This post was written by William Womack from www.conscious-growth.com a Blog Dedicated to Entrepreneurs and their own Personal Development. For more great motivation articles, please visit his site.
Polarizing Your Motivation
Motivation always seems to be an uphill battle, doesn’t it? It comes and goes with the moods of a teenager, with no real rhyme or reason. We all spend hours figuring out ways to motivate ourselves to take action and push forward in our lives, but it seems that we always hit a wall and get stuck there.
Today I’d like to offer you a different look on motivation. One that involves the idea of polarity… (cue mystic voodoo music here…)
One of the main reasons that we find it hard to motivate ourselves is that we haven’t polarized ourselves yet. Polarization has to do with what purpose you perform your actions. On the one hand you have actions that you do solely to benefit yourself, and on the other we have actions that you do to benefit others.
Our projects and ideas are usually fueled with motivation from both ends of the spectrum, and that creates an incongruence in your actions. You might start a blog to make more money, but you also like the idea of providing value to others. You might go running to give yourself a better body, or to have more energy to play with your kids. These opposing motivators create conflict and cut your motivation like a knife.
You’ll go back and forth in your head, trying to decide what’s next to do and how to do it. You might go out buying courses that promise you how to make money on your blog, and take shortcuts to get there, while at the same time trying to provide real value. Both desires typically cannot be carried out at the same time. It’s either one or the other.
The good thing is, you can pick what side of the spectrum you’d like to be on, the light worker or the dark worker.
Light workers and Dark workers
Now, before you go yelling “Yeah, light worker, that’s me!” I want you to know that there is nothing wrong with being a dark worker. A dark worker just does things because of the benefits to himself. He might eat healthy because it benefits his body, instead of eating different foods to cut back on animal cruelty.
A light worker serves every purpose “for the highest good of all.” You start a blog to help people with valuable content and resources. You run to strengthen your body to help you serve more people. You eat healthy to help you think more clearly in order to help people more efficiently.
Light workers and dark workers can both want the same result, but for different reasons. Let’s take money for an example. Light workers want money to enhance their ability to help more people, while dark workers want more money to get more things that they like. But the fact of the matter is, they both want more money.
By polarizing, you are aligning yourself at all times with a mindset that gives you motivation. It’s up to you to decide which side of the polar scale motivates you the most. Do you desire more to help others? Or do you want to help yourself more?
Polarizing your efforts always keeps your motivation at the fore front of your mind. I know that I blog to serve others, so I am constantly deciding what to do next based on what would help others the most. If I were a dark worker, I would be aligning my efforts to figure out what would serve my own desires the most.
This mental shift creates a fuel for motivation like I’ve never seen. It got me off of my butt and writing quality articles, it got me organized, it got me making free reports, it got me guest posting, it got me motivated.
Making the Commitment
That’s not to say that I’m done polarizing. To fully polarize takes a long-term commitment. I’ve heard it described as deciding whether or not you want to become a jedi, or a sith. (For you Star Wars fans out there, go ahead and get your geek on. 
)
I want you to think about that, most people never make that level of commitment in their lives. To totally commit themselves like that is rare, but you can think of a few people who have, can’t you? Ghandi, Mother Theresa, Monks, etc…
A commitment to fully polarize is a commitment that is made with every fiber of your being. Every part of you must decide to polarize for it to work properly, and to give you motivation that you desire. The kind that just keeps on coming. The kind that lives to fulfill a purpose, and doesn’t quit until it does.
Making a commitment of this magnitude forces you to think out decisions and think years in advance. It forces you to do this because you know you must make the decision that best reflects your polarity.
It’s a life-long commitment to a certain ideal, that forces you to focus your energies into achieving all things with a certain result in mind: either helping others, or helping yourself.
Polarity is not something that you can achieve overnight. It’s a gradual shift in awareness from your current confusion to motivation. Your motivation becomes a single purpose, and with a single purpose in mind, you rid yourself of incongruence and live in a way that others only dream of.
Mastery of light working or dark working is only limited by the amount of focus that you put into it. More focus, more polarity, more motivation, more action, more results. Rinse and Repeat.
Polarizing yourself means that you become alive and passionate about serving others or serving yourself, it means that you can overcome obstacles that others can’t, because you know for what end goal your actions are. You finally know why you decide to do what you do.
Now, all that’s left is for you to decide what type of worker you want to be. Light or Dark? (And keep in mind, this is for posterity, so please be honest ).
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
What an incredible concept – one I had never thought of before.
Thanks Sarah! It’s one that I’m still working on myself, but I’ve seen huge advantages to this line of thinking already. It brings so much clarity!
I’m not sure I quite understand why this idea of polarizing should work.
As an example, suppose I am trying to motivate myself to clean the house. The ‘light worker’ reasons might be so that my family can enjoy our house more, so that guests coming over feel welcome and at ease, and so on. A ‘dark worker’ reason would be for my own benefit — so that I feel more at home and less stressed in my house.
Now.
Why should eliminating one set of those reasons give me MORE motivation to do something? If I am trying to accomplish something, shouldn’t the fact that it helps both myself AND others be more of a motivation to do it? Why would eliminating one set of reasons to do something give me more motivation to do it? I’m just not clear on why this should work.
I see what you’re saying, and I thought about that as well when I first heard this idea.
Polarizing yourself is about giving yourself a purpose for the things that you do. For others, or for yourself.
I alluded to it in the article, but often times, most of us have the same goals in mind, just different variations of them.
By deciding which type of worker you want to be, you always have congruent actions to follow, which boosts motivation and productivity.
Peace, Happiness, Joy, Love, etc…
Finding those things can be done with either a motivation for yourself, or for others.
So why would you want to remove a set of reasons to motivate yourself?
Let’s take the cleaning the house example. You may do it for others so that they think well of you and like you, to serve your own purposes later. Or you may do it so you can serve them in the best way possible, because you want to serve them.
Deciding which reason gives you a purpose that’s clear and congruent.
You must decide what motivates you the most, serving others, or serving yourself. (or serving yourself in order to serve others, if your feeling saucy) By doing so, your purpose for doing something becomes clear and concrete. It has a single reason and purpose that resonates with you.
And because of that, your motivation to work goes up.
I would suggest trying it first. Don’t go by my word, see for yourself. IT has given me immense clarity towards my purpose, and I know it has for others as well. I hope it helps you too.
Interesting idea.
I understand the value of polarizing in terms of being able to focus on one set of reasons or factors for motivation, but I don’t think I can commit myself to either one or the other extreme. I’m always skeptical of taking anything to the extreme.
I like being able to pull motivation from both ends of the spectrum. Instead of doing something because it benefits me OR helps others I prefer to view it as doing something because it benefits me AND helps others. Double the motivation
lol. I see the tricky “double motivation” factor is sneaking in.
I was the same way. I did things for a whole slew of reasons. Both “dark” and “light” (relatively speaking), but when I committed to one side, motivation came to me much much easier.
Aligning yourself with a certain outlook provides a framework for you to view what you do, and within that framework you are able to make decisions that give you the outcome you desire.
You work in a different way and with a different mindset when you motivate yourself from one set of ideals.
Your work becomes more fun, because you are either making things to help people (and when it does, you feel fulfilled), or your are making things to help yourself (and when that happens, you feel fulfilled as well.)
Intellectually and Logically, it might be a little shaky, but I highly suggest trying it for a week and see what happens to your motivation.
Mine got a huge boost, that I can call on whenever I desire. I know of others that it has done so as well.
It may seem logical to think “double motivation”, but to me they really detract from each other, and it’s more like “half motivation.”
I can think of many world leaders and top bloggers and successful people that work from one side or the other.
Besides, nuetral motivation is boring. When you are around someone that does nearly everything to help others, it’s intoxicating, and they never seem short of energy.
Think of your pastor, or just a really helpful friend.
And the other way around as well, if you are around someone who does everything for themselves, it’s intriguing as well. And somehow, they always seem to get what they want, because they are willing to do whatever it takes to get it.
Both sides of polarization can take you wherever you like to go, much faster and easier than using neutral motivation, but you travel very different paths to get there.