The Driving Forces That Shape Your Life
Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.
What are the driving forces that shape your life everyday?
Humans are not random creatures. Everything we do is done for a reason.
The driving forces that control us are pain and pleasure.
Everything you and I do, we do either out of a need to avoid pain or our desire to gain pleasure.
Procrastination
Why don’t you do the things you know will benefit you?
Even though you know the action would benefit you, you fail to act simply because, in that moment you associate more pain to doing what’s necessary than missing the opportunity.
There’s always a fear of the unknown. A fear that there my be pain waiting for us right around the next corner.
For most people, the fear of loss is much greater than the desire for gain.
The Emotional Threshold
This is the point where you hit a level of pain that you aren’t willing to settle for anymore.
This is GREAT, because the pain will now drive us to take new action and produce new results.
Our desire to remove pain from our lives.
We learn in life, what creates pain and what creates pleasure. This is highly subjective.
What you link pain to and what you link pleasure to shapes your destiny.
If we link massive pain to any behavior or emotional pattern, we will avoid indulging in it at all costs. We can use this understanding to harness the force of pain and pleasure to change virtually anything in our lives.
“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself but to your own estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment” Marcus Aurelius.
What drives our behavior is instinctive reaction to pain and pleasure, not intellectual calculation. We are not driven so much by what we know intellectually, but rather by what we’ve learned to link pain and pleasure to in our nervous systems.
Although we’d like to believe it’s our intellect that really drives us, in most cases our emotions are what truly drive and move us.
In order for change to last, we must link pain to our old behavior and pleasure to our new behavior, the behavior that we want.
We can learn to condition our minds, bodies, and emotions to link pain or pleasure to whatever we choose. By changing what we link pain and pleasure to, we will instantly change our behaviors.
Any time we’re in an intense emotional state, when we’re feeling strong sensations of pain or pleasure, anything unique that occurs consistently will become neurologically linked.
A great example of this is the story of Pavlov’s dogs.
During the 1890s Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov was looking at salivation in dogs in response to being fed, when he noticed that his dogs would begin to salivate whenever he entered the room, even when he was not bringing them food.
In an experiment, he started to use a bell every time he fed the dogs.
Whenever he gave food to his dogs, he also rang a bell. After a number of repeats of this procedure, he tried the bell on its own. As you might expect, the bell on its own now caused an increase in salivation.
So the dog had learned an association between the bell and the food and a new behavior had been learned.
Be aware of the power that pleasure and pain have over every decision you make.
“I conceive that pleasures are to be avoided if greater pains be the consequence, and pains to be coveted that will terminate in greater pleasures” Michel De Montaigne.
Most of us base what we do off of our short term views rather than our long term views. That’s why long term goals are so much harder to envision and that much harder to attain.
It’s not actual pain that drives us, but our fear of something will lead to pain. And it’s not actual pleasure that drives us, but our belief that somehow taking a certain action will lead to pleasure.
We are not driven by reality, but by our perception of reality.
Remember anything you want that’s valuable requires that you break through some short term pain in order to gain long term pleasure. Any type of discipline requires breaking through pain.
Why do people persist in an unsatisfying relationships, unwilling to work toward solutions or end it and move on? It’s because they know changing will lead to the unknown, and most people believe that the unknown will be much more painful than what they’re already experiencing.
Most of the things that are valuable in our lives require us to go against the basic conditioning of our nervous systems.
Here is an exercise for you to do.
Write down four actions that you need to take that you’ve been putting off.
Under each action, write down the answer to the following questions:
1. Why haven’t I taken this action?
2. In the past, what pain have I linked to taking this action?
3. Write down all the pleasure you’ve had in the past by indulging in this negative pattern.
4. Write down what it will cost you if you don’t change. (Use pain as your friend here).
5. Write down all the pleasure you’ll receive by taking each of these actions right now.
If we can learn the associations we have with pain and pleasure, and start applying these same principles as Pavlov did, we can change our whole life.
Just as an athlete can train his body to perform at a certain level, so he can attain the success in his field he wants to attain, so you and I can also do, to reach our goals and dreams, and the success we are longing to achieve.
Yes You Can My Friend!
Use the driving forces that shape your life to work for you to attain the success you deserve.
You are a winner!
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