Achieve

by Chris Friesen

  Not surprisingly, poor health, gambling, and substance abuse are going to pose formidable problems when it comes to your success. So knowing where you stand on these dimensions and then doing something about it is essential to maximizing your potential.

  Low Motivation and Achievement

  Achieving big goals is going to be an uphill battle for those who are low on the Basic Personality Tendency of Motivation. For those low on this dimension, the risk of underachievement is high. In other words, you’re likely an underachiever in the sense that you may have strengths and potential that are not being fully utilized.

  If you are low on Motivation and low on Negative Emotions, you tend not to be interested in achieving high levels of what society typically defines as “success.” You probably have a care-free, ultra-relaxed, and laid-back lifestyle and demeanour. But if you happen to have this profile and have some big goals you want to achieve, then the strategies in this book will be essential to get you motivated to do something that is meaningful for you.

  If on the other hand, you are low on Motivation and high on Negative Emotions, you likely avoid competitive or achievement situations like the plague. You may have a strong fear not only of success, but also failure. You probably often feel like you’re at the mercy of your own impulses because you feel unable to resist urges and desires. You likely have a hard time stopping yourself from doing things you know you shouldn’t be doing, which is usually due to difficulties controlling your emotions. You also have a hard time getting yourself to do things you know you should be doing, which is due to difficulties with motivation. To achieve big goals, you will have to work very hard staying disciplined and focused.

  The Enforcer

  I once worked with a professional hockey player whose primary role through much of his professional hockey career was as an “enforcer.” For those of you not familiar with hockey, each team has about 1 to 3 enforcers whose primary role is to protect teammates and to drop the gloves and take on the opposing team’s enforcer to lift morale. This player, we’ll call him Denis, had the Basic Personality Tendency profile of low Motivation and high Negative Emotions. You may wonder how someone with low Motivation could make it to a professional level. As will be outlined more below, these individuals tend to achieve more when they are in highly structured work environments that essentially serve as their prefrontal cortex to reduce the load on their executive functions, which keeps them in check and on track.

  Given Denis’ personality profile, it was not surprising that his role was to fight at the drop of a hat (or glove). It didn’t hurt that he was somewhat low on Agreeableness as well. Denis came to me because of problems off the ice. Specifically, he became addicted to pain killers he began taking after knee surgery a year or so before we met. He didn’t need them for pain anymore, but kept using them and felt he couldn’t stop. It turned out he was using them as a way to control his negative emotions and deal with the inevitable stresses that come along with being a professional athlete.

  Denis and I worked together for a while, but he first needed to safely withdraw from the painkillers under medical supervision. He did so and then we got to work. Not surprisingly, given his low standing on Motivation, Denis had a hard time doing any “homework” between sessions. But using many of the strategies in this book, we worked on building up his WHY for completing the between-session assignments. We then got to work on two main tasks.

  One was helping him learn to better control his negative emotions and stress through strategies that included changes in diet, sleep, light exposure, and his thinking patterns. We also worked on improving his stress response through Heart Rate Variability training, improving his ability to inhibit his impulses through computerized cognitive training, and improving his ability to regulate his mental states through EEG neurofeedback training. For those of you interested in learning more, I will go into much more detail in the upcoming books in this series.

  The second major focus was on designing his environment so that various temptations were minimized, which helped him keep his willpower tank from running near empty. There will be more on willpower in the last section of this book.

  Denis was able to stay off painkillers and regulate his emotions much better. His performance improved on the ice in that he took fewer unnecessary penalties and generally felt more in control of himself. His personal life also improved. He learned that he would have to change his lifestyle by incorporating many of the above strategies into his daily life permanently if he was going to function at his best.

  Control Your Environment or Be Controlled

  As noted, if you are low on the Motivation dimension, you may do well when you have an environment (e.g., team, training schedule, or job) that is highly organized for you. Using your willpower in the face of having too much choice (e.g., whether to get up at 6 a.m. to train) will be hard. If the environment is already organized for you, then making the right choice will be easier.

  For example, one strategy for this is called stimulus control which I alluded to when discussing Denis earlier. To see this in action, take the example of having a difficult time getting yourself to stop eating junk food at night. If you tend to overeat on junk food at night, you would make it really hard to get your hands on junk food by removing it from the house.

  Or if you want to get up at 6 a.m. to work out or work on a project, you can make it easier by having things prepared the evening before. For example, you would get all of your workout clothes, equipment, water, and gear laid out and ready to go the night before. When you wake up the next day, the experience is less painful and demanding on your limited willpower.

  Many of the strategies in this book will also be helpful in improving your discipline, focus on goals, and feelings of competence. For example, the Funeral, Values Clarification, and the Process vs. Outcome Goals exercises will be essential to keep you motivated toward achieving your goals.

  Key Takeaways

  The Basic Personality Tendency of Motivation contrasts those of us who are sure of our abilities, organized, detail-oriented, disciplined, goal-oriented, ambitious, and deliberate with those who are more spontaneous, unsure of our abilities, inefficient, disorganized, undisciplined, and lacking in ambition and drive.

  Where you stand on this personality dimension is related to your prefrontal cortex, executive system, and possibly the amount of your slow-wave brain activity.

  If you are high on Motivation, then you tend to have high levels of motivation, ambition and belief in your ability to accomplish your goals.

  Drawbacks of high Motivation include being at risk of missing the forest for the trees, having perfectionistic standards, and becoming a workaholic. The exercises in this book will help prevent these from occurring.

  If you are low on Motivation, then you struggle to stay disciplined, focused on your goals, and feeling competent at times.

  If you are low on this dimension, your set point may be changeable by improving your executive functions, and your ability to focus and inhibit impulses using cognitive brain training and neurofeedback. The strategies in this book will also help you find your purpose or mission and put this into action, which will serve to keep you motivated and moving forward.

  Chapter 9

  Step 1: Know Yourself - Conclusion

  At this point, you should know a lot more about where you land on the 5 Basic Personality Tendencies. These are based on over 65 years of research by some of psychology’s best and brightest minds. We all fall somewhere along the continuum on each of these.

  You also learned how your specific personality traits can be strengths and weaknesses. Knowledge is power. With this knowledge of your and others’ personality alone, you are light years ahead of 99 percent of the population in terms of understanding how we tick.

  You now know your personality hardware. You know more about What you are. As useful as this information is, it’s only the first step toward understanding who you are, what you really want, and how to ac
hieve the right goals for you.

  Our basic personality is hard to change without a lot of work. As a first step, you need to become aware of your basic personality by completing the brief measure in Chapter 3. The more extreme your scores are on one side or the other for each basic tendency, the more difficult it will be for you to alter this natural way of being for more than a short period of time.

  Remember, your basic personality is both a strength and weakness, depending on your environment, lifestyle, values, and goals. When you fall at the extremes, it may be in your best interest to try to mitigate these basic tendencies in situations where they are not helpful. In other circumstances, these can be strengths and you need to be aware of this so you can capitalize on them.

  In the next section, you’re going to learn a little more about your software, or what’s important to you. These are your values. As Tony Robbins declared, “Success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure.” You can’t be fulfilled if you are successful at things that are not in line with your deepest values. You’re pretty much guaranteed to underperform if you are working on achieving things that are not in line with what’s truly important to you. So let’s keep the momentum going and get you more connected with what’s really important to you.

  STEP 2

  KNOW YOUR VALUES

  Chapter 10

  Know How You Want to Live Your Life

  It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.

  ― Roy Disney

  Your beliefs become your thoughts,

  Your thoughts become your words,

  Your words become your actions,

  Your actions become your habits,

  Your habits become your values,

  Your values become your destiny.

  ― Mahatma Gandhi

  You should now know a lot more about your basic makeup, your Basic Personality Tendencies and how they are both strengths and weaknesses essential to your success. But this is only the first step.

  You need to know more about who and what you are, what’s important to you and how you want to live your life. Living a life incongruent with your own deeper values is a recipe for failure.

  As noted earlier in this book, there is nothing worse than going through years of blood, sweat, and tears pursuing a goal only to realize that you were focusing on the wrong goal, or a goal that was incongruent with what you truly value.

  When we live a life incongruent with our Basic Personality Tendencies and values, we are likely to become depressed, anxious, and possibly addicted to substances to get by. Don’t let this be you! With a few simple exercises, you can prevent this from happening.

  Personality Tendencies and Values Are Not the Same Thing

  Your Basic Personality Tendencies were not chosen by you – they are hard-wired into your brain due to a combination of your genes and your experiences in life, especially when you were growing up. Your Basic Personality Tendencies are changeable to a certain extent, but they are not easily altered. They generally stay with you your entire life.

  Your values on the other hand, are developed through your experiences, such as how you were raised or socialized. Values tend to change over time and they can be more easily changed by new experiences and be chosen by you.

  Your personality and values can at times seem to be incongruent. For example, you can value calm and stability, but have a personality style that makes you susceptible to negative emotions and stress. Or you can value achievement, success, and hard work, but be low on the personality dimension of Motivation.

  The trick is to know what your Basic Personality Tendencies and values are. I can’t overstate this enough. Living a life incongruent with your values will lead you down a path of failure and unhappiness. And without the knowledge and strategies to work with or around your Basic Personality Tendencies, you will never reach goals that are truly in line with your values.

  How are Tendencies and Values Related?

  There are a couple Basic Personality Tendency profiles that can influence the type of values you have. These are primarily related to where you fall on Openness and Agreeableness.

  Those who are high on both of these personality dimensions tend to value independence and cooperation. You are more likely to believe in the good in people and that through creative and benevolent means, progress can be made to solve society’s problems.

  For those who are low on both Openness and Agreeableness, valuing tradition, pragmatism, and realism is more common. You’re likely to have strong beliefs about what is right and what is wrong and have little tolerance for those who don’t see the world as you do.

  If you are high on Openness and low on Agreeableness, you likely value freedom and unconventionality. You are also unlikely to be swayed by sentimentality or tradition. You are likely open to different views of right and wrong, but once you decide where you stand, you probably don’t worry too much if your stance bothers others.

  If you are low on Openness and high on Agreeableness you are likely to value tradition and heritage. You’re likely to put a lot of faith in what has been done before and to believe this is the key to the success of families, groups, teams, and society.

  There are numerous other ways your Basic Personality Tendencies can influence your values. Below are some examples:

  High Negative Emotions = likely to value order and stability

  High Agreeableness = likely to value cooperation

  Low Agreeableness = likely to value competition

  High Motivation = likely to value achievement

  Again, these are not hard-and-fast rules; I’m only pointing these out so you’re aware of how your Basic Personality Tendencies may be influencing your perceived values. Sometimes what you value is being driven more by your personality than a conscious choice of what is truly important to you. For example, your high levels of Negative Emotions may be the driving force behind your valuing of order and stability due to a propensity to feel uncomfortable with change and unpredictability. It could be that if you lowered your natural set point on Negative Emotions or learned strategies to prevent your negative emotions from holding you back, you would actually value more excitement and adventure.

  Again, the point here is to realize that values can be chosen, but are definitely influenced by things like your Basic Personality Tendencies.

  Other Sources of Our Values

  The late Stephen R. Covey said it best with “Begin with the end in mind.” What he meant was, before we decide what to focus on in our lives, we need to find out what is truly important to us. In other words, we need to figure out what our values are. The problem is that this is not as easy as it sounds.

  You see, the modern world is engineered to make you value things that may not be a true value for you. Think of all the constant advertisements that we are bombarded with on a daily basis. Marketing departments’ main job is to convince you that you value their product, the type of person that uses their product, or the lifestyle their product represents.

  These attempts at shaping our values are becoming more and more subtle. What some people don’t realize is that simple things like what brand of clothing celebrities or other influencers wear, what car they drive, what accessories or smartphone they carry, and even what they eat and drink are often forms of subtle advertising. Many of these people are paid to be seen using these products. Even people on reality TV shows, who we often don’t think of as “celebrities” in the traditional sense, are often paid to wear certain clothes or consume certain brands of soda in the hope that we also will want to use that product.

  Even when it comes to careers, society as a whole inadvertently tries to convince us that certain callings are more valued and desirable, with becoming a medical doctor valued over other careers like being a writer. So figuring out what you really value is a lot harder than it seems.

  How do We Clarify Our Values?

  The reality is most of us live our lives without much thought given to the
fact that one day we are going to die. And we avoid thinking about this sort of thing for a good reason. It would be pretty frightening and depressing if we were constantly, acutely aware of our mortality.

  But sometimes life throws us a curveball that makes us realize that life is short. Maybe it’s the death of a family member or friend. Or maybe it’s a health scare. As uncomfortable as these situations are, they can help us live better by helping us start living our lives more in line with our deeper values.

  The good news is you don’t have to wait for a tragic event to get in touch with what’s truly important to you. There are a number of exercises you can do to put things into perspective and clarify your values. These are so helfpul that similar exercises have been included in many self-help books such as The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Such exercises are also used in some of the most powerful forms of psychotherapy, including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Existential Psychotherapy.

  What follows is one of the most effective strategies. Be forewarned, this can be a powerful and oftentimes emotionally difficult experience for many, so be prepared.

  How Death Can Help You Find Your Values: The Funeral Exercise

  Take a moment and think about how old you will be exactly five years from today. Now imagine in vivid detail you are witnessing your own funeral. You are able to walk around but nobody can see or hear you. Use all of your senses to make this as real as possible. So this means imagining not only what you see and hear, but what it feels like to be in your body, and even what you smell. The more senses you engage, the more real and effective this exercise will be.