What's Your Motivating Driver?

Pain Relief or Potential?

I read a great article from Dr Tony Hayek, CEO of Blue Wealth Property on LinkedIn about the motivating drivers of the carrot or the stick, in other words motivation by reward and enticement or pain and fear.

That article lit a fire in my belly 🔥 about the motivating drivers to pursue personal growth and given my latest article entitled ‘It’s Time to Stand Tall’, I’m standing tall.

This is my 20th year as a coach. I’ve seen a lot.

I’ve seen the motivating factors.

And the consequences of the different drivers, and quite frankly this is something that has irked me for years.

Pain and fear is a powerful catalyst to open, to learn about self and to grow. It’s true that ‘sometimes we have to be shaken to awaken’. Crisis, chaos and calamity around relationship, health, career, money, business, death are very compelling motivating drivers and in my 20 years of coaching, I’ve had the privilege to hold truly life-changing transformation across all of these areas.

Pain and fear are freed and trust, faith, deservedness, authenticity and power are engaged through the portal of vulnerability and humility.

This renewed inner relationship is then reflected in external reality.

The transformation is complete.

Or is it???

Pain has been relieved.

Do we stop here?

Or is there more?

This is where I see the two motivating drivers very clearly.

Some will opt out (and thankfully only a few in my experience). They’ll disengage. The initiating cause to coach has been resolved. Pain has been relieved.

Quite honestly when this happens it makes me sad because I know they’ve cut themselves short. They’ve managed to dive under the whitewash but they’ve not opened themselves to the ocean. And it’s the ocean that personally calls me and calls me to adventure with others. This is where a life lived with no regrets is found.

For others, the transformation experience has been so fulfilling and recognising that they are an infinite being, they seek for more. They are inspired to dive deeper into the ocean. They are surrendered into the adventure of possibility. Indeed they may have a sense of what that ‘more’ is about, but because we work with the premise that ‘Love has bigger plans for us than the plans we’ve made for ourselves’ and the process is intuitively lead, we don’t have the ability to ‘exactly’ know what will unfold. And if we did, we would be limiting the experience.

Letting go of control and surrendering into the mystery is where the adventure exists and gives us so much more than we could ever anticipate.

I share the fire in my belly 🔥 with you today to have you consider the following.

What is your motivating driver for personal growth?

Is it Pain Relief or ‘Dharma’ and Potential?

If it is Pain Relief, I invite you to observe a perhaps unconscious need to control the process, or a sense of righteousness, or an undeservedness, and perhaps you’ve made ‘good enough to be good enough’ as I wrote about in one of my previous articles.

Has life become good enough because you don’t have acute pain?

Is this all that you are worthy of?

If you believe that the purpose of life is to know who we really are, as I do, be careful to not set yourself up for pain to be your only catalyst.

If it is Dharma and Potential, I applaud your faith in Love’s plans. I applaud your devotion and your capacity to surrender into the unknown. I applaud your sense of presence that you walk with every day, not just when you ‘need’ to because pain motivates you to do so. In this orientation the motivating driver of pain is superseded by many other more enjoyable catalysts - the desire to be and experience more, the desire for contribution, purpose and meaning, connection and communion with others, joy and happiness, the desire to follow the intuitive pull, to be a leader in the family, to be the generational remedy, to leave a legacy that you’re proud of……

With love,

Gisele