The Motivator

Everyone has conflicting basic needs that usually unconsciously argue about what we should or should not do. In the motivator, enforcement and belonging lead the inner team. They want joint success.

The assertiveness side favors the mind, while empathy is more important for the we-feeling.

There is a basic tension in the inner team. The right side likes closeness, calm and serenity. The left side wants to make progress and strives for logical and sensible ways to achieve ambitious goals as quickly as possible.

The search for recognition and the pursuit of safety are less important for the motivator in this circle of basic needs. They form the opposition to enforcement and belonging. Safety puts the brakes on enforcement so that its adventures do not have a destructive effect. Anyone who strives blindly forwards with zeal or fights for supremacy with others without necessity is taking far too great a risk. Our need for safety requires reliability and the assertiveness part can reveal its well-thought-out plans in return. Recognition doesn’t like it when we pander to other people. Adapting to a certain extent may be okay. But not at any price, please. We don’t want to give up on ourselves. Not only do we risk losing self-respect, but we also make ourselves look ridiculous if we completely disguise ourselves. We can only be recognized as individuals if we are authentic.

Motivators learn early on to pay attention to their inner balance, because it’s like being part of a team of colleagues or sports friends: If not everyone involved pulls together, there is a threat of defeat. He makes sure that opposing needs are aligned and thus benefit from each other.

If the inner team wants to agree on common paths, it needs attractive goals.

As a child, we play roles: ‘I would probably be a ballet dancer or a famous footballer or a well-known musician or a rich businesswoman’. In our imagination, we can identify with these roles and vary, adapt and shape them until we are deeply satisfied with them. The ‘do-as-if’ becomes a target scenario that we can visualize within ourselves (for the enforcement part) and talk about (for the belonging part).

The better we succeed in integrating all emotional aspects, i.e. all conflicting basic needs, into this idea, the more we feel a firm foundation within ourselves. The entire emotional world is behind us. We are carried by positive emotions. It is a joy to achieve this goal. It is so strong that we believe we will burst if we don’t talk about it and infect others with this enthusiasm.

Now we turn our attention to the people around us. We want to motivate them. They should be happy with us about what we will achieve together. Emotionally, we have already arrived there.

We learn to influence others through our inner attitude of conviction and our lively communication. As I said, it starts in the early years of our lives and so we train the art of motivation without even realizing it.

On this path of personality development, we learn how to integrate the members of our team. Because our assertiveness part wants to try out what we have learned straight away, we pay attention to the reactions of those around us. Schiller wrote ‘Freude, schöner Götterfunken’ and in the same poem (Ode to Joy): ‘Your spells bind again what fashion strictly divides.‘

Fashion is what we perceive in our inner team and in our fellow human beings, namely a division into red (enforcement) or green (safety), into black (ratonality) or white (empathy) and into blue (recognition) or yellow (belonging). They are strictly divided because we cannot go on an adventure and stay in the safety of the cave at the same time, nor can we think ice-coldly and empathize warmly at the same time. Likewise, it is not possible to be on stage and celebrate with others in the stands at the same time. Our mind says that these opposing things only work one after the other. Our emotions suffer because they strive for balance, for this joy, for inner balance. And that’s exactly what we experience in moments of lively enthusiasm, as Ludwig von Beethoven set to music in his Ninth Symphony.

The self-management of a successful motivator-type person makes use of the entire inner team, because this means that all the different areas of experience and perspectives with their complementary skills are available to them.

In the best case, we succeed in using all the powers of the unconscious for our concerns.

[TwentyFive - About the forces of the unconscious]

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