I’ve been struggling lately. My health both mental and physically has been all over the place. I can wake up and my body is ready to kick the days ass only to find my mental resilience somewhere in yesterday. On a day like today I went to the gym and worked as hard as I could because I was mentally on my game but my body just wasn’t having it. One of the things I’ve been trying to improve in myself is increasing my purpose. I hope you’ll consider doing the same by the end of this post!
When we talk about the roots of Motivation and Inspiration you will find them all over the place. Some are very personal and close to our being and others are general purpose ones like wanting to be sexy as fuck as a motivation to get into the gym. Benjamin Franklin said,”Do not squander time, for that is the stuff life is made of” and I’ve been struggling with this for some reason recently. I’m stuck in this paradox where I know that my body or my mind needs something like rest or to relax but I feel like I am not doing what I need to do. I had to remind myself that things like rest can be using your time wisely and efficiently before I was able to mentally put that stuff away.
Shit. I just realized some of you may not know the different between Motivation and Inspiration. Lets do that now. (These aren’t the full definitions but what we’re focusing on them for)
Motivation = the general desire or willingness of someone to do something
Inspiration = the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something
Let me break this down for you folks so you can understand the process, or at least how it works for me. I’m inspired by my daughter. She makes me want to be a better dad. To read about parenting and children’s milestones, and how to promote a healthy, happy, and awesome kid. Now I use my daughter along with my own personal drive as inspiration to maintain my motivation to go to the gym, to read more, to keep going when I want to stop, to do one more rep, or to generally keep failing forward no matter the physical or mental costs. They both work together. I’ve found that by increasing one you also increase the other. So to bring us back to the main topic, what does increasing my purpose have to do with this?
I’ve added a new part to my life equation. So now it looks like (My Purpose + Inspiration) + Motivation = Change/Results
So I tell myself things that increase my purpose. By increasing my purpose I’m also effecting my level of inspiration which in turn kicks my motivation into overdrive and always results in greater change! If you tell yourself that your purpose on this earth is to be (X – whatever it is for you) it is a much easier to fuel yourself because you’ve mentally incorporated these desires, goals, and thoughts into who you know you should be and want to be.
Thanks to the new people who’ve been showing up and sharing this stuff on Facebook and Twitter. I’m working on getting more content on here everyday guys. It’s just a 1 man show but we’re making progress together!