This week on the podcast, I’m focusing on how to find your motivation. Because it’s an important thing at any time, but it’s something we’re even more interested in at the start of the year. And, after a year like 2020, which was so um, eventful, and stressful, it may be feeling hard to access.
That’s how it’s been feeling for me. I’m someone who LOVES that New Year’s energy and I woke up on the first Monday of the New Year with zero motivation. The only thing that got me out of bed was that I had to wake my daughter up for remote school. Even after being upright, I just wanted to get back into bed. If I were an emoji, I would have been the one with the straight line for a mouth. Very. Blah.
SO… one of the benefits of having this podcast is that I can use it as a tool to explore the things that I need infusions of. So let’s go about finding our motivation together.
Listen To The Podcast Here
Before we start talking about any hows today I’m just going to talk about motivation itself; what it is, and all its many forms.
What is motivation, exactly? One way I like to think of it as some kind of desire. One of my mantras is, where there’s a want, there’s a way. Having the desire will help you find that way.
But sometimes motivation doesn’t feel very tied to desire. Maybe you need to find the motivation to do something hard, or the thing you don’t want to do. And sometimes you just need motivation to get out of bed. In those instances, motivation is feels more like a sense of urgency, like when you’re lying in bed so comfortable not wanting to go anywhere but you finally have to pee so badly that you force yourself to get up.
Just like there are many different situations that require motivation, there are many different kinds of motivation. That is great news, because that means there’s no one way to do it ‘right’. So during those times when you just don’t have a strong desire, or that go getter nothing can stop me! kind of motivation, or the urgency that feel like a full bladder you can find another one.
Here’s just a brief list of the different types of motivation:
There’s motivation for doing something just for the fun of it. This is intrinsic motivation, like a dog romping through the woods.
There’s motivation for the sake of improving, like trying to beat your previous performance
And there’s motivation for the sake of hitting a goal, in which case, you are desiring a sense of accomplishment
Or because you have to, in which case your motivation is a sense of duty or obligation
You can also be motivated to do something because it makes you feel better, and you want to boost your self esteem
Because you want to alleviate your guilt
Because you want to alleviate your stress
Or because you want recognition and you’re craving some social support
I’ll talk about this later in the week, but you can also get motivated because you’re sick of not doing it, and you want to alleviate that discomfort or pain
You can also find motivation from getting something you want (like money, or praise, or knowing that you did the right thing
None of these are better than another.
Daily Tiny Assignment
For your tiny assignment today, give some thought to what kinds of motivation generally work on you. I am most often—or I am most often aware of being—motivated by money, and a sense of accomplishment, deadlines, feeling good, and doing the right thing. Knowing this list helps me figure out a lot of things—what I want to take on, how I want to go about it, and how I can actually get them done. If you’ve never given this much thought before, don’t breeze past this! Somewhere, write down, I am motivated by, and write down what comes to mind. I bet you’ll discover more later, but you have to start somewhere.
Need Some Extra Support in Getting Motivated
In this week’s deep dive into motivation, we’ll cover how you can break the seal and get going any time you feel stuck; how to calculate the costs of NOT doing what you’re not feeling motivated to do; and how to use a little basic time travel to get yourself excited by the thought of how good it will feel when you’re done
And I’ll talk to Hayley Krischer, author of Something Happened to Ali Greenleaf, who worked on her incredible book for over 20 years, about how to get motivated and how to stay that way, even when, as she says, you feel like a boiled hotdog because you’re just so cooked.
I hope you’ll come back and keep listening!
