Early conditioning affects the capacity that an individual has for motivating and creating meaning for themselves in their lives. We are born with an innate potential. This potential is different for every person. The unconscious motivation that moves us in the direction of our potential also lies within us. This is also unique to every person. Being able to invest in satisfying their own needs and ambitions gives people meaning. Self-gratification, approval and recognition, curiosity, self-determination, self-efficacy and individual ambition are a few of the elements of motivation needed to achieve our potential. The motivation to take action and self-actualize is based on inner forces or energy that I call Striving Styles. Many people lose their full capacity to use their predominant striving energies during their early conditioning.
During the first three years of life, our authentic self strives to emerge and develop under a combination of nature/nurture forces: a combination of constitutional aptitudes, genetic biological pressure, and the parent's capacity to acknowledge, respond and give emotional support to the unique characteristics of the emerging self of their child.
External forces, such as rewards or punishments, controlled by parents are necessary to encourage development and to ensure healthy adaptation. The excessive use of external motivators undermines the capacity for the child to use their dominant Striving Style and the child begins to divert its striving efforts into adapting, thereby creating a dependence on external motivators (parental and other authorities). It results in the development of an unconscious relationship system, a distinct pattern of self-protective behaviours and thought patterns that is hard-wired in the brain over time, automatically governing how people behave in relationship to others, our work and ourselves.
This pattern of adaptive reactions is fear based and is associated with the primitive brain or reptilian brain. The resulting adaptation to the external world and those with perceived authority over them is self-protective, and leads to striving energy being fixated on a neural pathway that ensures psychological and physiological survival, diminishing the individual's capacity for self-actualization.
People who are dependent on external motivators to inform them of what they need to do have difficulty in the workplace when they are encouraged to work without direction, or to maintain their own motivation in the absence of their leader. In relationships, they depend on others and society to provide approval for good behaviour. They are cut off from their dominant Striving Style and ability to self-actualize.
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