image courtesy of Mi Gi

If you’re reading this site, it’s probably because you care about the state of the world. You also recognize that the problems we have to solve are fairly intractable from the level we are at right now, and so you want to push yourself to be smarter, more comprehensive in your thinking, and more powerful in your actions.

If you’re anything like me, though, sometimes this cognitive recognition that we need to keep developing slips away a bit. After a long tiring day at work, the couch sings its siren song, and the laziness to which our culture says we are entitled takes over more hours than we’d like to admit. In the midst of everything most of us have to get done in a day, how can we stay motivated to make choices that keep us growing?

Put another way, if we are basically wired to do what we feel like doing, how can we make ourselves feel like doing the right thing?

We don’t have to be pushed around by emotions

It’s not a simple question. There are so many different factors that come into play: our low-level, precognitive reptilian brain that perceives danger everywhere ... the conditioned responses we’ve learned from long experience with defying and meeting expectations ... our inborn desire to connect with and please other people. All of these inputs and more feed into our emotions, and our emotions largely determine what kind of decisions we make.

But we don’t have to be pushed around by all the different systems that influence how we feel. I’ve found that it is possible—at least sometimes!—to point my emotional state in a positive direction. My higher selves—my moral and cognitive impulses—can get together and decide where to go, and then I can get all those other selves on board, too.

Paying attention to something bigger

How? It’s a matter of attention. When the couch and the television are calling my name, and I choose to put my attention on how run-down I feel, it’s very easy to give in. After all, what does it really matter what I do? I am such a small and insignificant part of the bigger picture. So I may as well do whatever sounds like it will feel good.

But when I actually put my attention on that bigger picture and what it really is, I can see very clearly that my actions DO matter in the most desperate way. If I don’t pick up the ball, if I don’t develop my capacities to their fullest expression and push the boundaries of what it means to be human, then who will?

Top-down perspective

When I connect with the big picture, I can see life from the top-down perspective. I can see that my decisions moment-to-moment determine how far forward we push as a species. I can see that I am far more responsible for how this experiment turns out than I could ever have imagined from my smaller me-oriented vantage point. And rather than feeling run down or bored or apathetic, I start to feel excited to explore and create.

Emotions are incredibly complex phenomena. They seem to arise mysteriously, and we sometimes feel powerless to make choices when we are bathed in a powerful feeling. But we don’t have to just push through our experience with grim determination. We can learn to conduct our internal states, to create conditions favorable for making good decisions, and to use our emotional energy to continue to evolve. It’s all a matter of finding something bigger to be interested in and remembering to connect with it on a daily basis. More on the daily basis part on Wednesday ...