Finding Your Catalyst for Personal Motivation and Inspiration
A catalyst can be something that you experience – such as an event, or it can be words spoken by another person, or a book or a movie that causes you to alter your life in some way.
Some catalysts are simple – such as a man who gets fired because he’s always late. Losing the job can be a catalyst for that man to make sure he gets to his next job on time, or find a job that gives him so much personal satisfaction, he never wants to let his company down.
The event of getting fired, often at an inopportune time, caused him to make a change in how he acts in life. Change is hard. It’s easier to do what you’ve always done because there’s comfort in familiarity.
Leaving your comfort zone thrusts you into new situations and forces you to deal with new ideas and new ways of handling various aspects of life. It’s scary and no one wants to go through it voluntarily.
If you were to take a survey of random strangers and ask them, “Are you happy with your life?” you would get more no answers than you would yes ones. There are a lot of people who aren’t happy with their lives.
They don’t like their personal life or their professional life – and they don’t like how they act sometimes. Yet day in and day out, they don’t do anything to change any of that.
Some people don’t know how to change it. They don’t understand how they can find a catalyst to motivate and inspire themselves toward the kind of life they want.
Sometimes a catalyst enters your life, and you’re too focused on the ordinary, that you miss it completely. You may have to train yourself to watch for opportunities if you want to raise yourself to a higher level of success and happiness.
Change Begins and Ends with You
If you take the time to look over your life at this moment, what would you think about it? Think about the people in your life – those with who you’re in an intimate relationship with.
Is it everything you wanted it to be and hoped it could be? What about where you are financially in life? Does where you stand right now with your finances make you wish things were different?
Does it create a hunger within you to have more? To be wiser about your finances? What about your job? This is an area where a lot of people are absolutely miserable.
Yet, they stay in that job year after year getting older and even more miserable. If you dislike any area of your life because it simply isn’t satisfying, you but you stick with it anyway, it means that you’ve settled.
You’ve given up on the idea that there could be more – that you deserve more or that changing things is even worth the effort. If you dislike an area of your life now, but you don’t change anything about it, you will still dislike that area of your life three months, six months, or a year down the road.
You will have lost time and you will have missed the opportunity to make changes during that timeframe. If you want more out of life – if you feel that you should have more – and the unhappiness with your life sits like a rock in the pit of your stomach, then you need to take steps to make changes.
Physical signs like that are always indicators that something isn’t the way you want it to be – that it needs to be addressed. And ignoring these physical signs can lead to emotional complications as the stress of the matter weighs heavily on you.
Remaining where you are in a life you’re not happy with will lead to feelings of depression, sadness, and resignation. That hole inside of you that aches for something more, for something better will never be filled.
That’s not what you deserve. It’s not what anyone deserves. Life is not meant to be something that’s just endured. It’s meant to be lived with excitement because it’s an adventure if you decide that it is.
Roadblocks That Get in the Way of Motivation
Though people are all different, we all have one thing in common – roadblocks that get in the way of what we really want from life. Roadblocks stop some people from ever making a change, but they motivate others to keep on going to find a way to what they want, regardless of the roadblock.
You might have one of these roadblocks or you might experience more than one of them. A major roadblock to change is fear. When things change, it ushers in differences that can make us afraid.
We’re afraid to leave behind the bad job for fear we won’t like the new one – fear that we might not fit in as well. Remember though, that one of the acronyms for fear is False Evidence Appearing Real.
Your fears are usually based on what-if myths – and they almost always never come to pass. Don’t let fear cause you to sit on the sidelines of change. Another roadblock that gets in the way is a lack of knowledge.
It’s hard to make changes when you’re not sure exactly how to go about those changes. You might be branching out into an area that’s completely beyond your scope of knowledge at the present time.
Remember that what you don’t know can be learned. Use educational resources as your catalyst for change and success. Strive for new levels of insight that you previously didn’t have.
Thinking that you simply can’t add another thing to your already full life keeps many people stuck where they are. Making changes requires work. So many people see the effort as not worth the payoff – and that’s a mistake.
This belief is what keeps you rooted to that job that you hate, to those messy finances, or to that relationship that’s sucking the life right out of you. Learning better time management skills can be a catalyst for a better life as you clear out things that are a waste of time and make room for what offers the most benefits.
Being just comfortable enough where you are can be a roadblock to motivate you to change. You’re not 100% happy, but you’re “happy enough.” All this means is that you settled for a life that keeps you locked in your comfort zone.
You’re trading a full life for one that’s half empty – because if you’re not 100% satisfied, then something is missing. That something may be the very thing that you always wanted, but because you were “happy enough,” you’ll never reach it.
Visualization can be a catalyst for the changes you need to make. Picture the next level of success in every area of your life – finances, career satisfaction, relationships, health – everything that matters most to you.
Focus on how it could be improved and then make a game plan to get you there. If you block out those thoughts in an effort to stay content, you’ll never know what you could have made out of your life if you’d give it a chance.
Wanting everything to be perfect is a huge roadblock to motivation. It’s here where people stall out. They want the new situation to be perfect before they attempt any changes.
They want the new job to have everything in place. They don’t want to take the chance that they’ll make a switch and find it’s not what they wanted. These are people who wait for the “perfect” relationship before getting into one.
Perfectionism is the killer of change because what you see in your mind as perfection doesn’t translate that way in life. That’s because there are no perfect scenarios in a life that’s lived to the fullest.
There are experiences to encounter – and not one of them will be perfect. That’s okay. Perfectionism kills progress. You don’t want to be sitting on the sidelines waiting to get into the game of life.
The number one roadblock that keeps too many people from letting a catalyst be their motivation is the fear of failure. They falsely believe that they haven’t failed yet because they haven’t even tried – so they’re safe.
But whether they realize it or not, they have failed. They’re choosing to stay stagnant in a lesser life than what they dreamed of. That, in itself, is a form of failure.
Another roadblock happens when people wait for change rather than seeking change. They wait for the perfect joint venture partner to come to them instead of seeking one out because that requires putting themselves on the line.
They wait to see if the person they’re in a relationship with is going to treat them better, rather than speaking up about what they want and deserve. They avoid tough situations and tough conversations because they’re waiting for everything to work out on its own.
Change isn’t something that happens on a whim. It’s something that you make happen. You have to find the motivation within yourself to make that change. And it’s uncomfortable at first.
That’s okay. Take that sign of discomfort as a compliment. It’s proving to you that you’re taking action and bettering your life, even in the face of fear or uneasiness.
Your Mind Can Be a Catalyst
You get the life that you think you deserve. Your mind or your thought patterns lead you to make changes – to take action that alters the life you currently have. What usually happens when someone’s mind leads them to take action is they become so upset with their current situation, they think leaving it where it’s at is no longer an option.
Their emotions will often reach a point that they must make a change. This drive can often start out backed by an emotion. For example, if someone is in a relationship with a person who didn’t treat them that well, they’ll often stick with the relationship until a catalyst fueled by emotion causes a change.
One emotion could be anger. If the person you’re in a relationship with is unfaithful, it’s often anger over the cheating that drives the catalyst – even when the prior bad behavior didn’t induce a change.
Your subconscious knows what you truly want. What happens is this true desire becomes buried deep under what we’re willing to settle for. This is why so many people aren’t living a life full of passion.
You can tell if you’re living a life full of passion by asking yourself this question. Do I love getting out of bed in the morning? If you’re not excited about what you get to do when you get out of bed, that’s a warning sign that you need to find your catalyst.
Whatever it is that motivates you is what will drive you to wake up, ready to start and excel throughout your day. It will drive you to keep going in the face of obstacles.
You’ll continue on – even if you’re the only one who believes in you, or your idea, or your change. That’s why it’s vital to your success – to your ability to thrive – that you get in a business that you have a strong emotional attachment to – something you are proud of and believe in strongly.
Face the Hard Truth About What’s Keeping You Stuck
Did you ever hear of someone who had a terrible health scare because they made bad choices in life that led to the issue? It shook them up – and for a while, they strictly followed the doctor’s orders.
They ate right. They exercised. They got the amount of sleep that they needed. They quit smoking. They quit drinking. Yet before several months were out, they slipped right back into their old habits.
The catalyst, which was the health scare, came face to face with personal responsibility – and lost. The hard truth is that in order for your catalyst to motivate you, you’re going to have to accept personal responsibility.
The choices that you make in life are your choices. You made them because you thought they were the best option at the time. You might have received bad advice that led you to a decision – but in the end, you were the one that made that choice.
You have to accept personal responsibility for what you want to see changed in your life before it can change. People who place the blame on others for their lot in life don’t ever reach a place where they’re truly happy – regardless of the changes.
That’s because they see life as happening to them rather than them making life happen. Accept the responsibility for your mistakes, for your poor choices, for that awful job you shouldn’t have taken, or for that relationship that was a mess from the start that you wasted too much time on.
Once you accept it, you can move on. You can free yourself to finally accept the catalyst for change. Don’t let where you are be a stone around your neck that anchors you to the place where you currently are.
Let the mistakes you made in the past become part of your motivation – part of your growing experience. While growth is hard, all good things happen with the evolution to a different place in life.
5 Ways You Can Find Your Catalyst
Knowing that you want your life to change requires that you take stock of your life. It means that you have to examine every area and look at what’s not been working to make you feel the inner satisfaction that you’d like to have.
The first way that you can find your catalyst is to understand the things in your life that matter to you. Your catalyst for motivation won’t be the same as someone else’s.
While what matters to one person may be an expensive house, that might not matter to you. Your priority might be financial security for your retirement or more time to spend with your loved ones.
If having time to do what you want to do with creative work is what matters to you, then your catalyst will be whatever action gives you the chance to free your inner artist.
This may be something as simple as cutting back on hours with work or finding a different job. It might be the catalyst of taking an art or a writing class. Whatever it is should be something that you truly desire – something that you feel your life would be lacking if you didn’t have it.
The second way is to accept that you’re going to have to change things in order to get what matters to you. Many people are willing to acknowledge what matters to them, but then they balk at the change.
You won’t get what matters to you without change. It’s like losing weight. You can’t shed pounds if you stay sedentary, eating copious amounts of calories. You have to be mindful of your movement and intake.
The third way to find your catalyst is to give it the opportunity to happen. For example, if you want to start your own business, but your personal and professional life doesn’t leave you with room to learn about business development or to increase your talents, then something has to give.
You have to make room to let the change in. Maybe that means spending a little time after work on the weekdays or on the weekends to educate yourself. It’s a temporary sacrifice for a long-term benefit.
The fourth way to find your catalyst is to make it concrete. Write it down. Share it with others. Find a mentor. Don’t allow this change you want to remain nothing more than a desire.
By naming it, you’re taking a step toward making it your future reality. Claim what it is that you want for your life. Then make a formidable plan to go after it, step-by-step.
The fifth way is to not let the size of the change throw you off your goal. Some changes that people want to make really are pretty big. Changes like moving from your home to live in another country because it’s what you’ve always wanted is a huge change.
You wouldn’t want to pack up overnight and head out the next morning. You can’t throw away personal responsibility when a catalyst happens. What you have to do is focus on the things you need to do in order to reach that change sensibly.
If your goal is moving to another country, you would want to find a place to live and secure a way to support yourself financially before taking the leap. Those are action steps that you can take that lead to the big change.
Small change is what equals big change and it gets you closer to where you want to be in life. Think about how often you’ve just accepted your fate – your lot in life.
Have you ever made an action plan to get to a better place? To have more peaceful relationships by setting boundaries? To feel the thrill of waking up each morning, ready to lead a niche that excites you?
If you’ve been watching time pass by, waiting for a bolt of lightning, consider this day your wake-up call. It’s time to embrace every catalyst you encounter so that years down the road, you’re not still stuck in the mud wondering why life passed you by. A Six Week Roadmap to Achieving BIG, Ambitious Goals
–and Create an Extraordinary Life