[My True Desire
Virginie Fayad
To learn more about how to become aware of the processes and impact of mimetic desire in our lives, and to help us achieve a greater degree of freedom from the forces of the market, from politics, from bad actors in our lives who want to manipulate us into wanting what they want with little regard for our flourishing, I caught up this month in my Finding Brave podcast with Luke Burgis, an entrepreneur, author, and Director of Programs at the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship.
Over the next decade or so, I came to understand what was going on at an even deeper level. That led me to the work of Girard and his theory of mimetic desire, which explains much about what is going on in our culture today.
Burgis: There are aspects of mimetic desire that are common to all people. But it makes sense that it might manifest differently based on your gender, culture, or other circumstances.
Can you tell me a story about a time in your life when you put effort into doing something that gave you a deep sense of satisfaction? Something in which you found a deep sense of meaning? Something that brings you joy even to recall?
Try to dig up at least 4-5 of these stories from your life. Write them down. Then ask yourself: what specifically was it that was motivating me in each of these cases? What was it that I wanted to achieve? And why is that so important to me?
Kathy Caprino is a career and leadership coach, speaker, educator, and author of The Most Powerful You: 7 Bravery-Boosting Paths to Career Bliss. She helps professionals build their most rewarding careers through her Career & Leadership Breakthrough programs and courses, Finding Brave podcast, and her Coaching team.
Indulge your true desires with this fun and floral Billabong maxi dress. Made with crinkle viscose, this dress features a fitted bodice and smocking detail for a flattering fit, plus cut-outs at the sides for an eye-catching touch.
LinkedIn and 3rd parties use essential and non-essential cookies to provide, secure, analyze and improve our Services, and to show you relevant ads (including professional and job ads) on and off LinkedIn. Learn more in our Cookie Policy.
Without true desire significant performance just does not happen. For me, true desire represents what an individual specifically wants, to a great enough degree, that they will be motivated to take appropriate action in order to obtain it. Going way beyond hope, wishful thinking, dreams, expectation, and entitlement, true desire helps us to overcome our natural tendency to maintain and justify the status quo. True desire facilitates enhanced performance, it enables openness to positive change, it provides people with the motivation and confidence to change, and it is what separates above-average performers from the hopeful majority.
One assessment that I have been trained in, and use frequently, is focused on some specific aspects of performance. Originally developed to help elevate the performance of elite athletes, this assessment was expanded in its application to help evaluate the performance of multi-level managers and professional personnel occupying a range of employment positions. And while this assessment does offer valuable information, like all assessments, it can never provide complete insight into the entire performance picture. Evidence of this can be found in a number of ways but, specific to this discussion, there is one obvious problem when attempting to directly translate the assessment from elite athletes to the business / employment community;
Also, those of you who read my articles will be aware of the critical position that I give to the assessment of cognitive matching with regards to an individual and their specific role. Generally speaking, if a person does not have the cognitive capability that is required to cope with the complexity of challenges that are involved with their level of responsibility within their organization, they will simply not meet their performance expectations. (You can read more about this in my article The Real Secret to Performance Success). But while the assessment of cognitive capability has special status in my evaluative process and is always included, like all assessments, it will have limited value when used in isolation. Because, even when a person possesses that crucially important cognitive capability to perform, they will still fall short of performance expectations if they do not have the motivationally-based true desire to perform.
Note: These examples support the need to use a wide range of assessments, and delivery methods, in the performance evaluation process because no one assessment will answer all of your questions. We will only obtain higher accuracy when all performance-related characteristics have been considered and when cross-assessment verification has been conducted. There are many interrelated technical (education, experience, specific technical skills) and non-technical (personality related) aspects involved with effective individual work performance. On the non-technical side, CAES incorporates a number of specific assessments within such broad categories as; cognitive capabilities and thinking preferences, concentration strengths, motivational preferences, general productivity traits, communication and interpersonal skills and emotional intelligence as well as various managerial and leadership performance items. All of these categories are important to various degrees, so it is just as important that their interrelated impact at least be considered, and certainly not be neglected, in order to obtain worthwhile accuracy in any individual performance-related analysis.
This thinking can be applied to many scenarios. From a leadership perspective, leaders set a direction (change), inspire and create a comfort in their followers to embrace it, and then motivate them to sustain their commitment and contribution to the change over time. In the following examples, it is obvious which leader people would follow simply because they have helped their followers to be more involved, and feel more confident, about the change involved.
A career seeker who defines what they desire in a next level role will be more able to assess where this position might exist, to evaluate their progress in moving towards it, and to bravely make whatever adjustments are necessary to obtain it. Their true desire that will sustain their motivation to keep going forward despite a challenging and competitive labour market. And it will also enable them to more attractively present themselves as a candidate who wants the position not just a position. Conversely, those people who rely on the hope that someone will hand them a job, better yet a career, will simply be left behind.
And to want something that makes you less of you through buffering, those false desires, will cause suffering. But true desire, desire that we find in the F-line that is generated from conscious thinking and conscious awareness towards a life that evolves us, towards a life that makes us bigger, towards a life that creates the potential that is us and manifest it, that is one of the most important things we can focus on.
And I know that many of you can relate to this in terms of food and alcohol and porn and social media. Any of those desires that feel compulsive, any of those desires that, when you satisfy them, make your life worse, those are false desires.
So, if you are someone with false desires, I want to encourage you to utilize the experience of those false desires to make yourself stronger and more connected. There is nothing wrong with you if you have false desires. It simply means that your brain is wired correctly for survival. And you can understand that and you can overcome that.
And in order to tolerate it, many of us give into false desires to tolerate our undesirable life. We replace our true desire with our false desires. But when we learn how to allow for those false desires, and therefore let them go, what we are left with is back to our undesirable life.
And as I removed those desires, what I found was dormant desires; desires that had been there, that were there, aching to be heard that were no longer dormant. They woke up. When I allowed space for there to be a vacuum, when I allowed space for there to be space, that genuine desire became known to me.
But once I was able to release that false desire, the new desires, the true desires, the dormant desires woke up and fueled me with a power, with an energy, with a motivation that I had never experienced before. The same motivation and energy that I was putting into going to the bar and getting a glass of wine, that powerful pull, was now put into something much more important, much more useful, much more expansive for me.
And with all that energy and all that motivation, I was able to create at a level and a pace that I had never been able to do before. I spent time acknowledging and finding and honing and listening to my true desire. What did I really want?
The desire for money was a desire for expression. How can we play this game of life and show how extraordinary it can be when you manage your mind? Never at the expense of myself and what I really wanted.
So, what are your dormant desires? When you get rid of all your false desires and you stop giving in to those and you really start to listen to yourself, what is it that you most want? When no one else is looking, when no one else has an opinion, what is it that you want for you in your life and are you willing to generate and allow for the desire that is there to fuel you into taking action?
Desire is so strong that it keeps me up at night. It keeps me thinking about it. It keeps me working through the problem and overcoming the resistance and overcoming all the obstacles to create and manifest that true desire.
And instead, what I do is I manufacture desire. I create desire with my mind because that is the fuel that I want to use to create the positive results in my life. And the way that we do that is by living into and from our future. What would our mind be thinking? What would we be believing if we already had accomplished this, if we already were the fulfilment of the desire that we want?
795a8134c1