I rarely get fixated on a TV show, but Bridgerton has me completely infatuated. The sexiness of the drama is compelling entertainment, but what captures my attention is witnessing the characters’ motivations. They’re so obvious, yet they’re also so disconnected to what is driving their behaviours.
If you haven’t watched Bridgerton, you can catch up later, but the main theme in the second season is a man chasing a woman, not because he loves her, but because he is desperate to check all the proverbial boxes of what he thinks makes a happy life. He completely neglects how he feels, and ends up creating a huge mess and lots of drama. This is amusing TV but it’s heartbreaking and painful when we do this in real life.
I think a lot our drama is born from holding up beliefs about how we think we need to be, instead of acting on what feels aligned with who we are. Finding our authenticity is understanding why we’re doing what we’re doing. Is it to fill some outside expectations of who you think you need to be or an inner belief about yourself that is causing harm?
Understanding our own motivation can help us be more accountable to ourselves. What we don’t know has the potential to control our lives. Knowing that, we can slowly learn to recognize small things, so we’re no longer controlled in the ways we don’t want to be.
In anything in your life, you’re being driven by a belief. Understanding the driving factor (aka the stories that make up your reality) is essential to getting rid of the things that no longer serve you. There’s many archetypes that we feel we need to represent, such as feeling the need to be the type of person that’s agreeable, hard working, selfless, social, charismatic, overworked, gives too much and on and on.
Understanding what motivates your behavior delivers insight into why you feel the need to be perfect, capable, intelligent, fun, or creative (for example). The stories we tell ourselves have the potential to create most of the drama’s in our lives. By drama I mean the things that cause us pain and suffering.
There’s as many stories as there are humans on this planet, so we don’t need to be critical of ourselves for figuring out that our motivations could be possibly harmful to ourselves or others. We can only make change once we understand who we are. That’s why as we age, many of us begin to self explore, because being someone other than ourselves is exhausting and depletes our energy, even when we achieve the successes we thought we wanted most.
These days I’m taking more time to understand what’s driving me to behave certain ways. I’ve come to realize that a lot of what I’ve been doing has been disciplining myself. Working hard and being relentlessly driven so that I feel like I deserve what I have, even when I have so little. It’s been a defense mechanism to make myself feel worthy. It’s unhealthy, and I’m working on changing it because it creates all kinds of issues, such as fatigue and disconnection from what I really want in life and what is healthy.
You don’t have to unpack all of who you are, for those of us that feel like we have to understand every single motivation, that in itself can be an exhausting practice. So tread lightly with yourself as always, and when you understand more take care of those things within yourself, and potentially remove some of the unwanted struggles of your life.
Love, Noelle
Also, I’m running a 60hr course called The Confluence of Neuroscience, Yoga & Vitality in September. To find out more click HERE.