Are you aligned to achieve your maximum potential?

Your Daily Points

Let’s say you have 100 units of energy, each morning, when you wake up. You have access to these points of energy on any given day, once you use them, they are gone until the next day. You can use these units to live your life as you please. It’s your choice how you use them. You can use them to maintain the status quo and struggle OR for to follow your calling and transformation.

Three Sources of Motivation

You have your biological needs to fulfil. It’s fair to say, some of your energy is directed to maintaining these urges.

You also have a second directive, to avoid pain and gain rewards, the fear of taxes and being shunned and the potential of a bonus in your pay check or gaining praise for doing the ‘right thing’ does create an impact in your life. To sustain this paradigm, you expend further energy in maintain it.

Past that, as many scholars have pointed out, you have an urge to find meaning and contribute to something greater than yourself. Abraham Maslow called this ‘self-actualization’, our ability and innate desire to fulfil our greatest inner potential. In his words, ‘what humans can be, they must be.’

As Daniel Pink points out in Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, similarly shares, “The science shows that the secret to high performance isn’t our biological drive or our reward-and-punishment drive, but our third drive—our deep-seated desire to direct our own lives, to extend and expand our abilities, and to make a contribution.”  In summary, he makes the case that society has moved beyond Motivation 1.0: biological urges direct us, to Motivation 2.0: rewards and punishments shape us and direct us, to Motivation 3.0: intrinsic motivation based on autonomy, mastery and purpose guide our choices. Ultimately, putting consistent focus and effort aligned with your calling yields your greatest fulfilment.

However, our society, including business, schools, government, economics and other major systems that we depend on, are still primarily using the older paradigm of Motivation 2.0. Many of us stuck straddling both uncomfortably. Luckily, individuals and organizations alike, have been making the switch. With each unit being carefully considered and reallocated.

Each unit of energy represents the focus you must give to life.  It is the mental and emotional energy that available to you to navigate life, maintain your wellbeing, and growth. According to Don Miguel Ruiz, author of The Four Agreements, we unwittingly and unnecessarily waste our precious energy in maintaining ‘agreements’ with through our thoughts, beliefs, actions, relationships and intentions. He recommends self-awareness and self-reflection to be investigators in our life and observe where we are spending our 100 units. Awareness and clarity is the first step to true, lasting transformation.

How Are You Using Your 100 Points?

Survival

• Essential tasks to maintain your needs for biological needs, security, and sex
• Chronic stress, exhaustion and lifestyle habits that do not sustain you. Falling asleep in pure exhaustion.
• Taking care of family members and their needs
• Allowing fears and your basic need for survival to hijack your agenda

Pain avoidance / pleasure seeking

• Relationships, work, and lifestyle choices that preserve your sense of self-esteem and love.
• Working in a job for the pay check, bonuses or benefits, literally counting down minutes until you can go home.
• Maintaining past beliefs, expectations, conditioning from parents, teachers and society
• Addictions including social media television, drama, drugs, alcohol, sugar
• Traffic, slow lines, slow Wi-Fi, your partner or child leaving a mess for you to clean up. Allowing little things, that are not in your control to test your patience and wear you down.
• No time again for your own self-care, a walk, time for meditation, that book on your bedside table with the bookmark on page 4, to maintain the status quo
• Maintaining a grudge with a loved one or someone that you need to let go from your life for fear of upsetting the apple cart
• Email, texts, phone calls, scrapbooks, unread magazines and mail, pending work, a stack of dirty dishes in the sink, that pile of mending you’ve been meaning to get to, all vying for your attention.
• Filing your taxes at the last-minute deadline to avoid penalties
• Avoiding your own self-care, a walk, time for meditation, or any activity that causes clarity, growth and the need for change
• Self-sabotaging behaviors that keep you stuck
• Seeking significance from your image, status, position, possessions, emotions and struggles

Your Calling

• Knowing your calling and taking consistent action towards it.
• Risking true intimacy and authenticity to create long-lasting, meaningful relationships
• Being of service to a cause greater than yourself
• Working on a hobby, building a business or self-improvement endeavours
• Leaving a legacy of impact and contribution
• Seeking growth as an inside-out process, essential to our evolution

Often, we put much of our energy in doing the things we need to maintain our current lifestyle. Then, beleaguered, we wonder why we aren’t feeling fulfilled? When is there time left in your life to pursue a calling, undertake personal growth, and make the impact you know you came to make? Just to be clear, there is no judgement if these are showing up. I have faced these in my own life and many of my clients have struggled with them as well. Clarity can give you an insight on how aligned you are with your calling and gives you the awareness to align your focus to your fullest potential.

Over to You

Track where you are expending your 100 daily units in your life for the next few days. Put your ‘scientist’ hat on and collect some data. Approach this activity from a place within yourself of no judgement. It’s a chance to find data without the focus of worry, labelling ‘mistakes’, or murkiness. Clarity comes from seeing the Truth (with a capital ‘T’). We cannot change what we do not see or acknowledge.

Areas that you might consider mapping out and focusing on: Finances/Wealth, Health/Wellbeing, Purpose, Work/Career, Relationships, Contribution/Legacy, Play/Leisure, Education/Growth.

Go with your style! Anything goes from taking mental notes to sharing with a buddy to a play-by-play in a journal to making an excel graph.

Finally, once you have collected the data consider the following questions.

• What do you notice?
• What are you doing well?
• Where do you need to reallocate your resources?
• What can you let go of?
• What’s next?

The science shows that we are all wired for intrinsic motivation, however, many of us are caught up in the paradigm of the carrot and stick mentality. As you use this data to recalibrate your trajectory, consider the source of your inspiration—purpose, mastery and autonomy are far more satisfying in the long run.