Engagement and Affirmation

The order or primacy of these two steps determines which of the two processes is dominant in a given situation. While we feel these two processes to be different, they are not absolutely distinct. That's why I talk about which is primary or dominant rather than speaking as if they are completely separate.

Engagement

Engagement is a stage with characteristic feelings. If motivation is a car, engagement is like the engine--it's where the feeling of power comes from. At times, we feel that we are in control of where that power is pushing, but at other times we feel we are at the mercy of this power. This power can feel like reasonable pride or it can push into hubris. This can be a feeling of strength and balance in one's body and can also feed into dominance and oppression. It can feel like a healthy attraction or an obsession. It is the feeling of a driving force.

When something becomes noticeable enough to us as relevant to me, we engage it. We have instinctual and emotional reactions that engage, and we also are able to engage with our thinking and a sense of contemplation in many instances. While we sometimes feel like we are looking for whatever, that we are active in going out and engaging, it also happens that we might feel that particular things engage us. If you're out for a walk and some big dog rushes at you, you will probably feel that it is engaging you. By walking near it's territory, you will be engaging its instinctual or trained reactions. However you see it, though, you will soon begin to feel like you must react to that dog actively--you will engage this particular situation. (Much involving traumatic responses comes from a feeling of passivity in this brief attentional moment. Compulsions and habitual emotional reactions are also found here.) Whether you respond to that dog by screaming, fighting, running, whatever, this type of situation has energy. That energy is drive or "engagement".

Affirmation

Affirmation is the point where we decide that our methods of engagement and the situation are good enough or lacking. This stage of the attentional process can include acceptance or affirmation (good enough to excellent), ambiguity (don't know), negation (not good enough), and overwhelm (aaaaahhh!) which might include shock. If you already know that there is an aggressive dog in your neighborhood, when you go for your walk, you may be prepared. Preparation makes it more likely that our engagement responses will be felt as at least good enough. This can be as simple as remembering that there is a chain-link fence that will keep the dog from biting you. You might walk by, listen to the dog barking and snarling, and laugh at your response yesterday when you froze and almost shit your pants. Ah, it feels good to be competent.

Since we know that preparation can be helpful, we plan, we expect. Some people try to plan more than others. If our love of planning encourages discretion to the exclusion of valor, we can find ourselves living like academic weenies. It's possible to spend almost all of our time in expectations and memories. At the other extreme, to the extent that we discourage thinking or contemplation because we want only the feeling of engagement, we can live mostly like animals.

It does not so much matter in each instance whether engagement or affirmation comes first in our experience; it matters that we can align our actions and our judgments. When we feel a sense of continuity and rightness from priming through affirmation and into engagement (or vice versa: priming then affirmation then engagement), we feel healthy and right. When that doesn't occur, we can look at whether we need to change our thinking and expectations, our actions, or whether we need to pay attention to something we have possibly been ignoring. That occurs in the stage I call change.