The Why Factor: How Knowing Your Purpose Can Boost Your Success
Understanding My Motivation
Your ambitions propel your momentum, but knowing your internal desires drive your purpose and attract soulful opportunities to you. Are you wondering if you’re taking the right approach towards fulfilling your goals?
You’ve most likely been in a situation when you’ve executed a big idea backed up by so much passion, optimism and excitement! That big idea could have been: a business idea that could have helped you leave your 9-5 job, a healthy living plan aimed towards losing unhealthy pounds, starting a Facebook group dedicated towards personal growth or starting a non-profit to help vulnerable groups of people bounce back into society. Whatever your idea was, no doubt you had big plans behind your execution. You probably expected many others to share the same excitement and ambition as you, but as you quickly may have found out, your idea didn’t gain a lot of popularity or attention. No doubt you placed good intention into it - all for the betterment of others. You were in the mindset, ‘if I build it, they will come.’ You put in a lot of money towards developing a fancy website, and dedicated a lot of your time creating attention grabbing social media posts, but your idea no longer seemed like a big idea as nobody came. It quickly became an idea with little impact and your motivation took a beating…
NO IDEA IS A BAD IDEA
Maybe you’ve turned your back on your big idea, maybe you’ve lost motivation all together, maybe you feel as if you’ve lost credibility amongst your circle. These aren’t good reasons to give up on something that you were once excited about. It’s true, no idea is a bad idea. What you need to do is to go back to that very moment when your big idea was blossoming.
Write down all the feelings and emotions that you were feeling.
Provide details about the type(s) of people your idea could benefit. What age group? What gender(s)? What types of personalities and characteristics do these people have?
Understand the needs of the people that your big idea is meant to benefit.
Research people that have a similar big idea as you and who have been successful at implementing it. How were they able to gain loyalty?
BECOMING AWARE OF YOUR MOTIVATIONS
Gaining clarity on how you were initially motivated to pursue your big idea can be a game changer. Ask yourself, which one of these two types of motivations were steering you:
Internal - developed through your inner passions, beliefs and values. The most powerful type of motivation because it fuels your creativity, it’s authentic to who you are, and you can successfully cultivate it on your own.
Extrinsic - driven by extrinsic rewards by the world around you such as: recognition, money, and popularity. This type of motivation is temporary and you feel challenged each time an extrinsic reward wears off.
There has been a numerous amount research done citing that intrinsic motivation ultimately leads to insurmountable success for an individual. Today, there is also neurological evidence that behaviours triggered by intrinsic motivation increase activity in the mid-brain (in the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula).* causing dopamine, a feel good hormone to be released.
