You just aced that test or you received a raise at work and your hearts pumping really quickly. Your mind’s racing; “I’ll go to the gym today”, “I’ll ace the next test too”, “I’ll eat a crap ton of junk food tonight”. Whatever it might be that you’re thinking, your power bar inside your mind is at 100% and there’s nothing you couldn’t do that in that moment. What if there were other ways to fill that bar to 100%? What if motivators weren’t the only ones?
Think back to the last time you were scared or angry or depressed etc. Didn’t those moments also feel like you have so much power? I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say it’s all about emotion. It’s all about how these motivators make you feel. I mean think about it. The greatest motivators I can think of are a death of a family member, or having a gun to your head or even a breakup. What if it isn’t the word, “motivation” that we’re looking for, but instead “emotion”.
Anger is a powerful emotion. As much as we want to beat the living crap out of our bully, we unfortunately can’t. But the thing about anger or any strong emotion for that matter is that it isn’t like motivators. For emotion, that bar will stay at 100% until you do something about it (motivators like acing a test will eventually reach 0% after a couple of hours). If you sleep on anger, you’ll wake up angry or if you cry yourself to sleep, you’ll wake up sad the next day. The emotion will persist until your friend makes you smile or you spend an hour in the gym to get that anger out.
This can be another tool for us. I’m not encouraging you to get your dad into a car accident or mess with someone and get a gun pointed to your head, please don’t. I’m just suggesting that we recognize what these events are for how powerful they are. Let’s look at them in a different light and be ready for them the next time they come back. But like I said these emotions are powerful and instead of spending a day with a friend and laughing (although I support that), let’s instead do something we could never get ourselves to do.
Since we’re all about taking baby steps here, let’s make a little plan. Let’s plan out our next big emotion. For example in my case: next time I’m depressed, I’ll do what I can to start an Instagram. That’ll include message my sister, since she’s big on that, and ask her about the basics (how can I take a nice profile picture), what kind of filters etc. You do the same. Like I said, that bar isn’t leaving 100% until you do something about it. I mean you know that to be true because you thought back to a time you were angry or depressed and knew you had to do something about it to get it off your shoulders.
So this is what they meant about each and everyone of us having the power inside ourselves. Let’s put it to the test, I personally want to know how powerful I am. Oh, and here’s a little extra motivator (a song) that helped me through an amazing arm workout today: Pumping Adrenaline 1 – Niklas Gustavsson. Hopefully it has the same effect on you that it did on me.
Road to Happiness 