Often people will dream of getting what they want but don’t actually do anything to move towards that goal. Why is that and what can you do to change that?
The main reason we don’t take action to move towards a goal is because of the pain/pleasure principle. This says that we either move away from pain or towards pleasure. When thinking about goals though, we often associate the move towards the goal is more painful than the pleasure of reaching that goal. In a way we are gaining more pleasure by not going for that goal than the imagined pleasure of reaching that goal.
In order to start taking steps towards our goal, we need to imagine the pleasure of attaining the goal to be much greater than the pleasure of remaining the same, and the pain of reaching the goal to be much less than the pain of remaining the same.
To do this we need to ask ourselves some questions and be 100% honest with ourselves in the answers that we come up with.
Get yourself a pen and paper and then write down about 4 things you would like to change but haven’t been able to.
For each of these things list as many things as you can that are going to cause you pain if you don’t stop doing what you’re doing or don’t do the things that you want to do.
Next, ask yourself, what pain do I imagine when I imagine doing this thing? If you didn’t imagine there would be pain when you do it, you would have already done it! So, what pain is stopping you?
Then ask yourself, What pleasure do I get out of not doing it? Again, if you didn’t get some pleasure out of not doing it, you would have done it, so what pleasure are you getting?
Next ask, what pleasure am I going to get when I do it? When you think about this also think about how you will feel when you’ve achieved the goal. Will it be happiness? Will it be fulfilment? Will it be a sense of achievement? Will it be a warm fuzzy feeling?
Write down as many things as you can think of that will make achieving the goal much more pleasurable that the pleasure or pain of remaining where you are. Make the pain of not going for that goal worse than he pain of of making those changes, associate much more pleasure to doing the thing that you want and more pain to not doing it.