Your Noble Mind
Warning: This website may change your mind.
Building Resilient Motivation.
What follows is the beginnings of a general approach to understanding and supporting our own internal motivations that, when working appropriately, produce our behaviour and allow us to define objectives and achieve those objectives.
Libraries of books have been produced on how to generate motivation and how to achieve our objectives. Many, many, managerial courses have been created to allow groups of people in organisations to work effectively together as a team to achieve statements of objective. There is nothing wrong, nor out-dated, about these books and courses. Each has something to offer in what seems like a complex field of study and practise.
My aim here is to identify a basic "pathway" that is, I suggest, used by our brain that naturally triggers motivational energy and focuses our interests through many of the situations that we face on a day-to-day basis. This "pathway" is flexible and we will tend to be aware of different parts of the "pathway" as individuals and in different situations.
Knowledge of our in-built motivations are most important when we are considering our major life choices. It is our major life choices that can most benefit from taking notice of the whole of our H I Mind Focuses, and particularly our Noble Focus. It is our Noble Focus that is able to consider choices and potential benefits that offer more than simple selfish advantage. But whether we are making simple everyday choices or potentially life-changing options, I believe that we follow a single main mental path to recognise possibilities, take notice of them, and eventually decide whether or not to engage with them.
I call this path the "Noble Pathway". "Pathway" points to the process that we go through each time we choose to do something (or behave in a certain way). "Noble" points to the benefit of engaging our more selfless imagination when it comes to important life choices and the potential higher reward (or otherwise) of our choosing wisely.
I believe that we actually follow this self-same route each and every time that we consciously choose to engage in a particular activity or behaviour. The actual time (attention) that we spend in each phase of this process will be different each and every time, but the basic phases remain the same. In what follows I attempt to identify a single pathway of events but in actuality I am aware that the sequence of events can change, or we can stop and restart and work out way along this pathway in a variety of ways. I present a single pathway as a simplification so that we can better understand that there will be times when we get stuck, or lose our way, or have to change our own appreciation of our wants and our capabilities. This necessary flexibility builds resilience.
Unconscious and Conscious Noticing.
Stage 1 of the Noble Pathway can be a largely unconscious process. For minor everyday wants and choice-making, we are not always very aware that anything is going on. In fact, the first stage of the Noble Pathway is based on the way that we process sensory input; something appears in our field of vision, or a particular smell gets our attention for example. our subconscious processing identifies something as offering a possibility for personal benefit.
It all starts with a recognition of possibility.
This follows on to an assessment of opportunity.
Once we have possibility and opportunity then we may experience curiosity, which is the way that we engage with future potential.
Out of curiosity, we may grow interest, which brings the focus of our attention to the opportunity and the potential consequences of following this particular opportunity.
In many cases, it is only at around this stage that our consciousness starts to get involved. Depending on what else is going on, we may notice that we 'want' something or that our attention has been drawn to a particular possibility, and it may that we will then consciously go back to consider possibility and opportunity to confirm the realistic value of our 'want'.
Once we have established interest then we can begin to build anticipation which will lead on to our ability to make a judgement about the possibility that we have been (perhaps unconsciously) considering. Anticipation can fall into three areas: The opportunity represents a problem or something potentially threatening (a fear), or an I don't-care option, or a want. If it ends up as a want, then we are likely to act on this possibility. Otherwise, not.
Each of these phases, between possibility and evaluating whether or not we 'want' to act, will be different. Often we will skip through the first stages and only become aware of the decision whether to act or not. Whether to repeat our old habit or not.
The earlier that we can work out what is going on, the better our chance of changing our final behaviour. In order to resist temptation or to change our 'normal' behaviour, the sooner that we can interrupt this pathway the better.
Still working on this....
Another way to think about this is that the automatic temptation generated by our Subconscious taps into our anticipation process creating emotions that grow more intense over time.
Aspiration can start with the recognition of a possibility or opportunity, followed by a raising of curiosity and interest. Once our curiosity and interest are roused then more directed emotion starts to be generated and anticipation can turn into thirst (anticipated exhilaration), intense curiosity (lust/avarice/compulsion), apprehension (fear/terror/dread), aversion (boredom/disgust), or foreboding (doom). The feelings of anticipation become strong and range from enticing excitement (where we anticipate a reward) through to fear (we anticipate loss/pain).
With temptations, we are likely to get both types of anticipatory emotion in different situations: we want the reward promised by the temptation and fear the loss/pain/regret that we predict will come if we don't follow through with the temptation. Sneaky temptation can, I suspect, directly use the unpleasant emotions associated with anticipatory-fear (boredom/depression/anxiety) to trick our Planning Mind into seeking the reward promised as part of our old habit.