Movement Away From Pain.

Movement Toward Pleasure.

All innovation and achievement comes from one of those two sources of motivation. Let's take a closer look at how these two sources work.

Movement away from pain: When you are experiencing something in your life that causes pain, you eventually reach a point where you will not take it any more, and thus become motivated or determined to make a change. This pain can be in many forms, it could be a relationship that is strained, a physical disorder, a case of depression, anxiety, confusion, etc. It could be any number of things, including vulnerability. Once you become determined to change this circumstance or emotion or reality, you begin to take action. The catalyst for this action, or the motivator is the pain (frustration, confusion, irritation, etc) you are experiencing.

However, the reason motivation sometimes does not last, and you need to re-motivate yourself is that once the pain is gone, you often stop making the change, and go back to your old ways. You had a pain, you changed something, saw a manifestation of a different life, got comfortable, and now the pain is starting to reappear. When motivated by pain you get fast results, but often the effect is not as long lasting. This is because the further you get from the pain, the less you become motivated. In other words, your motivator disappears.

This is where the second form of motivation needs to come into play.

Movement toward pleasure: When you take the time to take stock of your life and determine what it is that you want, you can use those desires to get motivated. Usually the way this form of motivation works is that you write down your goals: financial, relationship, education, general, etc. It really does not matter what your goals are, what matters is that you have them. Once you have your goals set, you change your actions to help you achieve them. Thus, your motivator is pleasure: a better job, a bigger house, a kinder spouse, etc.

After some time, usually longer than the previous example of a pain motivator, you start to see some of this new life manifesting itself. However, in some cases this form of motivation starts to fail as well because the results are too slow.

So, now that you know how you get motivated, to get pleasure, or avoid pain, you can use this idea and combine the two to get and stay motivated to get better things for your life, and experience less of the painful, frustrations.

Being, staying, and feeling motivated is a foundational element of success, change, and happiness. Knowing what you want, and what you don't want are key to motivation.