Encouragement

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1. INTRODUCTION: I AM BEFORE I CAN

One writer, Hal Becker, states, “Motivation is like deodorant, it is only useful for 24 hours”. Many people subscribe to this idea but fail to use the lesson it teaches. Motivation has become a ‘pie in the sky phenomenon’. A lot of people reject attempts to motivate them; others avoid motivational events because, as they say, it (motivation) is useless. This is said in the background of a lot of people making money by delivering speeches, which get the audience excited for a while, but when they get back down to real life after the speech, things are tough again. This is the reason I propose that while the “I CAN” message is one of the most powerful messages to gear people up to reaching their potential – the message has been overstated to an extent that a lot of people think that just by hearing these positive affirmations, life will automatically change. We need a balancing act, which expresses a new way of looking at life. This is how I put it:

I AM BEFORE I CAN

Imagine a pig listening to a motivational speaker telling it “You can fly!!” This pig listens with enhanced interest and is agitated to ‘act out’ what it hears. ‘I can fly’, the pig says repeatedly until it is convinced that it really can. She then goes to the top of the mountain and with a loud shout of ‘I CAN FLY!’ it attempts to fly and it sadly hits the ground and breaks its back. How right was the commentator when he said:

You can’t teach a pig to fly, no matter how long the runway.

The problem is not with the message “I can fly”. The problem is with the pig’s approach to the message. I propose: the pig should have started by redefining who it was and finding fault with its pig nature, which did not allow it to fly. The pig should have engaged in a transformative process to adopt a new nature. It would then have been able to say: “I am now an EAGLE, I believe I can fly”. This scenario happens to the best of us. We need to set our goals in realistic terms. Find out who you ARE before declaring what you CAN do. I am before I can.

The most exciting thing about this is the part of “self investigation (consciously deciding to answer the question, ‘who am I?’), self realisation (coming to a point where you say, oh this is the real me) and transformation (once you recognize the real you, engage in a process to work on all aspects that need to be changed for you, like the caterpillar, to transform into a ‘butterfly’. In religious terms they say, “I am not what I used to be”. That is motivation in itself and will push you adequately to do the new thing that you now believe you can DO. Its not what you are, but what you can be that should motivate your desires

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