This quote from Steve Jobs is so perfect for the topic I want to discuss: Stay hungry. Stay Foolish. I have been thinking about the word hunger a lot and how it serves us, drives us, and is an amazing trigger for assessing what we really want.
In the context of weight loss, which I am way to familiar with the yoyo affects of focusing on weight management, one common denominator for each program I tried, was to get comfortable feeling a little hungry. You didn't want to go into starvation mode, otherwise it would have reverse effects, but in order to see a shift, you had to accept and leverage the hunger.
In the content of career or business management, your level of hunger comes up too. How many times have your heard, "Are you hungry enough?" or "How hungry are you?" This use of the word hunger makes is more about emotional desire, vs. fuel for your body. And since you can associate the physical attributes of being hungry to the word hunger, when it is used the emotional impact is stronger because it connects your mind to your body.
Last week, I conducted Session 3 of the Be A Badass Online Program and the mantra of that week was the D in Badass: I am Driven. When I think about hunger in action, the word driven totally comes up, because if you didn't have something you would be viscerally excited about achieving, your drive to achieve it would waiver at any site of overwhelm, or even in moments of fulfillment when your hunger is lost.
Let's check in and look at what drives us can you answer that by asking what are you hungry for? What is it that you will stop at nothing for to have right now? What would satiate that hunger? Once that hunger is satiated, now what are you hungry for?
If you are not hungry for something, and feel fulfilled in all that you do, then you have found the fuel that consistently fills you up in your life's purpose. You are aligned with your calling and potentially might look at tasting something new? Most of us overachievers have a perpetual hunger even after we devoir what we crave, we look to see what is next. It's like the achievement of satiating the hunger makes us have a bigger stomach for more: more ways to challenge ourselves, more opportunities to grow, more areas for impact. We are slowly becoming the giants we are meant to be in the big world we have designed for ourselves. The hunger remains because we now have more room, since we have grown past the latest version of ourselves, we can stomach more.
See hunger in our body's shows up in different forms that trigger us to do something, and the reaction is so simple, we just have to find something to eat. Unless you are trying to hit a specific goal, then the hunger can be even deeper because you are trying to find something to eat that garnishes a specific result, like lean muscle mass, or sustainable energy boost. Same goes for the hunger you and I have when it comes to building our career or our own company. We know while sitting in our comfort zone, we can do everything we have been doing really well, and then something stretches us that creates a deeper hunger than we had before, something we want to shift or achieve creates a new level of hunger, something to up-level to.
It's easy to distract yourself with noise and gain temporary relief from your hunger, but never really find a way to satiate it.
How often have you allowed your hunger be satiated by unconscious actions then wonder how you got there? Here are three questions to ask yourself when you are feeling unsure of how to satiate your hunger for the life you desire to sustain conscious actions:
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What are you hungry for right now?
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Why are you hungry for it? (What would it satiate if you could devoir it?)
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How do you plan to celebrate it once it is achieved?
My suggestion is to use an arena of your life you want to improve upon, and ask yourself what are you hungry for in that arena, what needs to change, shift, up-level, in order for you to go after it and get the satisfaction you are looking for? I will tell you that without this clarity, you will consume a lot of junk that might give you temporary satisfaction, like a bag of chips (been there, done that), but not give you the long standing results you truly deserve in your super large badass life!