The Motivation Trick I Wish I Knew Sooner

Will (00:00) What's up y'all welcome back to another episode. I am pumped for today because today we're talking about the secret sauce of motivation and this is kind of a secret that I don't know why I have never heard of up until about three months ago and it's a secret that I've been using to motivate myself to get to the gym to work extra extra hard and to clean up my nutrition in hopes to look my best and feel my best for my future wedding. And yes, I am getting married August 23rd. You better have it on your calendar if you're a listener of the Unstoppable You podcast. If not, that's totally cool. It's kind of weird if you had it on your calendar. I'm gonna teach you that motivation secret that again, I have no idea why no one taught me this earlier. I have a feeling it's gonna be really helpful for you in maybe it's your school, maybe it's in your sport, maybe it's also for you in your gym or your nutrition. It's just been really helpful to get motivated. Now, before we talk about this secret, ⁓ I want to really make sure we're on the same page. There's people on the other side of the screen. And I would say probably a hundred percent of people listening to this episode that don't feel motivated. There is nothing wrong with you. If you don't feel motivated, that is normal. That means you're human. have so many students that I talked to in my calls and in our programs that really feel guilty for not feeling motivated. They're like, all of my friends are motivated to get good grades. Chat, that's not true. They are just better at faking motivation than maybe you are. Maybe you think all of these people at the gym who go every single day, they're just way more motivated. That may be true, but that also may be cap, right? There's a lot of people that just in the gym that just take action even though they don't feel motivated. And so all of those things that tends to kind of stack up on your shoulders and it makes you feel potentially like there's something wrong with you because you don't feel motivated. That's not the case. Successful people, and I want you all to like ingrain this into your brain, successful people, they aren't necessarily more motivated than you at the start. They just have a bigger habit of taking action even when they don't feel motivated. Now, I don't say that to harp on this idea that you've got to improve your discipline and you've got to do all these things because that's not what this episode's about. I say all of that because I want you to really internalize that if you don't feel motivated in fitness or in your nutrition or your school or future college plans or whatever it may be. It doesn't mean something's wrong with you. It means you're very normal. And so you can use this podcast episode and this tool and this secret that I wish I would have had earlier to kind of tap into a different type of motivation up until this point. And definitely in my own life, right. I'm 20. So my gosh, I'm 28. So up until this point, I have really thought that there was one way to get motivated. And that is to pull from something in your future. that you want to achieve and use that vision and that goal to motivate you to feel and to take action today. Right, so for example, maybe there are people listening that their parents are like, just think about your future college plans or think about a business that you want to start or think about a state championship that you want to ⁓ win and use that as motivation to work really hard now. The problem with that, y'all, especially for young people like us, not just you, but us, I'm including myself into that bucket. The problem with that is that a lot of us either don't know what the heck we want to do for the future. And so how the heck can we pull from something that we don't know to motivate us today? we don't know what we want to achieve or we just don't really care that much. Right? So maybe we know we want to go to college, but we don't really care that much about where we go to college or what kind of stuff we study or what kind of fraternity we're in or sorority or whatever. Where teachers and principals and coaches like myself are like, dude, just think about what you want. And maybe this is something that could be really helpful and they're helping you brainstorm things that you want. But you're just like, dude, I don't care about any of that stuff. That's why it's really hard to only rely on poll motivation is what I'm going to call it here. I'm going to pull from something in the future and I'm going to use that vision or reality that I want to motivate me every single day. It's very hard to be motivated every single day. Okay. But that's the first method and that's the one that everyone feels like they should be good at. And if they don't, that's when we start to feel guilty. So again, ⁓ I have this wedding that's in August and pull motivation is pulling from maybe what I want to look like what I want to feel like and I'm use that vision in my head of myself looking all spazzy and fit in my suit and I'm pull that to you know Ultimately create some motivation to go to the gym today and tomorrow and the next day and the next day and the next day Again, that's the stuff that just isn't moving the needle for me. I don't know why it just isn't right. So there's not something wrong with me. It's just I'm relying on the second way. The one that you might not have thought of in the last few weeks or ever. And that is push motivation. It's pushing yourself to think about the cost of not taking action. The best way I like to describe this is pull motivation is thinking about What you want to achieve and push motivation is thinking about what you fear. We're using fear as the biggest motivator here. I was coaching a student the other day and we were thinking about the ACT and the SAT tests, right? So standardized testing here in the United States. If you're outside of the United States, it might be like the GCSEs for you. And they just couldn't muster up the motivation, the purpose and the action. When they started thinking about, I want to get a 28 on my ACT. or I want to get a whatever on my It just didn't really move the needle for success or of success for And so I asked them one question. I said, what is the cost of not taking And I want you to really like pause and ask yourself this question. If you are struggling to find motivation or to create motivation in your life, I want you to ask yourself, what is the cost of not taking action? For example, if you are struggling with motivation in school, what's the cost of not doing your homework? If you're struggling with motivation, go to the gym. This is something that I'm asking myself every single day. I'm not even exaggerating, probably multiple times throughout the day. What is the cost of not going to the gym? What's the cost of sitting on my butt and eating 39 cookies before I even stand up from my bed. I love cookies for breakfast chat. Like I swear I just am so addicted to them. But I'm getting out of that habit because I'm asking myself what's the cost of eating this every single morning? And I want you to think about what this does. Where does our brain go when we ask about the cost of not taking action? It goes into fear mode and it's a healthy fear mode. Right? I know I talk about, you know, combating fear as much as we can in these episodes, right? Fear is usually something that that holds us captive and holds us ⁓ stuck and stagnant. And we want to use our fear for good here. If we're asking ourselves, what's the cost of not doing our homework? We start to think about, ⁓ I might not feel good. by the end of the school year because I feel regret. I might feel that I failed my parents. I might fear. falling behind on, you know, certain things in ⁓ my friend group. And so if you don't care too much about the straight A's, something tells me that you do care about not failing and getting all F's. So use that fear as motivation more so than looking at the straight A's. So ask yourself, what's the fear of not taking action for my wedding, something that I'm working on doing. And asking myself for the fear of not taking action and going to the gym is that I stand in front of all my favorite people in front of my future wife and I'm thinking to myself dang I Should have gone to the gym more often because I don't feel good in pictures I fear looking back at pictures and being like I just feel like I wasn't my best I didn't look my best. I didn't feel myself my best That is using fear as motivation and y'all let me tell you it is kind of lighting a fire on me, up me, I think whatever the saying is. And it's really helping me kind of get to the point where I wanna work out and work out for a little longer. And so that's the first question. I want you to pause and ask yourself, what's the cost of not taking action with the thing that I am maybe procrastinating? The second question, this is really, really important one. What does my life look like six months from now if nothing changes? My wedding's in five months and if I ask myself that question, what does my life look like or how do I feel in six months if nothing changes? I know I can only answer that with negative emotions. Obviously on top of getting married, like there's gonna be more positive emotions than negative emotions but. You know, in terms of just like overall fitness and whatnot, like going to the gym looks, that's something that I know I would feel negative about. So ask yourself if nothing changes, if you don't take action, what does your life look like three months from now? If that reality stresses you out or maybe just brings upon you some, some fear or even regret, then Tap into that. Ask yourself that question more often, especially when you feel unmotivated. It's going to again, bring you to a place of action versus just kind of sitting around and in action. Okay, so that's the second question. Third question, how will I actually feel when I get to that moment having done nothing? Again, all three of these questions are pulling from our fear-based thinking in a healthy way. So we ask, how will I actually feel? when I get to that moment having done nothing. I know again, I was talking to this person about SAT and ACT prep and I really had them visualize their negative feelings and feel all of their negative feelings if they were sitting in front of this test three months from now and they were completely ignorant around like how to answer these questions. Right. had no idea how to answer these questions and they were feeling so much regret in that moment. Visualizing sitting there feeling lack of confidence, feeling insecure. Maybe it's like getting their test score back and walking them through. How would you feel if you got that test score back and it was five points lower than what you know you need to get in order to go to where you want to go using that feeling? And usually it's going to be regret. Right? Using that feeling as motivation is for me in this time and season of my life. It's like 10 times, a hundred times more powerful than using poll motivation, pulling something from the future and hoping that it motivates that summarizes all of this is don't give up what you want most for what you want right now. Because that's what we do all the time. We do this every single day. We give up what we want most for what feels good right now. And that, if you want to be successful, is something that we need to continuously improve on. So what I want you to do... From this episode, know I covered a lot of deeper things and if you really pause and you ask yourself these questions, then maybe you're feeling motivated right now. And I want you to open the Notes app and I want you to write down one thing that you've been avoiding. Maybe it is homework, maybe it's an instrument, maybe it's prepping for a big test, maybe it's going to the gym or throwing away those freaking cookies that are in the pantry that I eat all the dang time. Write down one thing that you've been avoiding. And I want you to ask yourself, what's the cost of doing nothing about this one thing? And go into detail here. Like don't just say to yourself, I feel bad. It's like put yourself in those shoes. Put yourself in that moment. How will bad feel? What's the cost of not taking action? That's step number two. Answer that question. step number three is to ask yourself this more often. Again, this is something that I'm asking myself every single day, multiple times a day when I wake up in the morning, what's the cost of not getting up on my first alarm today? What's the cost of not putting away these clothes? It's like stress is the cost of it. So step number one, open your notes app, write one thing down that you've been avoiding. Step number two, ask yourself that question and really think about it. And step number three, is to actually go and do the dang thing. So if all this is making sense, y'all, I have three action steps that I want to encourage you to focus on today, just to kind of summarize all this stuff. The first one is I want you to open up your notes app, open up, I don't know, your phone and type one thing that you've been avoiding right now. So maybe in the last week, maybe it's in the last day, maybe it's in the last 10 minutes and you're getting distracted with this podcast, which by the way, thanks for doing that. And you're avoiding something, write it down. Step number two, ask yourself, what is the cost of doing nothing about this thing that I'm avoiding? And I want you to really feel it. Don't just say, again, I feel bad about this, or like, I'm gonna not get the grade that you want. Think about this in detail. How is it gonna feel to not get the grade that you want? How is it gonna feel three months from now, looking back and knowing that you could have taken action, but you decided not to? Go into detail about how you're going to feel and... really what the cost is of doing nothing. And number three, if you feel motivated, if you don't feel motivated after this episode, then like you don't have to do this number three one, but step number three is take action, take action. You should feel some motivation when you're listening to this pause. I don't want to say you should feel it. You can feel whatever you want, but if you do feel it, then that's when I really want you to take that motivation while you feel it and take action. Cause I've noticed, especially with my ADHD years on the other side of this device right now, motivation might not last a while. And so if you have five minutes or five seconds where you feel some type of purpose, whether you're pushing it or you're pulling it from somewhere, taking action in those five seconds is one of the most important things you can learn how to do. So go and take and ask yourself this question if you want to be more motivated. I'm going to go to the gym now because well, I've got a wedding that I get to prep for and I don't want to feel really crappy about myself on my wedding day. So love you guys lots. Thanks for listening and leave a review if you enjoyed this podcast and I'll catch you in the next one. Peace