The Motivation Manifesto: 9 Declarations to Claim Your Personal Power

by Brendon Burchard

AVIBRANT, GENUINE, AND PURPOSEFUL LIFE IS THE right of all humankind. But most of us fail to grasp it. We are lions and lionesses living as mice. Rather than exploring free on the savanna, we are living small and distracted lives.

rather than stalk our dreams with abandon, we too often sit and sulk, blaming and complaining, chasing after paltry goals that cheat the magnificence of our being.

our hearts filled with a ferocious passion for life. The day is meant to be ours, and our purpose within it is to live as who we truly are and enjoy the full terrain of life’s freedom as we chase our own meaning and purpose, our own legacy.

hunt our dreams with a fierceness unimagined by those creatures trapped in wastelands of stress and sorrow.

Humankind’s main motivation is to seek and experience Personal Freedom.

social freedom, emotional freedom, creative freedom, financial freedom, time freedom, and spiritual freedom.

at the base of all of our desires is the greater desire for freedom to choose and actualize that desire.

Choosing our own aims and seeking to bring them to fruition creates a sense of vitality and motivation in life. The only things that derail our efforts are fear and oppression.

When experiencing Personal Freedom, we have a heightened sense of genuineness and joy in our being. We feel unbounded, independent, and self-reliant. There is a palpable authenticity and aliveness in how we relate to others and contribute to the world.

Personal Freedom—our goal—means: living freely by crafting a life on our own terms; being free in the moment from oppressions, of past hurts and present anxieties; being lighthearted and spontaneous as free spirits; courageously speaking our thoughts, feelings, and ambitions with those around us, without concern about acceptance; enjoying our free will to pursue abundant happiness, wealth, health, achievement, and contribution; freely loving whom we choose with passionate abandon; standing freely on our own, professing and protecting our ideas and integrity; serving a mission that we have chosen; fighting to give our children a foundation in such freedom, building in their hearts the will to live as they choose so that they may meet oppression with courage, and opportunity with a virtuous intent to contribute. Can anyone deny that these are things all humans desire and strive for?

inalienable right of humankind to think for ourselves, to speak our minds, pursue happiness, seek peace and prosperity, and sing to our own conception of the Divine without the conformity imposed by small minds or our own small-mindedness.

each of us, every individual, ought to have the right to happily and peacefully move our lives forward without fear or hurt or imprisonment or arbitrary social constraints.

when controlled by others, life loses its flair and we are cast into melancholy and mediocrity. Without such striving for individual freedom, what becomes of us? We relinquish our free will to a society of strangers that speaks not of liberty and courage but of conformity and caution.

true self is subjugated and a pseudo self emerges, a mere reflection of a societ...

We become those masked souls who spend their time wandering in a wildernesses of sameness and sadness. We become tired and weak. We lose our nature. And

the world looked on for too long before acting, the mass indifference of a society that allows its people to starve and struggle, the despicable acts of mobs and madmen who simply do not respect the freedom or rights of the individual human. When freedom is gone, suffering sets in for all.

freedom is tightly bound to the human desire for ascension—our natural drive to rise from our circumstances and actualize our goals, our potential, our highest self.

the pursuit of happiness, challenge, progress, creative expression, contribution, hard-won wisdom, and enlightenment—

ascend to higher levels of being...

Every human has a natural inclination to ascend to higher planes of existence, but it rests upon each of us to match that...

trained themselves to be free from social and self-oppressions to an impressive degree. They struggled but learned to be free in the moment to express who they truly were and to create and contribute to the world without paralyzing fear.

They didn’t feel the need to conform but rather learned to be independent, unique, and genuine, even as they successfully served the world, even as they were often judged or jailed. On the ground of such personal liberation stand the world’s most noble figures:

a world that could never again believe in the impossible.

The ultimate narrative of the human species is its quest for more freedom and the related struggles to ascend to higher standards of living and relating.

not simply people of fortune or luck or fame, but rather of conscience and courage. They knew the demands of their time, that their destiny was unfolding with the man or woman to their left and to their right,

Theirs was a long march of effort and endurance and enlightenment. They declared without apologies their independence, their rights and direction. Their only guide was an internal one, a manifesto in their minds that called for the courage to be themselves and the discipline to direct their energies toward higher purposes.

tormented by incessant desires for more without cause. He is the most likely to wear a social mask to succeed, and thus he is always unsure of himself and his life, the deep tear inside always causing him to obsess about how to get more, why he doesn’t have it already, and whom he will have to please or become in order to get it.

afflicted by the need for adoration cannot have a free moment of real joy away from her obsession with self; she is slave to the never-ending quest for youth and beauty and social acceptance. Her endless desire blinds her from areas for growth and alienates others, ripping away her chances at genuine self-expression and the soaring kind of true love she deserves.

no person who believes they should be given everything for nothing will ever be free from an immature envy and contempt...

the tyranny of conformity coupled with inner turmoil.

work toward self-mastery and social prowess so that we can authentically express who we are and joyously seek what we desire of life.

It is only in active self-expression and pursuit of our own aims that we can become free.

Thinking, feeling, speaking, and behaving in ways that are truly our own brings integrity and shapes the foundation for our happiness.

overcome social- and self-oppression if we are ever to join the ranks of the free souls who love their lives and lead their people.

when we want to follow our own spiritual beliefs but the culture suffocates us with its dogma. It’s when any other person’s petty judgments, harsh criticisms, demeaning comments, injuries, or unreasonable expectations and direct or indirect actions hold us back.

Often the most highly adaptive among us are the least aware of this process,

But what if we chase all that and believe in all that and then one day awake to find those things aren’t what matter most? To ask such a question, to rattle the cage of conformity, is to invite real risk into our lives. Once freed from the cage, an animal finds itself alone, unsure of what to do, separated from a life and things that it understands. The sudden uncertainty can be paralyzing. If we had total freedom in life, what exactly would we do, where would we go, how would we behave day-to-day, and what would give us meaning? These questions can be terrifying.

Those still trapped in the cage no longer see the freed as one of them. To refuse other’s expectations may bring about our greatest fears—that we will be left isolated or abandoned, deemed inferior, thought unworthy of love. But to stay confined by other people’s rules brings about other risks. Chasing the prizes that society tells us we must want can also drive us from our true self. How many artists turned from their art because they were told they had to make money in a traditional way? How many talented people shirk their strengths to fit into a more needed but less fulfilling role? How many have given up their dreams in order to follow a more secure and profitable and socially accepted path?

The aims of others (our parents, our teachers, our spouses, our fans) can become our aims if we are not vigilant. Their certitude can replace our quest for something new. Their collective meaning can subjugate our search for our individual meaning. Yes, let us be wary. We can quickly lose ourselves in others and in our culture. We become not free and genuine humans but rather slaves to opinion.

A difficult choice must therefore be made between the comforts of fitting in and pleasing others and our higher motive for Personal Freedom. This choice is easier once we reach the levels of maturity and enlightenment that allow us to see that we can be individually free but not entirely apart from our culture and those we love, that independence does not preclude interdependence, that individual uniqueness does not mean we must be social or spiritually distant outcasts. We learn that the more we are true to ourselves, the more we can connect with and contribute to the world. We find that the more free and spontaneous and authentic we become, the more our motivation and aliveness returns and the more others are attracted to us and want to be around us.

Unfortunately, most oppression comes not from others but from a source we least suspect: ourselves. Self-oppression is the condition of letting our own negative thoughts and actions restrict us. It is an inside job, a burdening of our spirit by incessant doubt, worry, fear, and distraction.

Self-oppression is evident whenever we limit ourselves.

We procrastinate on an important assignment or exciting new venture because we cannot overcome our uncertainty. We fool ourselves into thinking that things must be perfect before we release our art into the world when the clear reality is we’re just too undisciplined to get things done. We lie to ourselves, break our own resolutions, allow our dreams to slide away without grasping at them. Is it not clear to us that we can be our own worst enemy? But we can also be our own saviors. Through the active expression of our genuine nature, and the steady efforts to master our minds and move our lives forward,

we seek personal growth—to be free from the pain we cause ourselves, to make better choices, to feel better about who we are becoming, to act more confidently in social situations, and to unleash our full creativity and contributions into the world in order to make our highest difference. Gaining Personal Freedom in this sense is letting go of any self-doubt and self-loathing and allowing ourselves permission to be our unique, powerful, authentic selves.

“Are my ambitions, attentions, affections, and actions truly of my own choosing? Am I being my genuine self in the world and pursuing things that deeply matter to me? Am I opening myself to change and challenges so that I can stretch and grow into my full potential?”

Key questions

Freedom requires responsibility to choose who we are above and beyond our immediate impulses, needs, and social pressures, so that we can genuinely express the type of person we want to be, live the life we truly want to live, leave the legacy we desire.

If we are not free to choose our character and conduct and legacy, then we are controlled by something else—thus we are lacking freedom. And if we are not responsible for our beliefs and behaviors, then someone or something else is—thus, again, we are slaves. And so the great demand is clear: We must be conscious and responsible for our beliefs and behaviors if we are ever to be free.

Character conduct legacy

in our finest hours we are willing to forgo pleasure and endure pain in order to have freedom, meaning, love, and transcendence?

And so we want freedom from pain and yet will celebrate meaningful struggle and hardship because we know those very things will free us from one level of life and set us into another. We know that pain can be necessary and heroic, that our difficulties need not be condemned but often seen as a rite of passage that opens the doors to greatness.