Picking Up Your Motivation

How often do you forget to shower? I would guess the answer is never. Well, how about brushing your teeth? Here the answer might be rarely. OK. So how often do you neglect to give yourself food? And assuming you have hair, how often do you forget to brush it in the morning when you get up? Silly questions? Perhaps.

But they serve as an analogy. If you don’t forget to do any or most of the above, why do you not behave in a similar fashion with how you motivate yourself on a daily basis? Zig Ziglar said in a relatively comic fashion: People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily.

It simply makes no sense that we expect motivation to last if we don’t nurture it daily. What you use to motivate yourself and how you do it is a slightly more personal matter, but some suggestions can be found here on the blog under the search term of ‘energy’, and in particular, these two posts:

Your motivation is in part your inner energetic frequency … the motor that keeps you going even when you have failed and even when others look at you as though you were mad. But this inner energetic frequency depends on you to keep it high and so you must work out what works for you. Hence the above suggested articles to give you some ideas. You are the one who can keep that motor running in you – but only if you decide to do so. If you stop having showers, you can imagine how quickly you would stop smelling clean. It’s the same with motivation: if you stop doing it, exactly what will keep you going?

For much more information about your energy, your thoughts and the choices you make in order to live a conscious life, have a look at my book Rewiring the Soul: Finding the Possible Self, available at Amazon as paperback or e-book for Kindle.

Click here to download the first chapter.

A Review (From the Back Cover):

“The masterwork of a profoundly gifted healer of the soul. Dazzling, challenging, wondrously useful.” Peggy Rubin, Director, Center for Sacred Theatre, Ashland, Oregon; author: To Be and How To Be, Transforming Your Life Through Sacred Theatre

Excerpt from an Interview:

Who is the book written for? Rewiring the Soul is written for anybody who suffers and I guess that means just about all of us! It is written for anybody who has not yet experienced enduring happiness and inner well-being; anybody who is reaching for inner peace; anybody whose life is not as they would wish it to be.

What can a reader expect to gain by reading this book? What makes it different from most other transformational or self-help books out there? So many wonderful teachers tell us about working on our spiritual selves. So many other wonderful teachers show us how to work on our psycho-emotional selves. But very few actually integrate the two. And Rewiring the Soul is my response to that challenge. Rewiring the Soul brings together the need to take your daily life in hand with the need to put your spiritual life in order as well. By daily life I mean your personal life, your professional life, the way you do or do not love yourself and all that such an attitude entails: conscious awareness, healthy boundaries, meaning in your life, recognizing you always have a choice, and taking responsibility for all your choices, etc., and by spiritual life I mean the inner connection to your eternal self.

If you have learned how to meditate, or do yoga, or whatever it is that you do, have you also learned how to observe yourself in the middle of an argument with your rebellious teenage son or your angry partner and hence choose to react differently because you have learned to love yourself enough to do so? If you have learned how to communicate more effectively with your children, spouse, friends, colleagues or employees, have you also learned how to be mindful and connect to yourself in meaningful ways to achieve that spiritual balance in your life?

While Rewiring the Soul is about so much more than that, those previous examples give an idea of what my book is about and how it does so in such a way that our psychological and spiritual selves nurture each other.

In a nutshell: neither the spiritual nor the psychological or emotional dimensions of your life will work if you neglect:

your inner connection to the eternal self while you seek happiness in the outer world
your happiness in the outer world while you seek the connection to the inner eternal self

It was Goethe who said “If everyone will sweep in front of their own door, soon the entire world will be clean“. In Rewiring the Soul ‘sweeping in front of your own door’ means bringing yourself to the utmost point of inner and outer growth, creating progress in body, mind, and soul. This literally means that you have already begun to change the world because of how you are changing yourself.

Are there many exercises in the book? Not at all. This book does not mean hard work, or spending a lot of time doing specific things. It simply means that as you read – if you so desire – you begin to incorporate small changes into your daily life. And so it begins. And the quality of your life changes…

How did you come to write this book? For years the essential content of Rewiring the Soul was like a small, recurring voice in my head; it was always there, and simply would not leave me alone. I had dozens of excuses for not writing it: I was working on my Ph.D. in psychology, I was teaching at a state university, I had three sons, later I was occupied with moving back to Spain, I was setting up my private practice, I had a monthly newsletter to write in English and Spanish, I had a weekly one-hour radio show to broadcast, I had a daily blog post to write, I facilitated numerous workshops and gave frequent speeches, and apart from all of this busy activity and work, sometimes I even had a life. In short, I told myself the book would simply have to wait. But just as a splinter under your skin eventually needs to be seen to, I ultimately realized that the only way I was going to be able to honor the more and more loudly clamoring voice in my head – and heart – was to sit down and write the book.

And you know, that goes to meaning. We all need meaning in our lives, and although I had many things that gave much significance to my life already, the inner urging and excitement I felt each time I thought about Rewiring the Soul compelled me to write the book. Rumi puts it beautifully: “When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy“.

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