My Best Self 101 Blog
Motivation is a fundamental driving force that pushes people towards achieving their goals and fulfilling their aspirations. However, staying motivated can be challenging, especially when faced with life's everyday struggles and distractions.Today I wanted to talk about how to become motivated, flourish, and live with engagement by utilizing the resources found in MyBestSelf101, 10 Overlooked Truths About Taking Action, and Atomic Habits by James Clear.
Values are the deepest desires of your heart—they provide a scaffolding for how you want to interact with others, yourself, and the world in general. Values are typically described as one-word “core virtues” or “ethics” that capture what a person wants their life to be about. They are meant to provide meaningful direction and joy along the way instead of putting emphasis solely on the outcome. In short, defining your values, learning to effectively live them, and actively refining them can be ways out of the incessant future-based goals mentality that can bog down our daily efforts.
Put simply, self-efficacy is the amount of belief that you have in your own capabilities. Whether it be public speaking, making a friend, or creating a business, we instinctively set goals to seek personal growth. We cannot attain these goals without believing in ourselves. Sure, it may seem cliché. You’ve heard “believe in yourself,” “be confident,” and “trust in yourself” predictably plastered into your perceptive field, right? Even so, we need such confidence now more than ever.
So, according to Campbell, we like to read, watch, and learn about heroes because their mythical quest stands in for the psychological journey that we take every day. At the same time, Campbell points out that we are usually unaware of this journey, so we often take steps in the wrong direction. We are the detoured hero, distracted by side quests that prevent us from achieving our ultimate self-development goals.
So, when you are struggling with feeling like you need to be perfect, think about why you are feeling that way. Is it for other people? Are you setting goals and trying to accomplish things so that you will gain the satisfaction of others? If you are, try setting different types of goals that focus on becoming better at something for yourself rather than for others.
Instead of measuring our success by the number of things we finish and the destinations we reach, why don’t we learn to enjoy the process and journey of becoming who we want to be as we move closer towards those life-long goals of discovering what matters most to us? This is what describes a values-driven life.
The greatest news of all is that with a solid plan you can stop thinking ahead and start participating in the present. After all, goals are only accomplished through our work in the present! Stay mindful, savor the journey, have self-compassion, and you can be happy on the way to achieving personal growth, not just once you get there.
