Ashok Gupta breaks down three core motivations: fear of not being good enough, greed for accumulation, and love for what you do. Unhealthy achievers run on anxiety and self-esteem dependence. The shift to healthy achievement means moving from stress-driven striving to value-driven work.
Really good question. Now this question comes up in personal development. It comes up in spirituality. So many different areas that if I am not supposed to be stressed and anxious about the outcome. Right. If I'm not to be attached to the outcome, as we've talked about in previous sessions, how on earth am I going to motivate myself? Yeah. My motivation comes from achievement and that bit of anxiety that comes with that. Who am I without that? What's my raison d'? Etre? And it's a beautiful question and it's something. First of all, no one's here to give you an answer, but it's certainly something to reflect on. It's a lifelong reflection. But let me share what's helped me. We go from becoming an unhealthy achiever who is motivated by the anxiety of the sense of self that my sense of self relies on achieving. Therefore, the motivation is, hey, if I don't achieve my self esteem, my sense of self plummets. So that becomes our constant source. The problem with that is it's very stressful. Let's face it. So then we say, okay, I'm learning to be more comfortable with myself, more relaxed with myself, more relaxed about outcomes. And we can move gradually to a healthy achiever who may still be achieving the same things in life. But the motivations shifted. Yeah. And I hope that that's a journey that I've been on and I continue to strive to be on is moving from the unhealthy to a healthy. I still have ambition, I still want. And my ambition is to heal as many people from chronic illness as possible. Right. That is my ambition. That's the whole team. I'll Gupta program teams ambition. We all align on those values. But instead of being motivated by how it affects my self esteem, we can now be motivated by something else. And there are different types of motivation. So one is fear. So generally we're motivated by fear. That's I'm not good enough if I don't achieve this. Number two, we can be motivated by greed. Sometimes greed is a motivator. I want to accumulate more, I want to get more. I'm not saying that's a good motivation, but we become aware of it in our minds. A third one, which I feel is a more healthier source of motivation is love. That actually I'm doing this because I have a love of something. I have a love of beauty and art and that's why I'm doing it. I have a love of my family. So let's say instead of I'm working in this job because I need to prove myself. I'm working in this job because I love my family, I love my children, I love my parents. And therefore, this is so that I can be a provider and I can support people around me. Or actually, this is the aspect of the job that I love. Or it can be a commitment to a certain level of excellence and quality in something without being perfectionist. We'll be very, very careful. And so when our motivations shift and go more towards what do I love about this? Love becomes a safer and healthier intrinsic motivation.
