The Cause of a Personal Tipping Point

Many people I've spoken to who have made one or more drastic, beneficial lifestyle changes found the motivation to do so because of an emotionally-charged moment that endured in their minds for years to follow.

I call this powerful moment a moment of clarity. It is during this brief moment that the entire implications of your habits - long term, short term, emotional, physical, and mental implications - suddenly become crystal clear. Imagine you've been walking around with horrible eye-sight for years and then a doctor finally puts on your first pair of glasses.

You can finally see the world around you with infinitely better clarity. When you experience this effect through a moment of clarity, it is the emotional impact of this clarity, and the lasting impact that it leaves on you, that pushes you past your tipping point. In his classic book "Psycho-Cybernetics", Dr. Maxwell Maltz tells a similar story of a lifelong smoker who finally made the decision to quit.

He did so because of a powerful moment of clarity that permanently changed his perspective. Living in a rural area, most errands were done on foot. A particular errand he needed to do was 5 miles away. After having walked 3 out of the 5 miles, he realized he left his cigarettes at home, so without thinking, he immediately spun around and began walking back to go get them.

At that instant, he had his moment of clarity. He finally saw, plainly and clearly, that tobacco had such a strong grip on his thoughts and behavior that he was instantly willing to go 6 miles out of his way (3 miles home and 3 miles back to where he was standing) just to be able to have them close by. He felt a mixture of anger and frustration for letting something have such control over him.

From then on, he never lost the drive to quit smoking. Constructing your own moment of clarity is incredibly difficult. In fact, the reason a moment of clarity is so powerful, is because it hits your emotions very hard. As the saying goes: "People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel."

A powerful emotional experience can endure for years, which can be channeled for positive use in the case of a moment of clarity. However, it's incredibly difficult to plan out something to appeal to your emotions so powerfully.

When you see a commercial of a happy family sitting around the table, advertisers are trying to bring a warm, happy feeling to you. An advertiser will then tie that in to whatever product they are selling, such as a tomato sauce that the whole family enjoys. The key to a highly effective advertisement is the use of an image or scene that creates a strong enough emotional response to convince you to buy the product or service. Note: Appealing to logic has also been shown to work, but emotional appeals have a more lasting impact.

From the point of view of personal motivation many of us are trapped by the emotion of fear ... fear of the unknown, fear of stepping outside of our `comfort zone` fear of breaking away from what feels like deeply held believes about who we are and what we are capable of.  A distortion of the fear response has a stultefying effect on our thinking: it is as if our mind becomes our own worse enemy and immediately upon us deciding there is something different we want to do it speeds off at the speed of light, so fast we don`t notice, and throws back at us all sorts of reasons why we shouldn`t.

Clarity and awareness of how this process unconsciously controls us - despite not working in our best interests, indeed holding us back from really living to the full - it ends up wearing us down.  BUT, when we get to understand how and why that kicks in we get to reclaim our personal core power.