Anyone who has taken an NLP course has learned that humans will invariably do more to avoid pain than to gain pleasure. (For those of you who don’t know, NLP stands for neuro-linguistic programming.)

Mapping out goals and plans are extremely important and motivating. Often those goals can be tangible things that people want because they will increase their social status and provide independence. And sometimes these tangible things, such as a new house, car or boat, become goals simply because people like them. They provide pleasure.

Then there are goals that aren’t necessarily a pleasurable process but will result in pleasurable feelings like relief and freedom. These kinds of goals include paying off credit card debt, a mortgage, or student loans.

However, if you find that pleasure proves to be an insufficient motivator in achieving your goals, reverse your thinking and focus on the tollthat may be felt if your goals aren’t realized. In other words, your motivation can become what you don’t want to occur in your life.

Many business owners are able to increase their incomes when expenses rise, a well-documented phenomenon in the coaching industry. Investments can increase the urgency to recoup the costs, hence effort and sales increase.

Another example is that many people find that they work harder after they have children. Even if they lose sleep about having more mouths to feed when the prospect is looming on the horizon, they’re able to rise to the occasion to meet expenses after they’re actually in the reality of parenting.   Causes almost always drive results.

I once had a client who told me that she was willing to sell her personal belongings so she could raise the investment needed to work with me. She didn’t want to look at her sleeping children’s faces and feel that she didn’t do everything she could to increase her chances of success. Her concern about depriving her kids of all the experiences she wanted them to have fueled her drive to succeed.

Another client told me that she motivated herself to become successful with the reminder that she didn’t want to be embarrass herself. If she didn’t succeed, she would have been too embarrassed that she’d wasted my time, and she wanted her case study on my website. (You can rest assured that her story is now featured on here.)

You can not only turn lemons into lemonade, but you can utilize your fear to create a thriving and profitable lemonade stand.  The trick is discovering which way you want to squeeze the lemon.