The Balloon Effect

A simple balloon is often times representative of our life situations

It’s not easy, and no one said it was going to be easy anyway. We have all probably been there, experienced it and wondered why! We all feel down some times, we feel so low or become average, and often times we get used to these situations. We get comfortable with our 'worsening' situations and hope that one day things will change by themselves – probably out of luck. The process of how this happens – of having so much confidence, hope, energies, motivation and then they start to diminish one by one to push us back to our lowest levels, can be likened to the balloon effect! We have all probably seen, played with or used a balloon. Without air, a balloon is not fun to play with and one may lose interest in it quite soon. We normally have to inflate it, and once this happens, the joy of seeing it rise above us is phenomenal. There is no single balloon that can ascend upwards without air or even be able to bounce back to the top once it hits the ground. That’s a balloon with air – fun to play with and brings us happiness.

However, if a balloon is inflated and left for some time, we eventually notice its diminishing size as it continuously loses air – either slowly or very fast, depending on how air-tight our balloon is. This seemingly logical phenomenon is the ‘balloon effect’. In the context of our lives, the balloon effect determines how strong we can keep moving on. What we learn from this effect is to continuously keep our balloons inflated, and of course to be careful not to burst them in the process. In reality, we face challenging situations every day, and to face them, we need motivation to stay focused on solving these daily concerns or most importantly achieving our goals. At some point in our life we feel so motivated (100%), and like the inflated balloon, as time passes we lose the morale to keep going. This is natural, and we cannot always have 100% motivation, but we however need a given threshold of motivation, hope, confidence, purpose and desire to keep moving towards the goals we aimed at when we were at 100% motivation.

The question at this point is how to continuously maintain motivation at threshold level. Well, this is at least not the hardest thing you will ever do in your life! How to keep the ‘balloon’ always inflated is a different topic altogether, and for now let’s keep in mind that we have the potential to re-inflate our lives back to threshold levels of happiness, hope, and continuous achievements.