You must be able to live the kind of life that you can endure your suffering royally. That is indeed one question to ask oneself constituting as a key question to reflect upon. Take a 15 minute free writing focusing on what you want and what you require.
Imagine this: Not as a dream that one could perhaps paint for the future, but as a sketch of what one could become if they found the way to arrange their lives not according to the expectations of others, but according to their own desires.
Accept the fact that you will be changing direction as you strive to describe the vision. Do not reject what you first created as you have to remember that nothing is perfect especially your first sketch. It is the first step, the raw sketch of who you can become, aware of the setting but not a prisoner of it.
True happiness is the rightful perception of life’s meaning or value while pseudo-happiness entails avoiding suffering or pain.
There is nothing more commonly uttered than ‘I want to be happy’; however, if examined more closely, it means that one wants not to suffer. Thus the pursuit of happiness is not necessarily the search for pleasure but its more on participating in things one loves. This inspiration or the ‘enthusiasm’ literally originates from the Greek word ‘entheos’ often translated as ‘inspired by a god. ’ Happiness thus means not good feelings but the attainment of valuable objectives.
Setting and Pursuing Goals
Positive affect enhances the activity and the approach towards particular goals. Your emotions are intimately tied to your actions: progressing towards a goal elicits positive affect and avoiding or stagnating when encountering obstacles create negative affect. Thus there are no goals in life, no positive feeling, and a life full of confusion and anxiety.
No goal, no positive emotion.
It can be noted that goal setting is among the most important activities that is most effective in setting a precondition for positive affect and happiness. What creates happiness, thus, is not the perfection of the goal, but the act of moving towards the goal, no matter how poorly.
The pursuit is what counts not the result that has been arrived at or the goal that has been achieved.
The personality of Negative Emotions
Consequently, negative emotions contrary to what most people would expect when viewing them as threats can be used to drive change. When properly understood and utilized, fear and anxiety can be useful in that they can drive you into changing your behaviour.
For instance, the man dissatisfied with a job might be couch-potatoed due to fear of the other job. On the other hand, if they can ‘see’ how the rest of their lives will be if they continue to remain in their current positions they will have the motivation to look for better positions.
Knowledge of your potential for a negative future is in some cases sufficient to overcome the present fears.
Visualizing Your Future
To harness both positive and negative emotions, it’s crucial to visualize two potential futures: As I defined it, there must be the one where you can be the winner and accomplish the set targets and the other where you are the loser and fail for your fears and weaknesses. This duality of the visualization process switches on a slope of motivation that directly drags you to your desired goals and on the other end threats you with despair.
Think about what can happen if no actions are taken. Think about how everything will turn out if you go on as you are, being paralyzed by fear and taking no action. Compared this to a vision of what you life will look like if you are working towards your goals. This divergence, between those two futures is good as it creates a stimulus in form of emotion that is in harmony with your goals.
Who needs Positive Emotion and Why?
Positive emotion is more than simply, being happy once in a while. It is the beating of the key notes to the call of cordial encouragement and deliberate chase. When you denote to, say, when you say “I really want to do that,” what you are doing is engaging your positive emotion system — the one that propels action and success. That is why this system is aimed at by many drugs of abuse, proving thus the significance of the self in motivation.
Conclusion
Non-suffering requires one to want to picture a future where all is well despite the odds on the ground. Utility is not the proper objective of man but the attainment of his rational and wise ambitions.
In this way, by having these goals in your life and working toward them, you experience good feelings along with a sense of direction. Furthermore, competence over negative affects will help you move, literally and metaphorically, away from such a future.
Thus, positively and negatively charged feelings working towards a goal makes the journey towards the goal a fulfilling, motivation-filled existence.
