Connor Beaton explains "dark" or shame-based motivation: how trauma-derived shame can power achievement (building careers, relationships) but eventually depletes and becomes burdensome. He contrasts this with "light" (love- or growth-based) motivation — intrinsic, authentic, curiosity-driven — and invites listeners to reflect on where they relied on shame versus where they feel expansive motivation.
Dark motivation is what a lot of us use to accomplish goals in our life. And dark motivation can be incredibly, incredibly powerful.
Another way of looking at dark motivation or another way of translating dark motivation is shame based motivation. So a lot of men that have experienced trauma in their childhood, or experienced abuse or neglect or abandonment, whether maybe it's verbal abuse or being told that they weren't good enough or not smart enough, or not fast enough, or whatever it is, they'll take that shame that I'm not good enough and it will become the fuel source that will drive them forward to try and create in their life. And that shame based energy, that darker energy will become the fuel source of how they try and produce results. And this can be incredibly powerful, right? It can be an incredibly powerful and intrinsic motivator for us to try and build companies, build relationships, prove people wrong, prove parents wrong, and to use that source, use that emotion, that feeling inside of us, to try and create some sort of external validation to make us feel better now for a while. This can be really powerful. A lot of the men that I've worked with over the years have in some way, shape or form used this dark motivation, this shame based motivation to produce some incredible things, to build businesses, to build amazing careers, to maybe get into a relationship with amazing women or men. And at some point it starts to fizzle out, this dark motivation will start to become depleted and a lot of guys will start to describe this feeling of like waking up in the morning and sort of feeling like, oh shit, I got to do this again or I gotta face this again or I don't want to have to deal with this situation or this work environment. And everything slowly starts to turn, right, Everything slowly starts to turn and a lot of things start to look like and feel like a burden. And that's mostly because the fuel that we've started that we use, the shame based motivation, no longer is serving as fuel and has just started to become the thing that we are feeling. So we feel that darkness, we feel that pain or that suffering or that shame or that guilt or that not good enough or that insecurity or whatever that feeling is, that emotion is that we have been carrying around that we're trying to avoid, because that's really the crux of all this, is that we didn't want to feel this. So we just tried to use it as a fuel source, as a battery to, to go out in life and produce results. Now the shift happens where at some point this mechanism breaks down. At some point we no longer can Produce results out of shame, right? So for example, with women, maybe we are going out and seeking relationships to try and prove that we are good enough, right? So we're using this shame as a mechanism to go out and actively date, to speed date, to maybe go, you know, maybe learn how to pick up and how to talk to women. And we utilize all these tools and all these skill sets and all this training to try and go and get a woman. But at some point this shame based motivation, this dark motivation will turn on us and it will start to fuel our inner critic, it'll start to fuel our inner sense of self destruction and it will become the thing that we are then fighting, that we're feeling dragged down by. And a lot of men experience this in a transition, right? Maybe something has happened in their life where divorces happen or infidelity or they're transitioning careers. That's a big one. They don't really know what direction they're going and all of a sudden they're like, I don't know how to motivate myself anymore. I don't feel motivated to take action and produce results. And I'm not really too sure how this works anymore. And there's this transitionary period where motivation seems like a very elusive thing. And that's usually the space where if we're paying attention, we can start to move into light motivation, or you can call it love based motivation, or expansive motivation, or growth oriented motivation, whatever term really resonates with you. But in the simplest means, it's where we start to shift our focus from I'm going to prove someone wrong, I'm going to prove someone's story about me wrong. And I'm going to start to prove my own story about myself right. And I'm going to start to live into the potential that I know I am capable of. Not to prove my dad wrong, or my mom wrong, or my ex girlfriend in high school wrong, or whoever hurt me wrong. But because I know that this is who I'm capable of becoming. Because I know that this is the type of man, father, husband, business owner that I am capable of. Not because of what society's told me, not because of what my family's put on me, but. But because this is who I am creating myself to be. And we start to move in that direction. And when we do that, it's a much more authentic aligned version of motivation because then we are motivated by like the curiosity of who might I be able to step into, who might I be able to become today, not tomorrow, not yesterday, but today, right now, in the moment, what choices might I be able to make? So I think the biggest thing that I want all of you to start to look at and look into is where have you used shame based motivation in your life? What results were you trying to produce and whose story were you trying to disprove? Whose story were you trying to prove wrong? Secondly, where have you felt this light motivation in your life? Where have you felt this pull to living into the type of person that you know you're capable of becoming?
How to Raise Strong, Unshakable Boys in Today's Culture, with Dr. Shefali Tsabary
