It’s a great pleasure for me to participate in this Contest: A Little Bit of Motivation Can go a Long Way brought by STEEM FOR BETTER LIFE, as part of Week 3 of the Engagement Challenge.

I would like to start by inviting @lavanyalakshman, @reinamia, and @sanuri to join in.

The Blue Fairy and Merida

As motifs for my current article, I choose the Blue Fairy from Collodi’s Children’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio and Merida from Andrews-Chapman-Purcell’s Brave (2012 movie).

Why?

Well, I choose the Blue Fairy because she could make a beautiful human being out of a marionette which had begun as a piece of wood—and not even an expensive one—.

Always let your conscience be your guide.
Our conscience knows what is right. If we act with kindness, we can achieve, why not, what seemed impossible.

Finally, I choose Merida because she made of herself a beautiful human being, being only a child armed with a strong determination and the commendable ability to hit the target, literally. Brave Merida went in search of her freedom and her destiny, straight and sure as the arrows she shot.

Our fate lives within us; you only have to be brave enough to see it.

Eyes on the target! We must have the courage to accept ourselves and go for what we want, what is right for us, even when it means we must go against tradition.

Motivating others. 1. When I met a Blue Fairy

I remember an Educational Psychology I class in my third semester of college. My professor, who later became a dear friend and who unfortunately died before his time, taught me perhaps the most important lesson in motivation.

After a three-month course in which I stood out for knowing all the answers and having read much more than expected for each session, he gave his words of congratulations for excellent performance to a student to whom I never paid much attention, since she did not participate much and made mistakes in diction, syntax, content, and so on. This happened on the closing day of the course and I could not believe it. She thanked us for forcing her to study harder than she had ever done before; she said she had grown a lot during those three months.

I stopped feeling bad for myself and in a second I felt absolutely happy. Although I was very moved, I must admit that I found her aspirations to become a university professor to be ridiculous.

And yet, seven years later, a thesis paper written by her came into my hands. The work she had done was astonishingly good. I can say that thanks to this experience, for years now I have cared more about what I can give than about the congratulations I might receive; and this has marked my character to this day, twenty years later. Truly, "a little motivation can go a long way".

My professor was the Blue Fairy. Where I saw wood, he saw diamonds and they eventually shined.

When we are young, there is insecurity in us. It is not easy to specify our goals and even less easy to aim at them with certainty.

Image by Jethrothompson - Wikimedia Commons

Motivation is to make us feel enthusiastic about how good something/somebody can be; if we are good, we will want to work for it. If we are not so good, we will want to reach the standards and go beyond.

Meridas don't just happen. Love is the key. If you know and feel that you're important for the people you also care about, then you learn to love yourself as well and become able to gather the courage to go against all odds.

Motivating others. 2. The Pearl Maker

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The second case I will tell you about happened in Barcelona, Venezuela, where there's a HOME I sometimes visit to offer help with the children's reading skills. Once I had the opportunity to help a group of children from 7 to 12 years old to study to take remedial exams in their schools. One of the girls wanted to be a teacher, but she had not told anyone because she was ashamed; since she was not doing well in school, she though everybody would laugh at her if they knew. I remember when she borrowed a book from me: Heine's The pearl (1988).

Let's say this girl's name is Maria.

Before borrowing "The Pearl", Maria (12) had asked me why these books we were reading did not teach anything. I explained that we could imagine the morals ourselves if we wanted to. This she asked me right after we read "The pearl". The main character is a beaver who finds a treasure, a possible treasure: a pearl that is supposed to be inside a mollusk. After imagining all the problems that envy for the precious object could bring him, he has dire visions, nightmares, all in a moment. The beaver decides to throw the mollusk back into the lake and goes back to play with his dear friends, happy and relieved.

An important part of the message here (which is a lot more complex) is supposed to be that friendship is a most valuable treasure. However, Maria asked me about the mollusk. She was shocked that the beaver could have sold the pearl and shared the money with his friends. I told her that she should read the story again and think it all over more slowly. What she told me the following week took my breath away.

I feel like the thrown away mollusk, she said. Everybody in my family thought I was going to bring problems to them and they threw me out of the house, like Biba threw the mollusk without even giving it a chance. It was a punch in the stomach for me. As we continued to speak about this, I understood, she had not been actually kicked out, but she had left and looked for help with the police and eventually, she ended up in this HOME.

I told her, without much faith in myself, that it was all about the pearl, that was why the story had that title. The mollusk takes what is trying to hurt its insides and covers it with shiny nacre and turns it into a beautiful pearl. I told her she'd be an excellent teacher, as she had learned how to make pearls out of adversity.

Long story short, Maria went to college and has just become a teacher... I have lent her a couple of tales now and then to work with her students, and it feels great every time. She's one of many Meridas you will find out there: they refuse to be reduced to a person they don't want to be, and they gather the courage to go find their own destiny.

Habits to increase motivating myself?

Well, my memory is terrible. A good habit could be keeping a "motivation diary", where I keep record of these chapters in my life and the lives of others which can teach me o remind me we can always do better, and we will. But this would be a diary you would not want to post on Steemit or anywhere else that is public! For me, each page would be a reminder to refresh the drive to keep going, to keep doing the right thing.

Giving ourselves or others some words of encouragement takes just a few seconds. Motivation as an emotional response may be short-lived, perhaps seconds, but how it affects us can be tracked over a lifetime.