Too Motivated to Succeed

TOO MOTIVATED TO SUCCEED

I am the creator of The Me Project, a business completely dedicated to helping people achieve their own personal versions of success. Yet, this fact has still not made me immune to my own epic failures.

I found myself experiencing a physical breakdown on a regular day that required me to be functional. This was the result of a long-sustained period of committing myself to doing too much.

By Hayley Nicole Wilson

I

am a highly-motivated person who finds it challenging to switch-off from achieving things.

A common theme in the coaching community and society at large is how can we motivate, inspire and create strategies for people to do more, to be more and to become even more.

This has lead us to focus on how we can achieve goals, get more clients, earn more and aspire to having everything the material world offers us.

This experience of over motivation negatively impacts the high achievers and perfectionists amongst us all just as seriously and dangerously as having too much stress can indeed shorten our lifespans.

My excessive motivation to do as much as I could with my time to achieve success was slowly but surely undoing me and compromising the most important thing I have, my health and wellbeing.

My Doctor pointed out to me that there are many successful people at our local cemetery. At that point in time, I found myself having many responsibilities. I was a business owner, a coach, a fiancé and a new mother.

I was highly-motivated, organising my overseas wedding, pushing my body through challenging exercise routines, keeping my home in order, executing a new marketing strategy, travelling interstate.

Then one day I unexpectedly woke up in such exhaustion that my stomach was in knots and I couldn’t breathe properly. Hilariously at the time it was all unfathomable to me!

I am an ambitious superhuman with things to achieve, right! How dare my body lose the plot… I haven’t even finished my blog entry for the day!

What I had learned from that experience is that we must take responsibility for ourselves, our over-achieving clients and society in cultivating a mindset that it’s truly ok to take some time to relax and simply do nothing. To simply be.

Doing just as much as we can manage to do at any given moment and not over-extending ourselves in obtaining success. True creativity, brilliance and results can only come to fruition whilst in a balanced, healthy state of being.

Success is a journey to be taken and not a goal with a deadline. It is filled up of many stages, involving glorious moments of peak performance and disastrous learning curves.

The negative impact of excessive motivation is highlighted in psychology by Yerkes Dodson Law (1908) which reports that performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, however only up to a certain point.

When the level of arousal becomes too high, performance decreases.

To draw their conclusion, psychologists Robert M Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson conducted an experiment utilising rats which were running through a maze whilst receiving electrical shocks. When rats received mild electrical shocks, they navigated the maze and when shocks were stronger they became over stimulated and failed to complete it. This was not conducted on humans as interestingly that would be classified as torture. Poor rats!

Taking charge of imbalanced perspectives which are too fixated on goal achievement at the expense of what’s truly necessary in life, vital rest and mental and physical recovery; is the best approach to helping our ambitious contacts to obtain success.

Too much stress makes you sick and ineffective. Such is the balanced perspective required to be successful and a coach’s vital role in effectively promoting that balance.

Effective strategies that can be applied to help master your life balance or to use as part of a life-transition strategy (major life change) include, but are not limited to:

Explore the nature of the motivation

Overwhelmed is the best word to describe how overly committed, busy people feel.

Being busy is a personal choice that has been made. Being busy is also a pain avoidance technique. Review the excessive actions and activities that are being taken and identify why you are choosing to partake in each of these activities.

Is there an inherent fear of being alone and having to face yourself?

Which activities are necessary?

“Getting lost in parks and gardens resets my spirit”

Gain Perspective

With an aim to help calm down your lifestyle, identify what your true core values are. If family, friendships are health represent your most important core values, yet you are neglecting these values through actions such as being a workaholic and an alcoholic; a space is suddenly created to re-prioritise your energy into activities that really matter to you.

Focus on Self-Care

As my Doctor said, there are plenty of successful people at our local cemetery.

Looking after ourselves is crucial. So, identify what a successful life truly looks like to you and develop a healthy understanding of failure as being an important and unavoidable part of the success journey.

You may come to a realisation that success is not what you have been conditioned to believe it to be. It’s a lot simpler than what we are sold through media and it’s completely personal.

Understand and get the basics right, are you hydrated enough? Are you looking after your body, or punishing it?

How much sleep do you get? Learn to confidently say “no” to both important and unimportant opportunities to carve out time for yourself to just simply be (your “me time”). Learn strategies to be able to cope with your mental chatter.

Organise work around life

Who said that we should squeeze in our personal life around the work part? When you diarise (always in advance) your pursuits for the week ahead, make sure you diarise all the life-enhancing aspects first, as a matter of priority.

What enriches your spirit and awakens your soul? For myself, a run or a reflective walk alongside our bay always enriches me. So, I consider making time for that an absolute must. More so than making time for a spotless home.

In the scheme of things, it makes cleaning far easier to approach when it gets done.

Getting lost in parks and gardens resets my spirit almost immediately.

More so than getting lost in a television screen or a late night of trying to finish everything on my goal list.

It might seem somewhat frightening to relinquish control over activities you have given such weight to over the years, but the freedom in taking control of your wellbeing’s destiny will make you wish you changed things sooner.

Adopt a minimalist lifestyle

The practice of owing less stuff tends to cause a positive shift, energetically.

A clutter-free home is the by-product of a clear mind. A minimalist lifestyle is one of less stress.

Less stuff means less time working to pay for unnecessary stuff and more time to enjoy life as it’s best enjoyed. Having surplus cash to pay off any existing bad debts is also a nice side effect.

You can start by trying a ‘one-in, one-out’ approach to items and using clothing you already have for new occasions.

This lifestyle is not about having a lack of style or sacrificing quality items, it is a way to learn to value yourself more than material products.

Hayley Nicole Wilson is an Entrepreneur, Author of The Me Project Success Guide [2016], passionate Personal Development expert, Mother and compelling change agent. An authority on leading edge practical and spiritual pathways to success, Hayley designed The Me Project to empower people globally to realise their own unique vision of success. Her novel, Personal Success Sessions and thought-provoking videos are transforming lives globally.

Her Personal Success Sessions are the most innovative in the global Personal Development/Life Coaching industry due to combining both practical and spiritual aspects to address all planes of human existence. Her tactics and strategies enable others to confidently become Personal Success Coaches, further making a difference to the lives of others.