The sixth motivator is self-acceptance
May
18
The sixth motivator is self-acceptance. I hope you get this one because you can’t realize your fullest potential without this achievement.
We all hunger for it. Self-acceptance is calcium for the bones of our personalities. Many of us keep those bones weak by making our self- acceptance dependent on the approval of others. Weak bones make for a hard life. Confusing self-acceptance with acceptance by others makes for a hard life.
You may have trouble thinking about self-acceptance in any way that doesn’t involve acceptance by others. Many of us simply aren’t in the business of accepting ourselves, although few of us ever get out of the business of rejecting ourselves. Positive input depends on others, negative input we provide ourselves. This is a no-win system.
The harder we work at trying to succeed this way, the more vulnerable we make ourselves. People sense our need, play our weakness to their own advantage, and decide for themselves whether we fail or succeed. Watch carefully where you seek approval. If you drift into seeking it from someone who’d be threatened by your succeess, you’re in heavy trouble.
Self-acceptance is the state of being your own person. You have arrived. Not where somebody else sent you, you have arrived exactly where you want to be. Self-acceptance marks the day when the opinions of other people don’t control you anymore. It’s the day you start making yourself heard when you don’t agree. It’s the night you suddenly jump a jet to Europe for a vacation; it’s the morning you stay in bed because you want to. It’s the hour when you’re all through with the games you don’t want to play, through with the roles you don’t want to live. It’s the minute you finally unlock your potential, become you, know that you’ve become you, and know that you are completely and gloriously your own person. Doesn’t that sound exciting?
Very few people get there.
Why do so many of us fail to attain self-acceptance?
Because we don’t limit the number of people that we must have approval from.
Because we demand more approval from the world than the world is willing to give us—and weaken our action in a vain attempt to get it.
Because we don’t grasp how important it is to truly accept ourselves. Some of us dimly see what’s lacking, and try to force self-acceptance on ourselves.
But those little voices inside our heads keep on cutting us down to size no matter how loud and aggressive and stubborn we act.
Yes, it is difficult to become yourself until you’ve learned to be comfortable with an attainable amount of acceptance from other people. Until you can stop worrying about this, you can’t become you.
And you’ll never reach self-acceptance, the state where you can function best and be happiest, until you get some recognition and enhance your self-image. You won’t get recognition until you have some achievement. You’ll never have achievement until you develop a feeling of security. And you won’t have a feeling of security until you start making some money.
You can get money, security, achievement, recognition, acceptance of others—and still not have self-acceptance. You probably know successful people who have all these things except self-acceptance.
We’ve all read about entertainers who reach stardom and then commit suicide. They had money; they had security; stardom is defined as recognition and acceptance by others—but they failed to achieve self-acceptance. Everybody liked them. That is, everybody liked each of them except one person. That one person hated what they’d become to get what they thought they wanted. The most sincere form of self-criticism is suicide.
The next most sincere form is the living suicide that so many people inflict on themselves when their cravings for the satisfactions of the six motivators far outrun what they can attain. Those who feel they’re entitled to these things as gifts react the same way when the world refuses to hand them all they desire. They retreat into destructive habits and attitudes, and rob their lives of productivity, joy, and meaning. Don’t defeat yourself before you begin to fight: don’t demand immediate satisfactions far greater than those you can immediately obtain.
Those are the six basic motivators—powerful, gut-level emotions that drive us all. Untamed, they drown us; harnessed, they supply unlimited energy. Study them.
They affect you in many ways: on the surface, in the shallows, and in the depths of your ego. You can’t learn too much about them and about how you can control their enormous forces.
As a starting point, look at your past. Feel your past. Your past has determined where you are at this moment; your immediate future will soon be the past that will determine your more distant future. As we get further into these pages, please realize that I’m writing to you about your life. Time passes at the same speed for everyone — it just seems to pass more slowly in slums than in Monte Carlo. Where will you be in five years? Develop a plan, and then activate that plan to put yourself where you want to be in five years. And be sure to update your five-year-plan at least annually.