The first secret to building everlasting motivation is to go deep within and discover a deeply personal wound that needs healing. But that’s not the only secret. When you know and apply the seven secrets to building everlasting motivation, what can stop you?
The secrets to building everlasting motivation will help you jump out of bed in the morning, ready to go, and comfort your soul when barriers seem immovable. Remember that they never are – it’s only a matter of innovation between you and progress. Before innovation, motivation.
Building Everlasting Motivation
Since I was a child, I remember wanting to see a book with my name on the cover, tangible proof, held in my hands, that my words mattered, that my opinion had value, maybe even my insights profound, and with hope, my message meaningful.
Today, I know the object and the deduction are not related, but the child in me still wants to be an author, even if it doesn’t mean anything. Even if it means meeting and greeting beyond my safe circle of one.
Time must be spent doing something, and, by all accounts, it appears to be a good fit between what is required of me and what I want to do: to widen my world and attempt to master the craft of communication.
This blog is in pursuit of my goal of becoming an author, in a dedicated and disciplined practice building the skills, the platform, and the connections to get there.
We all break through to our dreams; this I believe, while still working my way there.
(When are we done? When we take our last breath. Knowing how the news systems work, I know that if I do so stunningly, the world might find its way here through the headlines, though I hope to take matters into my own hands so such divine interventions are not required. Your intervention is highly welcomed, and I thank you for sharing from the bottom of my heart.)
Trust the process. These three words I found scribbled in the margin of my old notebooks from work. As an internal consultant, I’d be introduced to a business team, and they were told I was there to optimize things. They heard job cuts, new technology, or other unwelcome change coming, and they looked at me and knew who to blame.
Countering Pervasive Expectations
Instead, I’d help those underappreciated hard workers figure out what mattered, how to see disruptions coming, and what to do to stave them off, rather than running from crisis to crisis. How to manage, in a nutshell, but don’t tell them that because they’ve all taken management training courses, and this wasn’t that.
It was all very confusing and difficult for everyone, in the murk of expectations, genuinely innovative ways of doing things, and all the emotional ties everyone has to power, money, and relationships.
Knowing my success depended on my confidence, I projected like an Oscar-winning actress, yet in my notebooks, trying to direct the chaos into predictable processes, I wrote notes to myself in the margins. Trust the process.
One day, while waiting for feedback during a critical, don’t-fail-me-now, hands-off test, trusting the process involved repeating that mantra to myself as I sipped my tea lightly laced with rum. Ohmmm. Trust the process. Ohhm…trust the process.
It worked. It always works. Trust is must easier with experience. Trust with the proof of experience becomes something that looks like an unmanaged, unhinged, unmitigated risk of a disaster to the undoctrinated.
And there’s always an undoctrinated executive at the controls who swoops in and hits the big ol’ stop button before that anxiety passes; before the clouds part, before the success swoops in and makes it all worthwhile.
The moment of possible change passes, and the status quo resumes.
Those who remember, have faith and trust the process retire, move on, and long forget the memory of way back when.
Resisting Prevalent Insanity
I might be one of the last who remember the magic of the way of perseverance, because there is a way, and all else might be useless persistence, the insanity of trying the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result because you can’t see that they are indeed, the same.
I can teach you about variation, and what looks like it, but isn’t. For this one concept might be the most powerful thing I’ve ever learned, along with the experiment that proved that you can’t get rid of it, you can only reduce it to its bare minimum, and if you force it, squeeze it, or don’t allow for it, all chaos will break loose, and it will all hit the fan.
Prevalent insanity is acting like people have will over it, and always want more than is currently attainable within the current systems. They exert their will through social pressure, and there you go – a lie, a weak link, a betrayal, a simple mistake pushing people beyond their limits. Relying on memories to be complete and perfect, expecting people to be logical robots. Both concepts belong in the dark ages if you follow the science.
People are emotional, fallible, and have limits. Systems are built to support and elevate, but prevalent insanity is firing and recruiting for a better person, or prematurely forgiving and forgetting. Wait, now, something needs to be done; more than one thing, and to the system we go. But prevalent insanity is not having any system whatsoever.
Some workplaces have everything in someone’s head. I’ve met those people and they call it professional security, but as a process engineer, I can take that person out and know exactly what belongs in the piece of the puzzle.
Preventing Predominant Chaos
Every business, organization, and process is a puzzle. Organization in the chaos of connecting the dots between the customer and their satisfaction at the end of the interaction. Or at least, there’s an ideal to aim for and measure against. But like all scales, you may not want to know, while everyone else will be able to hazard a safe guess.
Online reviews and social media means that everyone can do good research on any company prior to deciding to spend money there. They decide price, quality, social values, or any number of individual things or combination of them. The choice is personal, but we are all consumers.
Many of us are or were workers. I used to attach my identity to my workplace, an extension of who I was based on where I worked. When I felt shame, embarrassment, or guilt by what I did at work, I would quit.
I fully understand the concept of creating a wall between the two of me, but I don’t think that’s good for society. I say that as I hear more and more people say, “Don’t blame me, I just work there.”
If you ask me, that’s not working very hard, although I know that knowledge work doesn’t come with the sweat of physical work, so it’s difficult to tell when you are working hard. If you are just going through the motions, you aren’t engaging the most important muscle of knowledge work – your brain.
Creating Accessible Content
As long as I have time left, and ambition to write, I will describe, explain, clarify, illustrate and whatever else I can do to explain this way of perseverance, the one that helps businesses crush sudden tariffs, that helps workers thrive at work instead of just going there, and helps me, as a consumer, not have to leave so disappointed, angry, and frustrated so often.
I think it matters, and I think it might be up to me.
Another one of the secrets to building everlasting motivation is to believe that humanity might depend on you – and I’m sure every human being has their own role to play, and it’s up to each of us to find it.
Keep going until you do. Focus when you find it. Get productive and streamlined. Solve problems and innovate. Build and sustain the systems that support practical perfection.
The way of perseverance is to pick yourself up when you’ve fallen. Along the way, you learn a lot about who this “you” is that you are picking up. You start to realize this is a process of refinement: as you change a little every time, on purpose and through life lessons, you become more authentic, influential, and intentional in everything you do.
At resilienceimagined.com, I thought of resilience as bouncing forward rather than back, because sometimes there is nothing to return to. There are endings in life, and you must carry on. There is unfairness, and mistreatment, and what is justice, when locking someone else away has zero impact on my life?
Today, I realize that the resilience I imagined is the underside of perseverance. You rest, reflect, and recover with resilience. Not out, just down, and not for the count, just for now.
With Gratitude to the Alter Ego
One of the devices I used was to adopt an alter ego. Rayne Wordsmith took me far; today, I embrace the only name that my cells recognize when it’s called from across the room. The name I needed to use when applying to a writing contest, no pen names allowed.
So be it then; I knew it wasn’t going to last forever. The internet sleuths are too good; dots are never that well hidden. I watched Northern Perspective go from a cartoon Cipher and Fox to real-life Ryan and Tanya to unemployed Ryan and Tanya to Ryan and Tanya having a sizeable influence on Canadian democracy.
Of course, there’s a point when it’s shocking, and you miss your day job, but one day, you wouldn’t change it for the world. Keep going if you aren’t there yet; polish your tactics and hone your skills, and it’s a matter of time.
Then, with a refreshed strategy, a refined skillset, and a resolute attitude, you try again. But you already know that strategy, skillset, and attitude are three key secrets to building everlasting motivation.
With Rest and Repair
And so, I try again, to build the platform I need to achieve that dream of holding a book in my hands that matters, to dedicate myself to learning how to communicate my message in a way that can be understood, applied, and leveraged by anyone who wants to learn the quiet power of perseverance; the process I’ve learned to trust, the process I’ve aimed to teach, document, and support, because when nothing can keep you down, what can stop you?
What if you aren’t stopped, but in rest and repair, patching up your perseverance with resilience, biding your time to start again? Allowing yourself to take breaks prevents burnout and is a well-kept secret to building everlasting motivation.
When is the best time to start again? Maybe on a Monday, with the start of a fresh week? Why not with a new moon, as we’ve just had on May first? Why not today, and may the force be with you, should you wish for a spiritual, invisible, helping hand, or at least, wouldn’t turn one away.
Trust the process. It’s the final secret to building everlasting motivation. Belief, faith, and most importantly, tried and true.
Let me show you how.
With Pointed Clarity
The seven secrets to building everlasting motivation are:
- Childhood craving
- Personalize accountability
- Plan a strategy
- Learn the required skills
- Harden your attitude
- Take breaks
- Trust the process
Do you have any secrets of your own to share? How do you keep going and going and going while knowing that you aren’t insanely hoping that things will work out differently this time? If you have tips to add, please let me know in the comments below. Thank you for your contribution to this effort!
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