Sometimes we are happy with the lives we are living. Sometimes we feel dissatisfied but we don’t quite understand why.
The reason for this dissatisfaction is our inner drive to become: our equivalent of a caterpillar’s longing to transform into a butterfly, or a nut’s longing to grow into a tree. We feel happiest when we are living in line with this unconscious longing. We feel dissatisfied when there is a gap between the person we are being and the person we most want to become.
As a wise philosopher once put it:
“You can choose what you do, but you can’t choose what you want to do.”
We all know what a nut and a caterpillar want to become but what about a human being?
Sigmund Freud was the first to research this scientifically. He discovered that for all of us:
“Life is love and work.”
Success for a human being comes when we are able to love and be loved — and to do work that matters to us, and which others recognise that we do well.
To this, psychologist Will Schutz added a third dimension. He discovered that people also want to be significant, we want to have status. We want to do something or be someone that is significant compared to someone or something outside ourselves. For some people this means making more money than other people. For others it means having more followers on social media. And for some people it means making a difference to their family, their community, their country, an organisation, nature, to future generations, or perhaps to just one other person or thing.
No matter what this looks like for you, these three things together are what drive and pull all of us forward:
- We all want to love and be loved
- We all want to do work that is important to us and which uses our unique talents, and which others recognise
- We all want to be significant in some way, that matters to us
These are the things we are all longing to become.
This is why advertisers promise us: “Buy this product and people will love you,” “Buy this product and you will be making the smart choice, the clever choice, the talented choice,” “Buy this product and you will have status, you will be significant.”
Our lives don’t always provide the perfect conditions to achieve these three things. But like a plant growing through concrete, we push on anyway.
And in a time of change, this means that the better we can know and understand what our versions of these three unconscious drives or longings are, the better we will be able to let go what doesn’t matter, and the better we will be able to focus to achieve what does matter most to us. And the better we will then be able to lead ourselves, and other people, through this time of change.
This is another step to becoming antifragile: able to use change to follow our inner drive, to become whoever we most long to be.
Are you happy with the life you are now living or do you feel the need to make a change? Is the gap to do with love, work, or the significance the impact you are making in the world? What do you want instead? And how will you inspire yourself and the people around you to long to make that happen?
Adapted from Inner Leadership: a framework and tools for building inspiration in times of change.
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Photo By Maria Keays via StockPholio.com