Stephanie Harrison
speaker
575 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 24 Oct
Stephanie Harrison’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Is it something that's realistic in terms of the scope of your business and the reach that you have? Is it something where that number is really exciting for you because it represents the possibility of all of the goodness that you could create? Those types of questions can help you to tease it out.
But of course, any goal that you have that comes from within in that way, no matter what domain it's in, can be intrinsically motivated.
Essentially, things like depression, anxiety, lack of self-worth, difficulty with resilience. The most ironic thing, I think, the finding that most surprised me and really opened my eyes to this was learning that people who pursue extrinsic goals are much more likely to give up. They're much more likely to have a hard time pursuing them.
And it makes sense when you really break it down because you don't have that real motivation driving you. You're doing it to get approval or to please somebody or to try and convey a certain level of image or whatever it is. So you don't have that real inner motivation. And I think that that inner motivation is the most powerful thing in the world.
We've seen what people can do when they are really motivated. They do crazy, wild, amazing things, right? They build incredible businesses and they climb mountains and they swim across oceans and they do all of these different things because they genuinely want to. And so I always want to tell people, don't Chase an extrinsic motivation that doesn't belong to you.
Find the one that exists within you because it is so much stronger than anything out there. And by doing so, you will be able to get all of the things that you're looking for. Happiness, well-being, mental health, a sense of accomplishment, the satisfaction of your needs and the people in your life. All of those things are fulfilled if we discover that intrinsic motivation within us.
I generally recommend starting with just taking an audit of what you're doing. What are you spending your time on right now? Because as we talked about, we're all driven by goals, even if we don't have a conscious awareness of them. And so grabbing a piece of paper, journaling about, hey, what am I spending my time on these days? And you might write down a bunch of things.
You might say, oh, I'm trying to please my boss by doing well on this project. I really want to run a marathon this year. I'm really nervous about a fight I'm having with my sister. You just write down everything that's on your mind that you're trying to figure out or solve. And then just go through and mark down any of them that seem like they're extrinsic and see if you can drop them.
let go of them, change them in some way, or find something to replace them. And the more that we do that, the more that we can really orient our lives around the things that matter most to us.
When people say to you, oh, just live an authentic life or whatever, I always get kind of annoyed because thinking, what does that mean? How do we translate that into action? It feels really vague and really broad. And so this is an exercise where I encourage people to just turn inward and ask themselves, what do I need right now? Or what do I want to do?
What does my true self want to do in this exact moment? And then do it, even if it sounds weird, even if it's something that you wouldn't normally do, or maybe it gets in the way of how productive you are today. And simply doing that allows you to start moving in the direction of living an authentic and meaningful life.
Because in fact, what you will be doing is with that action, you'll be tapping into something that's intrinsically important to you. So it's a little bit of a hack if you don't want to go through the whole goal setting audit, you can just start acting intrinsically and then seeing where that takes you and following the path as it's laid in front of you.
Basically. And I know it sounds so simple, but it's actually quite radical in some ways in a world where we're often on autopilot. We're often doing so many things in order to please other people or to convey a certain impression. Simply saying, what do I want right now? What matters to me? What would I like to spend the next 10 minutes doing?
That's all it really takes to get you back on your path.
Yeah, totally. And it's okay to make a cake, right? Maybe you making the cake is the exact thing that you need to get yourself unstuck on a problem. Maybe making the cake is just something enjoyable for you that you can do for yourself or something you can share with your kid. Not everything in life has to be optimized for our productivity.
And in fact, doing so ends up backfiring and really hurting us.
None of us are formed alone, for example. So from the very minute that we're born, we are cared for in order to survive. We're completely reliant upon our caregivers in order to keep us alive. Human beings have the longest period of developmental needs of any species. And so every interaction that our caregivers have with us shapes us into the person that we become.
We know that these early years of life end up forming the neural pathways that we draw upon as adults. They shape our attachment style, which influences every relationship that we have in our lives. They teach us how to regulate our emotions or not regulate our emotions, and that impacts every moment of every day. And so at a very basic biological level, no one is a human being alone.
We require each other in order to be able to develop and then to function. And then as we go out into the world, None of us are able to do anything by ourselves, right?
The only reason you and I are able to have this conversation is because there are people out there who have created these tools and platforms and the internet and the systems that make it possible for you and I to get on the phone together.
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