What DRIVES You?

Fear of failure vrs Pleasure of Success

What Drives You? What motivates you? What keeps you going when you feel like giving up?

For some of you, this may sound like a trivial question but if you think about it critically, you’d realize the relevance or essence of a driving force. As human beings with ambitions, aspirations and goals, it is imperative that we have an impetus that would compel or more importantly propel us toward the achievement of whatever we set out to do. In difficult times, when you feel like you cannot continue any longer, when you think your ambitions are absurd and not leading anywhere, it is this strong force that can keep you going.

Just as it is vital to have a driving force, it is also of great consequence that you choose a very strong thrust that would not snap under the weight of persistent set backs. For most people either the fear of failing and being branded a failure or succeeding and enjoying the benefits of their success keeps them going.

So what drives you? That is the focus of our discussion today. You may be using any of the above as a driving force, consciously or unconsciously. The other purpose of this discussion is to
• help you identify which of the two forces would be stronger for you, to
• help you tailor/ streamline it to suit perfectly, and
• help you fortify the force to make it much stronger.

Let me bother you with another trivial question. If you had to choose between avoiding pain and gaining pleasure, what would you choose? Or let me put it this way. If there was something you could do to give you great pleasure, as opposed to doing something that would spare you great pain, which one would you love to do?
There is no right or wrong answer and no option is better than the other. It depends solely on the individual. In any case the most important thing to bear in mind is that the desire to avert pain or to gain pleasure should be so strong that nothing can stop you from attaining it. That is the quality of a good ‘driving force’.

At the end or the beginning of every year, we make several resolutions geared at making our lives better in the ensuing year, but sometimes as early as halfway through the first month, we find ourselves helplessly clinging to our old ways. If we are very strong, we may follow through to somewhere in the middle of the year and then the driving force would snap. Very few people are able to follow through to the last letter. We will talk about resolutions at another time but what I’m trying to send across is that most of us are not able to keep our resolutions simply because we don’t have a driving force or the driving force is too weak to withstand the pressures that troop in from the four corners of the world. The few people who are able to follow their resolutions are able to do so mostly because they have a very strong driving force that does not stagger under the weight of of strong antagonism.

....To Be CONTINUED...
Highlights for next week
*This is Pain. Hate it or Fear it!
*The Fear factor... etc