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Desire Engines: The Full Cycle
Desire Engine Graphic
© 2011-2017 Mark K Petruzzi Jr/Success Waypoint LLC

The Desire Engine

The Desire Engine is a way of thinking about what pulls us through life. Desire Engines are cycles of thought, choice, action, and evaluation that are always operating within us in our day-to-day lives. Whether you are wanting a snack, planning a family vacation, or reacting to criticism, Desire Engines are at work. Once more, on the way from Perception through Desire and back again, we're energized to move forward—we are motivated.
All emotions and stresses in our lives are somehow related to our desires—either something we want or something we don't want to lose. Try this experiment. Think of one or more emotional scenarios that you remember having this past week.

It doesn't matter what you pick but try choosing one emotionally stressful, and one emotionally pleasurable situation with which to work. For each, ask yourself, "What is it that I wanted (or didn't want to lose) in this situation?" I think you'll find that you can easily trace your feelings to your desires.
You'll feel tension and stress where beliefs, thoughts, values, and action choices conflicted with your wants, and you'll notice relief and ease—and expansive emotions—where the latter aligned with the former. Whether you merely wish that you feel a certain way in an immediate situation or your desire is a long-term, cherished aspiration, tracing your emotions to your desires works equally well.
Once you make the connection, you can then make more conscious, mindful choices. This new level of awareness can make a remarkable difference in how deliberate you are about choosing your future desires. You'll pay better attention to how your beliefs, thoughts, values, and action choices align with those desires.
Please note, there are important differences between the Success Waypoint Desire Engine that I created in 2007, and the "Desire Engine" created by Nir Eyal almost five years later.

Nir's work, first published in TechCrunch, is interesting and useful and seeks to describe how technologies can engage and "addict" users into habit-forming behaviors. Mainly, Nir is using his “Desire Engine” in a way that suggests how professionals playing in the marketing, social application, and game design spaces can "create" desire in their prospective and current users.
The Success Waypoint model, on the other hand, seeks to describe how desire operates in our psychology and our lives. Desire powers us by infusing us with emotional energy. In this sense, the word "engine" in the SW model refers to internal powering, and not, as in Nir's model, an external force acting with intent to influence us.
I find Nir's model useful in showing how we give our power away. By contrast, the Success Waypoint Desire Engine reveals that the power is always with us, and if we become more conscious or our internal desire process, we are less likely to fall into the traps described by Nir's representation.

We can say that our life turns on the Desire Engine, and our self-expansion (even transformation) turns on our progress and process in life. One helpful way to visualize this relationship, is like a set of gears.
Desire Engine Graphic
© 2011-2017 Mark K Petruzzi Jr/Success Waypoint LLC

Everything we experience begins with a thought. Emotions, belief, attitude, choice, action, relationship, experience, material wealth — it all starts with our thinking. We create, and co-create, with thought.
Aligning aspects of our internal process and external action can focus and energize our forward progress in life. We more easily achieve both short-term goals and long-term dreams when all the gears of our Desire Engine are meshing well and running smoothly.
On the other hand, fears and other inhibitions can slow or thwart our progress through the Desire Cycle, slowing our forward motion through life, and lowering our energy levels. We can make choices misaligned with who we are and what we truly want, and this is like putting the wrong kind of fuel in our engine—it can't run its most efficient under those circumstances.
This kind of "poor running motor" might result in (at minimum) a feeling of sluggishness, or that we're "stuck," but it doesn't have to be that way. Everyone can enjoy the increased energy and happiness that comes from aligning thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and choices with desires and objectives.
Can we choose our thoughts? Yes. And since our emotions follow our thinking, choosing our thoughts more carefully can change everything—from our mood to our productivity and overall success.
Can we choose our beliefs? Yes. Views held over time become beliefs, and through teachable techniques, we can let go of beliefs that no longer work for us, and replace them with one that do.
Can we choose to align choices with desires and objectives? You bet. Smart companies do this with products, streamlining and aligning processes to gain more reliability and consistency in manufacturing.
With a mindful way of paying attention and a bit of practice using the tools we are all born with, we can simplify and align our lives through smarter choices that line up with our objectives and desires.
Find out more about the DesireEngine...

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