Understanding Your Onion, Schemas, Motivation, and Maslow

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.

— Albert Einstein

The tough part about making any change in your life is firstly understanding yourself. Development is a drawn-out process, and a lot of what has made you what you are has gone unnoticed. Much of what has formed the person you are to date has been via subliminal messaging, repetitive and reinforced behavioural expectations, and family, environmental, cultural, educational, and vocational experiences.

Perceptions, memories, encounters, and actions collect in your subconscious. They can be tightly bound in formed schema that can be defined as your onion. They are divided into either positive or negative experiences.

The onion analogy is appropriate in that if you have ever peeled one, you know that it can make you cry and consists of many tightly packed layers.

An onion is a very dense and hard object; it's also difficult to peel and to separate those layers. Peeling it also produces a physiological reaction (crying). This can take a bit of effort; however, once you've done it and take a closer look each layer, it is really soft and pliable, and there is less crying.

Like an onion, you compact your negative and positive experiences into one big mass. Within those layers lie your desires mixed with your abilities, needs, and reasons, as well as all the negative perceptions that are holding you back from making the behavioural changes required to change.

As you attempt to recognise what your desires are, you will be challenged many times. Where your abilities might come from and the difficulties you may encounter in making changes to the habitual routines that keep you from moving forward will be questioned constantly. What influences habits is often indecipherable and difficult to visualise; however, the level of success you achieve is directly proportional to your motivation.

You identify with a total compilation of life experiences rather than identifying the layers (individual experiences and responses) separately. Knowing what made them positive or negative is significant.

By confronting and reviewing each layer (success or failure), you reduce or increase the overall significance that the experience has had on you as either positive or negative.

If a combined set of experiences has resulted in either a positive or negative memory, reviewing the experience and dismissing or reinforcing various issues may give you a better understanding of how approaching things differently had a significant effect on the outcome. The result may be the same, but at least you know what to do (or not to do) next time to achieve a more favourable outcome rather than to totally avoid the situation in which the experience was created.

Knowing your personal onion is very important in reducing stress and negativity. Confronting the barriers presented by your onion is imperative to allow you to move forward and make positive changes in your life.

Making a personal onion involves identifying those things that are difficult for you to deal with. Looking at your fear (chapter 2), you can target each layer of your onion and see how each has a domino effect on the others. By identifying fears through this process, you can look at whether the tools you have identified in your ability list (chapter 5) are sufficient to deal with your fear as a whole or as a specific layer.

If you find you have insufficient tools accessible to you, the task is to then define what else you require to tackle a specific layer of your onion and identify how to obtain those tools.

The purpose of exposing the layers of your onion is to identify the negative actions and responses that you have maintained through habit (chapter 2) that prevent you from moving forward.

Once identified and analysed, you can describe the changes needed to turn negative reinforced habits into positive habits. Positive changes are reinforced through your desires, reasons, and needs that you attach to your desired goals.

Remember that your current perceptions and actions are a result of your personal experiences, upbringing, educational and social pursuits, genetics, and environmental constraints. These have all contributed to the development of your own collection of schema. Schemas drive your habits, which in turn are the foundation blocks for your fears, expectations, and needs. Your goal is to change your habits.

What Are Schemas?

Schemas are patterns of thoughts or behaviours. They are collections of your experiences — throughout your life — that are organised into categories of information. Planted in your subconscious, they provide a mental structure. They are responsible for connections, understanding, and responding to situations and relationships from information constructed from preconceived ideas.

As a result, your actions and behaviours are limited by the depth and extent of the schema you have been exposed to and that have subsequently become imbedded into your subconscious.

Your development of schema is influenced by familial, vocational, educational, environmental, spiritual, and cultural factors. Schemas are the reason you see the world and everything in it as you do; they influence your likes and dislikes. Your attention is directed to things you are attracted to and have knowledge of by schema.

However, when you are confronted with conflicting information or totally new concepts, you need to re-evaluate the new information, interpret the contradictions, and either distort them to fit into existing schema or develop new ones. This can be a smooth transition, as the subconscious can handle some developments with relative ease, depending on how entrenched the belief is.

Schemas are relatively robust and tend to remain unchanged, even when presented with contradictory information. Instead, you tend to develop additional schema to influence behaviour in a more defined situation. In other words, you develop a more discerning view of complex or contradictory information.

When you embark on a journey of behavioural change, you need to challenge some existing schema you have developed and are responsible for the well-rehearsed behaviours that you currently action.

In your most primordial sense, you behave due to four subconscious drivers:

• fear

• expectation

• necessity

• habit

It is important to recognise what these drivers are and how to recognise the individual elements under each of them.

Motivation Is an Inside Job

Once something is a passion, the motivation is there.

— Michael Schumacher

What exactly is motivation?

Motivation is the fuel that actions your four primary drivers....