The analysis of the behaviour of ordinary people showed that they are interrupted between seven and eight times every hour. If we consider how many minutes each interruption lasts and how long it takes to get back to an adequate level of concentration, the result is an average of 10 hours of distraction. We can therefore conclude that we are pretty good at daily distraction.
Being able to busy yourself with what matters for the fulfilment of a task brings about radical changes. A chaotic mind brings about all sorts of problems.
It is desirable to maintain serenity while focusing on what is important amid difficulties.
We naturally reach this state during the first few months of training for war, without even intending to. Our (homeostatic) regulation system takes care of that. The focus required for action training forces us to detach ourselves from everything that is unimportant.
A good exercise for shifting focus is deep reading.
- Reading stimulates creativity and imagination.
- It helps to improve memory.
- It expands vocabulary and increases general knowledge.
- It helps to develop writing and logical thinking skills.
- It awakens critical thinking and promotes analytical flexibility.
- Reading can take the reader to different worlds and realities.
Those who practise meditation also achieve similar results after some time spent focusing on the present.
To be the master of your attention means to be the master of your life. Reminder: where your attention is, your emotions and energy will be.
IMPULSES
Stop and think before you act. When you feel an uncontrollable urge to do or say something, remember to calm down and reflect on it.
Close your eyes and take several deep breaths until you feel the tension leave your body. Breathing to relax: two short inhalations and one long exhalation.
Exercise to increase your VO2. Warm-up: 5 to 10 minutes to prepare your body for exercise. After the warm-up, do 10 to 30 seconds of high-intensity exercise (depending on your physical capacity). This could be a fast run, jumping jacks, or any other exercise that significantly raises your heart rate.
After the high-intensity interval, take one minute for recovery. This could be a brisk walk or a low-intensity exercise. Repeat the high-intensity and recovery intervals for around 20 to 30 minutes.
Finish your workout with a 5–10-minute cool-down. This could be a slow walk or some light stretching.
Count to 10. This is a simple but effective trick to save time and calm your mind. Increase the number if you need more time to think. Educate your inner voice, put it off for 10 minutes, days, weeks, months.
Ask yourself questions like these: “Will this help me achieve my goals?” “Will this make me feel better or worse afterwards?” “Will this hurt anyone?”
Reinforce positive impulses. Not all impulses are bad. Some can be creative, courageous, or generous. Recognise these impulses and celebrate them when you act on them.
Set clear and realistic goals. Set specific and measurable goals that create a sense of purpose and direction. This makes it harder to put off the necessary actions.
Distract yourself. Find something to take your mind off the impulse. It could be a pleasurable activity, such as reading a book, listening to music, or talking to someone. Or it could be something that requires concentration, like solving a puzzle.
Look for rational and positive alternatives. If you feel the urge to eat something high in calories to relieve your sadness, think of other ways to improve your mood, such as watching a comedy or calling a friend.
Understand your impulses. Know when and how they arise. Understand what triggers them and the consequences of giving in to them.
Examine your emotions. We often act on impulse to relieve negative feelings such as anxiety, anger, or boredom. Look for healthier ways to deal with these emotions.