Taking care of our ambition

Extroverts are invited to take care of a stage for their hunger for expression and exchange. Many fail to meet this demand of their temperament. And this can lead to these extroverts shanghaining any convivial gathering, degrading other participants to an audience, and declaring their own position as stage.

Massive and chronic problems that keep people under their spell for an extended period can point to untapped resources. These include potentials in the field of creativity and creative problem solving, solid skills in dealing with hair-raising challenges, and a great but untapped overall creative power.

Living on a mental carousel can be a sign, that we are invited to follow an oppressed, artistic ambition. It can show us our writing talent and call us on the path of the author. Or it reminds us of a joy in teaching and counseling that we did not want to admit yet.

What do all these phenomena have in common?

All these phenomena can be Trojan development invitations. Trojan development invitations tell us about potentials that we ignore, resources that we hardly use, or an ambition that we suppress. And because we suppress and ignore them, they disguise in a different form.

However, we and the environment take these disguised resources less often as a gift than the Trojans the wooden horse of the Greeks. It is rather the other way around: the disguise is ugly and the content invitation is a gift. But this gift is sometimes hard to unwrap.

Our life force pushes into action and manifestation. If we reject the responsibility for this power and the associated invitations to shape our lives, then life bursts into its own paths. And sometimes we hurt ourselves in the process.

With Milton Erickson, the founder of modern hypnotherapy, and his concept of utilization we can take it to the extreme. With every symptom, according to Erickson, we are dealing with potentials and resources that are looking for a more productive area of application.

One way to track down these healthier and more productive opportunities is the solution-oriented approach.

This approach is about counteracting an evolutionary tendency. We turn away from our constant mental circling around risks and dangers. We turn away from our constant investigation of potentially negative escalations in our lives and appropriate risk management measures. Instead, we turn to the question of what change in our lives we would like to see in the future with regard to our current situation.

This requires an awareness of the burden that we create with our current problem orientation for ourselves and others. Based on this, we can start to develop a genuine interest in changing our situation.

We turn to the exploration of a desired future. I describe the procedure extensively in my book “Solution Focus”, the PDF version of which I have linked in the text for download.

We understand that the journey is the goal. And even if this quote may seem like a cliché, it describes a fundamental human reality. The current action makes us happy. The current actions inspire our drive. Happiness is the quality of a productively cultivated present.

But of course, our ambition also visits us more directly in the form of wishes, hopes, and longings

Common parlance says dreams are but shadows. This could mean that we rarely succeed in realizing our dreams. And that may be true. But if it’s true, it’s less often linked to the size and quality of our dreams. It is usually due to an underdeveloped and incorrectly structured inner motivation system. We have already talked about this in detail with the myths.

Moreover, dreams as shadows point us to the fallacy, we could find happiness at the end of the rainbow. The idiom wants to save us from hoping for happiness in the future that supposedly awaits us once we have realized our dreams.

We have already discussed this in connection with overarching goals. And we already defined the role of our wishes and hopes in more detail: they are inapt as motivators. The intoxication they create is seductive. But they undermine our inner drive as well as a success and learning orientation that could otherwise strengthen our motivation.

Our wishes and dreams invite us to shape our reality and to move in the direction of existentially exciting experiences. When we do that, we nourish our heart and our whole organism. But it is rare for this orientation to make us more productive. And it rarely has the power to trigger action.

There is one last way we get in touch with our ambition

And this dance with our ambition has been discredited a lot. But most probably this dance has never enjoyed social acceptance. Structure-savvy planning fetishists and self-proclaimed guardians of an educated bourgeois order rail against it. They proclaim public order was in danger.

If we follow this wilder form of our ambition in a crude way, then it will in fact become a danger to the common well-being. However, public order is also threatened if we bring these qualities of ambition into play in a cultivated way. However, our actions then threaten the hostile and rigid parts of our family, professional and social systems. And this is something that benefits us all rather than harms us. Because we all long for an open, colorful, and true-to-life coexistence, in which there is equal space for community and individuality.

What are these wild parts of our ambition all about?

It’s about our intuition, our impulsiveness, and our spontaneity we talk here. One thing is clear: impulsiveness and spontaneity only unfold an inspiring, invigorating, and enriching effect if we follow them mindfully. This is what I previously called “cultivated”. We take small steps based on our impulses and supposedly crazy ideas. And we deal continuously and mindfully with the feedback we receive from people and things.

I deal with these topics more intensively in other courses. In addition, there are courses that deal intensively with the topic of meaning, enjoyment, and purpose orientation. Here, the themes of impulsivity and spontaneity play an important role, especially in the approach of the mindful pleasure principle.

This also includes courses on projects and complex processes. Here, these wilder forms of our ambition play a role, especially in the autofocus approach and the positive procrastination already described.

We do not find final happiness in the future and the hope for such a future happiness has little influence on a motivation that triggers action.

We find happiness and a sustainable drive in a productive and creative exchange with the world. We can also find productive bliss if we supplement the success- and learning-oriented action, with which we will deal even more intensively in the following chapters, with modern spiritual practice and an inner orientation that follows the heart.

A few questions arise:

• Why do we make life so difficult for ourselves?
• Why do we ignore our resources, our development impulses, and our projects?
• Why don’t we take care of adequate areas to apply our resources, curiously following our ideas for personal evolution and unfolding our potential with courageous action?

This probably has to do with our fears, or more precisely, with a basic fear of life. With the so-called “German Angst” we Germans have even conquered a rather inglorious place in the English language.