What is your golden thread of motivation?

Nadia Booysen elaborates on how to keep your motivation when your cancer journey gets tough and turbulent.

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Psychology Today phrased it perfectly with the sentence: “Motivation is the desire to act in service of a goal.” So, what is the goal?

Surviving, having better quality of life or prevention of symptoms; these are all goals in the world of oncology. Goals which each person holds onto with every fibre of their being whilst silently, being painfully aware that their lives often hang in the balance.

To achieve these goals, you need motivation to get you there. This opens up a Pandora’s box for every person on this journey to truly dig deep and answer one of the most important questions: why are you doing this?

Taken at face value, a quick response to this question is often: because I don’t have a choice, or the doctor said I have to, even my family insisted. These are true and honest answers for most people; unfortunately the most important part, reflection, is never engaged in. And true to our instinctual nature, humans do fight to stay alive, especially when it comes to potential and perceived life-threatening situations.

Purpose of reflection

Having an answer to why you are taking treatment is imperative, but it needs to be thought through. When things start to get difficult, when fear increases, energy drains and minutes start to feel like months, a mere, “I have to, or my family wanted me to” will fall short of getting you close to the finish line.

Let’s be honest, medically it’s in your best interest to take the treatment, and families for the most part will insist, and yes, it’s cancer which is every person’s worst nightmare on a good day. But ask yourself: why do you want treatment?

The golden thread

Being diagnosed with cancer changes so many aspects of your life. Search within for those truly personal and sometimes painfully honest reasons why you want treatment? Questions like these might assist:

• What do you want to do with life when you get to the other side of treatment?
• What do you want to do more or less off?
• What is your purpose for living?
• What are the things you want to fill your life with?
• Looking at it in the most simplistic way, we take treatment to be able to go back to life. How would you describe that life? The new you?

Having answers to these questions are the biggest motivations to pull you through the longest and darkest days.

What is your why?

Stay focussed on everything you want when you get to the other side of treatment. Actively decide what that looks like. Does it include more time with family, less time at work, more vacations, a new purpose, a better lifestyle?

You know what your goal is, the acts are merely following your treatment plan and the guidance of professionals throughout the journey.

But the most important part is to determine your reasons for taking treatment, stay focussed on a life after treatment and actively redesign that picture. Doing this will serve as your golden thread throughout the journey to sustain you on the most difficult days.

Always remember, personalised motivation (your reason for being combined with purpose) is all you need to see the silver lining, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and to have reason to wish upon a star again.

Header image by Freepik