What is inspiration and how it’s different from motivation ?

Inspiration – put some fire…

Inspiration as a word can mean to breath in which nicely fits to the way I understand it – because for me inspiration is this little spark that lights the fire place. It’s a spark that gives you new ideas in your life. It gives you day to day fuel to grow. For me it can be:

• book I’ve just read or movie I’ve just watched
• news, article, blog post or comment
• someone’s life, words or actions
• beautiful nature scenery
• sport, flower, dog… etc.

All those things can be sparks that build my emotions. One time you think about them for a moment then forget and another time you contemplate for a week.

What happens in my head when I get such impulse? Unconscious mind takes it and compares to my beliefs and values system – if it fits it generates emotions, thoughts and ideas.

Simple example:

Situation: I come across crying baby, mother is sitting close watching her baby.
Impulse: Tears, baby, loud noise, mother, watching.
Mind: Children crying means pain, I can’t look at others in pain, I love children
Idea: Help the child
Mind: Crying is not always pain, mothers take care of their children, not my baby, there are many ways to raise children.
Action: None taken.

For me inspiration stops here…

Motivation – where’s the fire?!

So we have new ideas. Why some of those ideas become actions while others just stay in our head? We have the spark, we have the fuel but we’re still not running? Thats how it looks for me:

Ideas are going through our analytic system – after beliefs and values it being compared to our identity and purpose system. If there are more impulses we analyze all those one after another and all together. If after many rounds up and down through our systems we just accept it or the motion generated by all analyzes gives us the energy needed to make actions and changes in our life.

An example to simplify this:

Situation: I come across crying baby in a room where I stay we are alone.
Impulse: Tears, baby, loud noise, empty room.
Mind: Children crying means pain, I can’t look at others in pain, I love children
Idea: Hug it, Check if its hungry, thirsty, needs change, where is his mother
Mind: Crying is not always pain, children cry sometimes to make attention, I still need to be in this room, Children with no care can get hurt, I like helping people, I like quiet places, I’m a father, Children are our future
Action: Taken care of the baby.

The underlined thoughts where the leverage to change state, make actions and realize ideas. These are the things that worked for me what will work for You? I don’t know but the most important question is – do You know what will work for You?

Fire! Walk with me!

If You can identify Your beliefs, then You can better understand why some things inspire you and some don’t and when You get that it’s easier to find new inspirations.
If You can identify Your values, identity or even purpose its easier to make actions, it’s easier to change our beliefs, it’s easier to find motivation in everyday life and in the end it’s easier to control Your life and live it the way You want it!

—-
This article is inspired by Daryl Furuyama post that You can find in here. I always wanted to help people, to inspire and motivate them so they can live their life with passion and being true to themselves and that’s where motivation came from.

Recently I got… lets call it – lack of motivation. After spending few hours on the internet I found out that I got big chaos in my mind.

Aha! – said the voice in my head – You need to put things in order, make some lists etc. thats the way.

So happily, because I could do something different and kind of easy, I started to look for anything that could take and organize my ‘todo’ list and mix it with Macbook style – You know those gadget freaks.
On my favorite time eating website Lifehacker I’ve found a lot of “Getting Things Done” ideas on how to put some rhythm into our life.
Getting Things Done (shortly GTD) is a workflow defined by David Allen and its all about control and perspective.Its five core principles are: Collect, Process, Organize, Review and Do.

Of course first thing I did – I installed The Hit List – software for Mac which I already had thanks to MacHeist 3 Bundle. I will try to write a short review of that later.So after few articles and one installation I had a lot of motivation to try something new.

From taking out garbage to childhood dreams…

First I wrote down all things I wanted to do for the next day. Here came my first surprise – “Oh my god I got only five things to do for the whole 24 hour day – what a wast of time“. That brought some new ideas, some projects and some dreams I had.
At the beginning it was a hard work but after a while it was a great fun. I was feeling like 7 year old boy telling stories about who will he become and which stars will he conquer. Let’s call it back to the future feeling.
Hours passed and I had big list of things I want to do.
Happy again with a plan and objectives to accomplish I fell asleep. New day came and I was surprisingly happy and motivated to work again.

What does it mean!?

Ok then. What happened in that simple yet, as it came out for me, pretty powerful process?
As I see it we people just get lost in our day to day life and we forget about is important for us. What this process made for me was first with few simple tasks it gave me feeling of peace and structure for the chaos of daily tasks. This gave me an easy way to metaposition from which I saw myself with less emotions. This plus the feeling of calmness allowed me to get into creative state from which I dugg out new ideas. After that to find my inner resources for more ideas I went back to my childhood memories and emotion I was having back then. When we are children we usually know what we really want and what’s true with us – that gave me one very important question: “What’s important for me now and how it truly suits me?“. That became the filter for all my tasks.

The most important thing for me now: Make it REGULAR!

To make the long story short.

My diagram of how it works:

Getting Things Done workflow through my eyes:

• Brainstorm – write down all the things you got on your mind, what you want, plan, need to do, all ideas that pop into your head.
• Analyze – look at the things you wrote one item at a time and try to validate them.
• Group – take the list and try to categorize, group and prioritize.
• Review – regularly check your list, add new items, regroup.
• Execute – START DOING THEM! and check/strikethrough the ones you done.

I know it’s a simplification but hey that’s how it worked for me. If You want to know how it really works – You want to try it for yourself!

Tatsu