You’re Not Unmotivated: You Have Conflicting Programming

Re-write your inner life by deconstructing it.

If there’s something you want to achieve, you’ll negotiate with two distinct versions of yourself. One part becomes excited thinking of this thing. This part of you can name several reasons for pursuing it.

As a creative person, you’ve also encountered another version of yourself. This part feels resistance, insurmountable blocks, and dread around the same pursuit.

With creative blocks, resistance, and bad moods, you have two choices. Either you’ll act in spite of your feelings or you’ll give up, telling yourself that you’re not ready to act.

If you decide to act in spite of your feelings, you’ll probably rely on discipline, consistency, or persistence. These values share one commonality. Each presupposes an unwanted default state a person must claw their way out of.

If you rely on these force-based values, pause. You have conflicting programming. You’re contradicting yourself. Conflicting programming results from unresolved pain and incompatible assumptions co-existing within the mind.

To move past resistance, don’t rely on discipline, persistence, or consistency alone. If you fight yourself, you may never uncover a real sense of fulfillment.

Let’s talk about the roots of conflicting programming, its implications, and what you can do to resolve it.

Get off the striving treadmill

Most of your ambitions invite you to move beyond your natural state of being. For instance, it’s not quite “natural” to sit behind a computer screen and compose consecutive sentences.

Personal development writers often reference our animal or instinctual drives. They say that reproduction or consumption are the main drivers of human action. As a result, meaningful pursuits demand that we override these programs. They tell us we should strive for “hard” work, discipline, and related measures.

Nevertheless, a lifetime of force-based action has stark ramifications. If you use struggle and force to build a body of work, you might be successful. But your saga is never going to end.

Sure, at some point, you’ll ride waves of momentum. Evidence that your work is effective will show up and doing the work will involve less friction.

But pursuits motivated primarily by measurable results are unlikely to be fulfilling. By relying on discipline and force alone, you’ll never have a sustainable source of fuel.

Face it. Human beings move goal posts. Always. We rapidly acclimate to our achievements. What once held the keys to eternal satisfaction becomes part of the mundane.

If discipline and force fuel your practice, sure, rewards may come. Yet they’ll always involve self denial. You’ll rope yourself into new states until your last day among the living. Is that what you want?

What if the motivation to build a body of work arose effortlessly from within you?

Self denial self replicates

People usually cite values like discipline, consistency, and persistence when describing their struggle to stay motivated. Embedded in these words is a sense of contradiction.

People with these values share a default orientation. They experience a gap between what they need to do and what they desire.

This dynamic is corrosive for two obvious reasons. First, the impulse toward discipline arises from the superego. This is your internalized storehouse of societal standards and expectations. If you’re superego-driven, you’re inflexible. You’re motivated by fear of punishment, humiliation, or being wrong or bad.

The drive toward discipline also bleeds into other domains of life. For instance, think about pain. Stomach aches, headaches, and other forms of discomfort reveal imbalance. They’re important. Without these aches and pains, we wouldn’t have the data necessary for re-calibration. We wouldn’t drink more water, get more sleep, or stop eating.

When you choose discipline at any and every cost, you become desensitized. You cut yourself off from signals that are necessary for the proper care of your body.

The ethos of discipline also gets you caught in corrosive friendships or relationships. When you feel agitated or angry, it’s an indication that a person has crossed a boundary or in some way disrespected you. If you habitually override emotions with hard-and-fast principles, you’re ignoring useful data. You remain in relationships that reaffirm your pain. They keep you in loops of struggle and turmoil.

Your feelings and inclinations have meaning and purpose. When you override them, you close yourself from much-needed messages. Your suffering continues until you arrive at the source of the problem. But you’ll never get there if you’re not open to receiving the signals.

Your inner dialogue writes your life path

The truth is this: you’re not flawed or inadequate or in need of reprimand or force-based measures. Rather, you have conflicting programming.

The following is a classic case of conflicting programming. You want to write a book. Yet every time you write, you’re overwhelmed. You’re burdened by an internal dialogue that lambasts your ideas, calling them useless and trite. Yet another part of you sees the value in your message. You feel guilty about quitting yet frustrated when you continue.

If you’re disciplined, you’ll force yourself to sit in the chair at noon every day until the book is complete. The experience will be unpleasant or painful. From this force-based perspective, it’s unlikely that the book will even be fun to read.

But if it turns out well, is this process going to be sustainable? Are you going to enjoy your life as you write your books?

If you don’t reprogram your subconscious, you suffer. The writer who straps herself to her seat in spite of resistance doesn’t run her own programming. It runs her. The subconscious prefigures the conscious mind, and the programs within it determine your life trajectory for you.

Reprogramming the subconscious is essential to eliminating conflicting programming. To do it, remember you’re most susceptible to suggestion when you’re relaxed. The barrier between the conscious and subconscious is porous when you’re sleepy or calm. If you’ve had a dream with disturbing undertones, you know what I mean. You’ve experienced the mood-changing power of powerful imagery. Emotional data works you over at a subconscious level. Don’t waste your free time watching news or listening to music with depressing lyrics. The subconscious absorbs whatever you consume, perceiving it as fact.

Listen to empowering material. Reader. You eat pears, nuts, and seeds. You brush your teeth and drink water. This is no different. Empowering information is necessary for psychological health.

Journaling is another powerful method for re-engineering the subconscious. As Dr. David Snyder says, the conscious mind is always the least informed and the last to know. When you journal, you might feel strange sensations when you uncover relevant information. As you tap into your subconscious, you might even feel like you’re making things up. You might describe a difficult emotion, and as you do it, an unrelated memory arises. You’ll feel perplexed about the connection.

Write about these memories any way. Those feelings of confusion mean that you’re on to something. They’ve been unconscious, so they’re bound to feel bizarre and alien to the conscious mind.

As you reflect, you’ll arrive at the core or the source of the belief. Take that belief, and write a new one. Construct a statement that contradicts the painful assumption.

In Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill says that the subconscious speaks in the language of feelings. It responds best to repeated information. Turn disempowering assumptions about yourself around by repeating empowering statements or affirmations. Write a sentence that evokes positive interpretations, like trust, gratitude, or excitement. Repeat it to yourself in the morning, at night, and whenever you feel uninspired.

Force-based values like discipline are unsustainable. Even if they inspire you to take action, they’re usually rooted in self denial.

If you create a body of work via pain and struggle, it’s not going to fulfill you. Do results matter if you never arrive at fulfillment, enjoyment, peace, or satisfaction?

Force-based emotions also encourage patterns of behavior that corrode self esteem and well-being. If you believe your inclinations are meaningless, you’ll miss out on crucial signals. These signals are there to keep you balanced, fulfilled, and on purpose.

Very often your feelings and inclinations are the data points you need to create work that inspires you and those you reach. Ignore them at your peril.