‘The single most important factor in any company, is the people who work in it.’
Duncan Bannatyne
Everything has a price.
It could be time, it could be money, it could be discomfort, embarrassment, it could be self-denial, humility, even humiliation, or some other kind of self-sacrifice.
But everything worthwhile has some price. And how we think about, feel about, the desired outcome , is usually what determines how we feel about the price. If we’re wishy-washy in our feelings about our goals, whatever needs to be done can be daunting, even prohibiting.
If we have a very strong desire about the projected outcome, the price may appear small, incidental even.
That’s motivation. It works both ways.
To be motivated is to be moved, stirred, inspired, to do something that will cause an effect; it’s an emotional response.
We like to see ourselves as mature, rational, logical, clear-thinking adults, unaffected by emotion in our decisions and perceptions, that we live by the intellect and not by the heart. That’s mainly because we’ve been educated to think that that’s the ultimate truth.
But it’s not the whole truth.
The term ‘Emotional Intelligence’ would have been considered almost unacceptable as recently as a decade ago. We would have asked how emotion and intelligence could be compatible. Oil and water don’t mix. And the use of emotion and the use of intelligence were considered to be mutually exclusive, an oxymoron.
I believe the main reason for this was that the word emotion was associated with a kind of whimsical mindlessness, that to be emotional was ok for soft, irrational, woolly-headed people, people who up to a generation ago were thought to be not of the calibre of the full-blooded, hard-driven, decisive and all-conquering James Bond kind of He-Man. Success in any area of life was generally thought to be the product of Superior Intellect and Brute Force.
Again, not the whole truth.
Women are finally being given the equality they want and deserve. Successful people in any field speak of how they achieved what they did, by the power of how they felt, about a person, a county, a country, an ideal, something that motivated them to do whatever they had to do to affect their achievement.
What they thought about it intellectually may have been in accord with the feeling, but it would have been the emotion that drove them to action. Over the past decade, the power of emotion has come to be recognised in any endeavour. And about time too.
Which brings us back to price.
When we’re moved, motivated, driven, we’re much more likely to persevere in any undertaking. And because of that emotion, that motivation, we’re much more likely to come to any task with a will, a drive, a force, whatever the task may be.
In any event in life, anything to which you need to apply yourself, find reasons, when you’re starting, why that particular project inspires you. Let yourself think about it, how you feel about it, what it means to you.
Be distinctly personal about it.
Find what it means to you, let yourself become come aware of the strength of feeling you have about it, and then, when you’ve decided that that is what you intend, go to it, with a will, and see it through.
Read this again.
If you need confirmation of this, reflect on some event in your life when you went beyond the perceived boundaries, when you searched for, and found, resources you didn’t know existed, when you did what you had to do, needed to do, and then saw that event through to its conclusion.
Then, and this is key to the whole process, capture the feeling, the emotion, the sense of drive and energy that pervaded every cell of your existence, and let yourself feel the strength of that feeling again.
Do that daily. And while you’re doing it, apply it to whatever you’re doing now. Like most people who’ve done this with a bit of a will, you’ll see the difference.
You’ll find that what you may have considered to be a price,
is in fact, a privilege.
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