Use your desires to motivate yourself

This is the last in a series of four blog postings presenting strategies you can use to discover your vision, that first, and most important, factor of self motivation.

This strategy, look to your desires, approaches the vision quest from an entirely different perspective than that of the other three approaches. If your attempts in using the other three strategies have been not been as productive as you might have wished, or if you just want to try something different, give this strategy a try.

In this strategy we look at the different needs that can be met by manifesting one’s vision. Victor Maslow, the father of motivation, created a hierarchy of needs based upon his studies. According to Maslow certain needs motivate us to take the actions we take in our lives. We call them motivating needs.

Here are the five needs, in ascending order of complexity.

1. Physiological: Physical needs such as food, sex, drink, sleep;
2. Safety: Needs such as the security of one’s body, having secure employment, having a safe and secure place to live;
3. Love and Belonging: The need to have friendship, family, sexual intimacy;
4. Esteem: The desire to have self-esteem and the esteem of others; to have a sense of competence and be regarded as useful;
5. Self-Actualization: The desire to grow as a person, to achieve one’s potential, to be spontaneous and actualized.

This hierarchy of needs is frequently presented as a pyramid, with the most basic needs, physiological needs, at the bottom and the most complex need, self-actualization, at the top. Maslow believed that generally a person had to meet the lower level needs before he could move up to more complex needs. In other words, the first level, one’s physiological needs, had to be met before one was motivated by needs on the third level, esteem.

To do this strategy, you first read the list of needs and the definition of each. When you read the list of needs, think about which of them are important to you at this time in your life. Focusing on your needs may help help you discover what vision will help you meet these needs.

Remember, the purpose of discovering your vision is to increase your motivation. Anything you do that increases the value of your vision, how important that vision is to you, will automatically increase your motivation.