What is Your Motive

 I am a firm believer, or until shown otherwise, that motive is king. What I mean by this is that why we begin something or perform an action is often more important than the actual act in most cases, because if the motive is flawed or rooted in any form of negativity then the life span of the act may be limited. Okay, I will stop being cryptic here. What I am referring to is primarily two areas in life, though it might apply to more, is personal development and weight loss. What is the motive behind personal development, to improve on an already existing set of skills and awareness’s or to make us better people (which would lend to assuming we were not “better people). If we maintained that we needed to “fix” ourselves by reading this book, taking this course, then the motive comes from a place of lack, and the fallout of that is a never-ending series of books and courses that perhaps will never end, because our initial premise of motive was one of being broken and needed to be fixed. The goal ideally would be to start understanding what our current self-worth, reveal our current value, and then use personal development to strengthen and refine what we already are. This way we become stronger, more confident on our journey and not helplessly caught up in a lifetime of “personal development” that never fills the void.
 The same issue I find is around weight loss. What is driver for our actions when we decide to get well and lose weight? If we think as a person whose “is fat”, that psychology is broken from the start, so every attempt, every program we try on will fall flat on its promises simply due to the “I’m fat” psychology it was being built on. So, like our personal development saga, there follows a series of diets and workout programs that never end, because our initial motive was one of being “fat” complete with the poor self-image and needing to be fixed. The goal here, like with our personal development journey, would to start the task of developing a stronger self-image, which entails discovering our current value as a person (mom, father, sister, brother, friend, a spiritual, honest, loving, worthwhile human being). If we started our journey into weight loss or wellness from a place of certainty, in that I am certain I am a valuable human being, then the likelihood is that our failures would be few and our success many. As with most things, the place you start psychologically will determine your success, so take the time to know your value, explore deeply all that is extraordinary about you, and you may come to find you are not as far of the mark as you thought you were, perhaps just a little misinformed
C. David Gilks Your Fellow Traveler