Skip to main content

Pain and Pleasure


Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.....they govern us in all we do, in all we say, and in all we think:
Why do people persist in an unsatisfying relationship, unwilling either to work toward solutions or end it and move on? It's because they know changing will lead to the unknown, and most people believe that the unknown will be much more painful than what they're already experiencing. It's like the old proverbs say: 
"Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know."
 " A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." These core beliefs keep us from taking the actions that could change our lives.

If we want to have an intimate relationship, then we have to overcome our fears of rejection and vulnerability. If we're planning to go into business, we must be willing to overcome our fear of  losing security to  make that happen. In fact, most of the things that are valuable in our lives require us to go against the basic conditioning of our nervous systems. We must manage our fears by overriding this preconditioned set of responses and in many cases, we must transform that fear into power. Many times, the fear that we are allowing to control us never becomes reality anyway. 
It's possible for people to link pain, for example, to flying in an airplane while there's no logical reason for the phobia. They're responding to  a painful experience in their past or even an imagined future. They may have read in the papers about airplane accidents, and now they avoid getting on planes: they're allowing that fear to control them. 
We must make sure that we live our lives in the present and respond to things that are real, not to our fears of what once was or what might someday be. The key thing to remember is that we don't move away from real pain; we move away from what we believe will lead to pain.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Magnificent Obsession - Creating A Compelling Future....

GIANT GOALS PRODUCE GIANT MOTIVATION So often, people ask me, "Where do I get my energy? With all that intensity, no wonder you're so successful. I just don't have your drive; I guess  I'm not motivated. I guess I'm lazy." My usual response is, "You're not lazy! You just have impotent goals!" Frequently I get a confused look to this response, at which point I explain that my level of excitement and drive comes from my goals. Every morning when I wake up, even if I feel physically exhausted from a lack of sleep, I'll still find the drive I need because my goals are so exciting to me. They get me up early, keep me up late, and inspire me to marshal my resources and use everything I can possibly find within the sphere of my influence to bring them to fruition. The same energy and sense of mission is available to you now, but it will never be awakened  by puny goals. The first step is to develop bigger, more inspiring, more challenging ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Maintain your wealth

The only possible way to maintain wealth is to pick a specific percentage of your income that you will invest each year up front. Now, many people know this,we've all heard about the virtues of saving a minimum of 10 percent and investing it. But very few people do it- and interestingly enough, very few people are wealthy. The best way to insure that you'll be able to maintain your wealth is to have 10 percent taken out of your paycheck and invested  before you even see it. To maintain your wealth, you must take control of your spending. But don't develop a budget. develop a spending plan. Truly, if a budget is done effectively, it is a spending plan. It's a means for you - or if you're married, you and your spouse - to decide what you want to spend money on in advance rather than get caught up in the moment. Too often opportunities come up and out of a sense of urgency we make decisions that later  on we regret.  Unfortunately most peopl...
Post a Comment
Read more

What Do You Want.....

Most of our emotional responses are learned responses to the environment. We've deliberately modeled some of them, and stumbled across others. Simply being aware of these factors is the foundation for understanding the power of state. Without a doubt, everything you and I do, we do to avoid pain or gain pleasure, but we can instantly change what we believe will lead to pain or pleasure by redirecting our focus and changing our mental-emotional -physiological states.  A state can be defined as the sum of millions of neurological processes happening within us- the sum total of our experience at any moment in time. Most of our states happen without any conscious direction on our part. We see something, and we respond to it by going into a state. It may be a resourceful and useful state, or an unresourceful and limiting state, but there's not much that most of us do to control it. Have you ever found yourself unable to remember a friend...
Post a Comment
Read more