How to Use The Pain Vs. Pleasure Technique: The Magic Key To Motivation

Today’s Wake Up Wednesday blog post is adapted from a powerful exercise I use in my all-in premium life coaching course, Mentor Masterclass. I know you’ll love this lesson pulled straight from the pages of our workbook! Go grab your pen and paper, and get ready to do some digging. I think you’ll be surprised how much we can uncover about you and your dreams in just a few minutes’ time!

Anytime you truly want something in your life, you have to motivate yourself to get from a standstill position to an active one. Whatever level you’re at, there’s always a next level, requiring a little bit more motivation to get there.

The key to understanding motivation is to understand the answers to these questions:

Why do we do what we do? What drives our behavior?

Everything human beings do, they do for two reasons:

1. To avoid PAIN or

2. To gain PLEASURE

For you to take control of your actions, you must take control of the pleasure and pain associations in your own mind.

If you consistently work on re-associating certain activities (working out, for example) with pleasure instead of pain, your brain will grow accustomed to that new association. This process takes about a month.

For now, let’s look at some ways to determine how you associate these principles with activities in your life.

Pleasure

What drives you? What is most important to you in life?

List the things that you value most in life. What you value most, you tend to focus upon and use as a criteria for all your decisions. This helps you to identify your associations with pleasure and pain.

Out of your list, in what priority order do those things fall? Put your values in order from most to least important.

This exercise helps you to identify what drives you. If you’re going to stay the course and succeed, you must feel that you’ll experience and get more of those top three things as a result of pursuing them. If you don’t think that, then you need to start making some new connections in your mind, or perhaps re-examine your values.

For example, if you value comfort above everything else and find that being healthy causes some discomfort, you may want to re-prioritize your values so that your value of comfort doesn’t impede your ability to be successful in obtaining optimal health! You don’t need to give up these values; instead, find a way to include them as a lower priority.

Once you can let go of the need for priorities that get in the way of your dreams, you’ll increase your ability to be successful and to focus on your goals.

People who are successful have big values and play a big game. If you want to develop the momentum needed to be successful and get ahead, you need to give up the smaller games, at least in the short term.

Now write a paragraph, if you find you need to. Take a few more moments to review what you’ve written, then answer the questions below.

• What are your reasons?

• What will it give you, your family and your friends?

• What values will it meet?

• What amazing things are possible if you are to follow through on making this dream a reality?

Pain

What pain do you (or will you) experience as a result of staying where you are? What are you going to lose, or what are the negative consequences that may follow?

In order to create change, you have to believe you can create change. You also have to believe that you’re in charge of the change. Finally, you have to believe that you must change things now, and be conscious of the immediate pain that may follow.

Most people are more motivated by pain than pleasure, so make sure that you utilize the pain to get you to do some positive things for your life.

Now, stop and take 1-2 minutes to make a list of the things you are most afraid of in your life.

Write down why you must take action toward embracing your fear and committing full out to this Masterclass each week in order to not have these fears become your reality.

Take 2-5 minutes to write a thoughtful paragraph on how not playing full out in these areas is going to impact every area of your life.

Take a few more moments to review your paragraph, and then answer the questions below.

• What do you stand to lose, how will this affect your family and your friends if you do not make your dreams a reality?

• What values will never be met?

• What sad things are possible if you don’t follow through?

Most people never get the motivation they need to take massive action because they don’t allow the pain of this loss to become a reality.

If you really know what’s at stake on a soul-aligned level you won’t take NO for an answer.

That kind of energy and commitment is what it takes to make it, in the way I know you dream of making it. You have to be clear about your pain and pleasure associations, and it has to be more painful to stay where you are now than it is to invest in yourself and launch your dreams.

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