Find Your Motivation and Happiness

What is the connection between happiness and motivation?

When you are doing something that is aligned with your innate, unchanging hardwiring, you will be intrinsically motivated and likely won't require any outside stimuli or reward to excel.

Doing well in that activity will feel like the natural thing to do. The pursuit of excellence in that endeavor will be instinctual. Time will pass without notice and you will feel truly in the zone.

This feeling will blur the lines between happiness and motivation. Which comes first? Is one a cause of the other? The ability to differentiate between happiness and motivation in that aligned activity will be elusive because you will feel like they are the same emotion.

The individual is motivated because they are happy, and they are happy because they are motivated.

Whether you are a CEO or a summer intern, everyone wants to find a vocation that inspires this level of "time flies by" motivation and happiness.

When you are engaged in an activity that is counter to your personality's DNA, things feel disjointed. It can seem like you are pushing a stone uphill, only to have it slip out of your control and roll back to the bottom, to be repeated over and over again.

Some people refer to that feeling with this colorful metaphor: "Monday was a real salmon day. I spent all my energy swimming upstream only to die at the end."

There are many things we must do during our workweek that we don't necessarily like. That is normal, actually, and this discussion isn't talking about that routine, mundane stuff. We're talking about the big stuff, that which makes up the overall nature of your occupation.

If the essence of what you do is counter to who you are, you will lack motivation and you certainly will lack happiness.

When those feelings are absent, the seemingly slow passage of time becomes readily apparent. Wishing you were somewhere else, anywhere else, than there doing that loathsome task that is completely opposite of how you are hardwired — living completely out of your wheelhouse — becomes top of mind.

You are outside of your vocation.

"Vocation: [noun] A strong feeling of suitability for a particular career or occupation; a person's employment or main occupation, especially regarded as particularly worthy and requiring great dedication."

How do you find the occupation that is also your vocation? What life hacks will enable you to find that job or career that inspires and motivates you at such a deep and personal level? How can you find the happiness that blooms almost uncontrollably when you are doing that which you were meant to do?

Although the answer to the question, "What am I meant to be doing?" cannot be answered by others, the answer can be found by you if you have the right information about yourself.

To find your motivation and happiness, you need to align what you do with who you are.

You need to know how you are hardwired. The most accurate and reliable way to discover your personality's DNA is to take the Core Values Index™ psychometric assessment.

Core Values Index™ and CVI™ are trademarks of Taylor Protocols, Inc.