Why Do You Want To Achieve Your Goals? - The Science of Motivation

Hey, this John and I hope you're having an amazing day. In the last video around setting and achieving goals, I shared with you the exceptional life blueprint that I use to write down my goals. And I also asked you to start thinking about what is it that you really want to achieve in the next six to 12 months. And clarity is where it all begins. No differently than a pilot sets the coordinates for where he or she will take an airplane or a captain of a ship sets the coordinates for where they're going to end up. You need to start with your destination and hopefully you have done that already and you probably remember some of the brain based factors of what happens when you set a goal and how it activates the occipital lobe and a part of your brain called the nucleus accumbens that sends out the feel good chemical that will motivate you to achieve your goals and dreams. Because part of setting goals is activating the right part of your brains. And the left prefrontal cortex is really the genius part of your brain that setting goals the right way will help you activate. So let me move to part number two of this and I want to ask you a question about your life. How's that? Does it matter to you if your life has any purpose or meaning to it? See, I made a decision based on what I knew about neuroscience that when I got deep to understand why am I here, like what do I want to achieve, why do I exist? It started giving me a little bit different of motivation to do what I want to do. So think about it this way. Will it matter to you if you live your life and get to the end of it feeling like you could have done more or become more? What would you feel like if you got to the end of your life and you felt like should have done more with my life? Should you? Could you? Would you? What are the questions you're going to be asking yourself? And what I have found is when you can really start to think about how can I make sure that my life has more purpose and meaning so that I could invest more time in the causes that I believe in so I can invest more time in raising my children or being a great husband or being a great wife or being a great community leader, helping my with our climate challenges, our air challenges, our water challenges. Whatever it is that you are interested in and committed to achieving is what gives your life purpose and meanings. And what I find is most people set really nice goals, but they're what I call our surface goals. They don't really have a big reason why they want to achieve it. And for the most part, their goals sound great. Like, you know, I want to become a millionaire, I want to travel around the world, I want to lose weight, I want to have a great relationship, I want to be happily married. And the problem from purely a brain based viewpoint and the science of motivation is this. If you have a goal, but you really don't have a big reason out underlying big reason why you want to achieve it, you simply will not have the deeper motivational drive that your brain requires to keep you motivated and help you overcome the doubts or the fears or the anxieties, the ups and downs, the challenges that are going to come your way. And there's something else that's really, really important in the science of achieving goals. And it's something that neuroscientists call the switch cost. Let me explain. When you set a goal, okay, it requires you thinking a little bit differently. And when you think a little bit differently, it changes your emotions. And when your emotions change, you actually set off a neurological response in your brain that causes you to feel uncomfortable. And when you change your behavior, whether it's to lose weight and change your diet, or to make more money or make more calls, or leave a relationship you're unhappy with, what happens is the neurological changes that occur in your brain is something that people feel uncomfortable when that happens. And when you set a goal that's out of your comfort zone or requires a different level of thinking, feeling or behaviors, and you are not aware the switch cost and how the brain hates anything that takes it out of its comfort zone, chances are you will start to lose your motivation and you'll lose the reasons why you want to achieve your goals. Your brain and my brain and our emotions are wired to our motivational circuits and our fear circuits. However, as we want to achieve that new goal, we are pulled back. Because our brain and our emotions love the comfort of our old. There is the fear of the new and the excitement of the new that wants to pull us towards the goals. But then there is the comfort of the old that we are biologically conditioned to want to stay in. We're also biologically conditioned to conserve energy and avoid anything that requires us to change our thinking, emotions and behaviors long term. And this is why most people who set goals on, you know, whether it's New Year's Eve or in March or June or July or September, it doesn't make a difference because we are creatures of thought habits, emotional habits, and behavioral habits. Anytime this switch happens, in the brain, we will revert back to what our comfort zone. And so, in order to achieve the goals that hopefully you wrote down in your exceptional life blueprint, you have to understand that when you set a goal, you'll be excited, but you also might be fearful. But as soon as you start to take action towards those goals, the biological and emotional and psychological parts of your being are going to come online, full swing. And they're going to cause you to put your foot on the brake so you stay in your comfort zone. The first thing that happens when you're out of your comfort zone is the fight, fear, or fleeing mechanism. The brain kicks in. And so that's like having one foot on the gas saying, this is where I want to go. And one foot on the brake saying, nope, this is not comfortable for you. And so when you have a big reason why, a bigger reason than the actual goal, you then have something to counterbalance why you're willing to pay the switch cost and the emotional discomfort, the biological, even physical discomfort of getting to the goal. So hopefully this makes some sense to you. I'll teach you more about how to navigate through the biological and psychological sides of achieving goals in the upcoming videos. And here's one thing I would like you to do right now. I want you to do something called the rocking chair exercise. And it won't take you very long. And it's something that I learned maybe 20, 30 years ago. And here's how it goes. I want you to imagine yourself 10 or 20 years, depending on how old you are, 10 or 20 years down the road. All right, so I'm 54 right now, so I would imagine myself, let's say, at 74. Here's what I would like you to ask yourself. If you were sitting in the rocking chair right now as a person who's 10 or 20 years older, and you were rocking back and forth, what do you wish that you would have done right now? What do you wish you would have believed about yourself? What do you wish you would have traded your life for? What fears would you have set aside? What things would you have really gone after? What things would you have let go from your life? And what things would you have gone after to make your life full of purpose and meaning? Now, here's one more thing. What message would the person who's 10 or 20 years older you 10 or 20 years older? What message or advice would you give to the younger you right now? What would you tell him or her to think and feel and do? Because when you can start Moving your to your future and looking back at your present self, you can actually be quite wise with the advice you're going to give yourself. So here's what I would love you to do as part of this next exercise that will really help you with achieving your goals. When you go to your exceptional life blueprint, you're going to see right at the beginning that I have my life's purpose, my outer mission, my inner mission and and the highest values that I make decisions and live by. And these are the guiding principles of my why. They're bigger than me. It's bigger than the money, it's bigger than anything. Because I'm operating from a much bigger why of who I want to be every day, every week, every month. So that when I'm sitting in that rocking chair, maybe I won't ever sit in a rocking chair, but the metaphor of being in the rocking chair, I will feel like my life has had purpose and meaning because I always followed a bigger reason why I was going to achieve my goals. So take some time and do that. And in the next video I'm going to share with you the proper way to create your plan of action so that you don't feel overwhelmed and that you don't scare yourself out of doing what you need to do to actually achieve your goals. One of the things I all we see is people setting goals and when I say to them, well, how are you going to achieve them? They go, well, what do you mean? Well, you need a plan. I'll show you how to plan really, really well. Alright, so for today I'd love you to do this. Share with me below on this page your biggest reason why you want and why you must achieve your goals. Alright, so why you want and why you must achieve the goals that you have for your life. And then click on the share button and let's help many, many people together. I hope you've enjoyed this. I look forward to the next video where I'm going to share with you a simple and powerful way to really start creating your plan so that your motivational circuits in your brain light up and you move into action and achieve your goals that you want to achieve over the next six to 12 months.