Almost all of the choices we make in our daily life are motivated by one of two powerful forces. The most powerful of these forces is the desire to avoid pain. The second is, the desire for pleasure.
Everything that we want to do is something we have emotionally linked to pleasure. Everything we try to avoid doing is something we have linked to pain. These are the two main paradigms in our life, and we have an emotional association for everything attached to one of these two categories.
Sometimes our willpower and logic try to do battle with these two powerful forces, but any victory is usually short-lived. Here’s an example, almost every cigarette smoker I’ve ever met knows that smoking is bad for him. He knows that he would be better off if he stopped smoking. So why does he keep smoking? Because emotionally smoking represents pleasure and quitting represents pain.
The only way for a smoker to stop smoking is to learn to associate pain to his habit and pleasure to quitting. This requires having a long-term point of view, rather than a short-term viewpoint. The very thing that brings him pleasure in the short term will bring him pain in the long term. It all depends on your point of reference or paradigm.
I used smoking as an example because the harmful effects are universally recognized but we could apply the same analogy to a wide variety of choices that we make on a daily basis.
Exercise could be considered painful in the short term but the long-term benefits are very desirable. If eating represents one of your greatest pleasures, then the very thought of dieting would represent pain. So for some people, exercising and dieting is a double dose of pain, and yet logically they realize that this is the fastest path to physical fitness. It’s a tug-of-war between emotions and logic.
Understanding how these two powerful forces work in our own lives is the first step toward taking control of our own destiny. We can actually learn how to use our minds to program our emotional associations. In other words, we can program our paradigms. We can choose what is painful and what is pleasurable.
Many things in our lives influence what we view as painful and what we view as pleasurable but paradigms are about association, they’re about interpretation. Learning how to program our emotional response a vital step toward personal excellence.
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