The Marketing 24-7 Podcast: Is it the Pleasure or the Pain that Motivates Action?
Is it the Pleasure or the Pain that Motivates Action?
Our brains either move us away from pain or toward pleasure. When you learn how to use this to your advantage, you’ll get so much more done!
This Podcast discusses this subject and more.
Our brains always move us either away from pain or toward pleasure. When you learn how to use this to your advantage, you’ll get so much more done!
The launch of one of my projects took months longer than it needed to because I was procrastinating on my part of the project. I had associated so much pain and suffering with it that no matter how many times I came into work early, I figured out ways to avoid doing it.
I see this happen all the time with people who are ready to take their business to the next level. They associate so much pain with spending money on ads, but instead they spend more and more time and money on additional training and courses and coaching and seminars.
Their brain is trying to find pleasure and move away from pain because the fear of the ad not working is so strong.
Somehow the success of the ad becomes a symbol of the total failure or success of the business. They believe that if the ad doesn’t work, then the offer is terrible, and the business should just go and curl up its toes.
Back to my procrastination, I spent 6 weeks delaying a task that took me 20 minutes to do. The pain in my brain made it so much worse than it actually was!
So how do you use your brain’s natural tendency—to find pleasure and avoid pain—to your advantage? What I do is to create something that had so much pleasure and excitement, so my brain felt like, “I want that! I want that more than I care about the pain.” That’s step one. Create that thing. (And no, I am not going to tell you what it was in my case, because it’s unique to me its a bit stupid and childish, but it was a pleasure thing for me.)
Step two is to tell yourself you can’t have those good feelings until the painful task is done. The pleasure eventually dwarfs the pain (if you do it right). Like a magnet, it pulls you to complete the task.
Step three is to recognize the next time it happens. Remember how big the pain felt and how once you actually did it, it really wasn’t as bad as you’d made it out to be in your head.
So that’s the essence of this message, find a pleasure big enough to override the pain associated with tasks you don’t want to do and get them done.