Ep #4: Motivated or Lazy?

Welcome to Empowered Wellness for Leaders, a podcast that teaches CEOs, entrepreneurs and sales leaders how to deal with the unique challenges of balancing a high-stress career, family, AND their own health. Here’s your host, Certified Executive Wellness Coach, Diana Murphy.

Hello. I am so glad you’re back, and I want to wish you a happy Monday. I hope that the topic today is something that you even look back on and use when you need it, because I’m going to talk to you about being motivated. You know, so often we talk about this where we’re either motivated or we’re lazy. But isn’t it somewhat true that there’s some places in between?

And although a lot of times we talk about being motivated around working out, starting a new diet, finishing a presentation, getting work done, this topic can be applied to anything in our lives. Frustration comes and we know there’s something we have to do, and we just can’t seem to get motivated.

Well today, I’m going to give you a little inside track on what to do in those areas. No matter what you’re trying to take more action on, to do more of, you have it within you to create more motivation. Doesn’t it feel awesome when we are motivated to do something? We feel really good energy in our body and it’s just almost easy to take action.

This issue got my attention at a workshop recently. I had a room full of business owners, attorneys, and consultants. When we started talking about motivation, one man said, “I must just be lazy.” I’m serious, I almost got whiplash because this man had just shared with us that he is raising twin girls, that I think are teenagers, if I remember correctly, and he’s an attorney, and an active one at that.

This fine gentleman was anything but lazy. Motivation can be tricky, and it’s even trickier when we think something’s gone wrong when we’re not motivated. This can apply to any topic in our lives. Cold calls, filing, paying the bills, following through on a project, working out, taking out the trash. If we think we always need to be motivated and feel great to do something, to take action, we’ll also be waiting for it to happen.

This could be problematic because I don’t know about you, but in real life, if we wanted to wait until we were motivated to pay our mortgage, our tax bills, or get in those dental and doctor appointment, that could really suffer some results. I dig a little deeper into this issue in my first module of my video training series, Empowered Wellness for Leaders. In the first video module, I talk about motivation, but in a different way than I’m going to talk about today.

I teach there how to decide ahead of time, and how to get out of your own way. These tools can be used in any moment when we don’t feel like it. They’re great tools around staying motivated and understanding motivation. You can find this on the front page of my website, diamamurphycoaching.com.

But today my friends, I am going to teach you how to create motivation. Yes, create motivation. This can be so useful and is absolutely the magic in creating sustainable, and if I might say, amazing results.

Let me first share an example. We’ve all done this, we have a reunion, a wedding, something where we’re seeing people that we care about, and maybe we care about what they think how – and definitely in terms of how we look.

Yes, I’m talking about the reunion or the wedding diet. It’s absolutely human nature, and so common, and there’s really nothing wrong with it. But this is the reason we typically don’t keep the weight off after we pass that date. Is that getting your attention?

And believe me, this doesn’t have to be around weight. I trained quite a few years ago for the Breast Cancer Walk. I had seen way too many people in my life suffering with breast cancer, and I decided I had to do something. I was so motivated. I raised a ton of money, I created a team, they helped me raise that money, we all walked together, and I walked over 63 miles in a weekend. I even astounded my teenage sons. I love that.

I trained for the entire year, and therefore the experience was really awesome. I proved to myself that I could do something pretty big, and it took a lot of motivation. I mean, we’re talking 5am training walks, walking in the rain because that was a training day and I didn’t have time any other day of the week, and staying with it all year long.

But after the weekend, I vowed I would continue to be a big walker. But guess what? I just wasn’t motivated. I think I spent the next six months after that amazing 65-mile weekend not doing much around walking or any activity. I was kind of stuck. I wasn’t motivated.

Well, this can also happen in your business. There are seasons when we’re more motivated to take action, to follow up well, to make bigger asks, just you know, taking active action. And that creates beautiful results. But that can also be followed by a season where we’re busy serving new customers, we have our noses in a new project, and guess what? Our motivation slows, and sometimes, our revenue actually shows it.

So what I’m going to paint for you today is a way to stay consistent, and create motivation when you need it most, and for those issues that are really important to you.

Alright, I’m a geek about definitions. If you look at the definition for motivation, motivation is the desire to do something. And the second definition for motivation is it’s the reason to do something, to take action.

So you can see from my Breast Cancer Walk example, I had a lot of compelling reasons to prepare and fundraise. I had a mission, I wanted to support those that were in the middle of chemo, and there was a specific date I had to be ready to walk those miles. Great reasons, but all of those also created a great desire to follow through. Especially those ones around the mission.

So for you, I want to help you apply this to your life right now. Take the most important goal and even a business goal, really what’s important to you, what got your attention around taking some action where you might feel lazy, where you’re judging yourself for not moving forward. I want you to write out that goal right now. And if you’re driving, you know, go ahead and just take note. You’ll remember it. Don’t worry.

Write down your why. After you decide what your new goal is, or somewhere where you’d like to take more action, you feel a little stuck, note every reason that you want to complete this goal or take action. Now, I will use a wellness example because you know that’s my gig, but remember again, you can apply it to anything you want to do in moving forward taking action.

I use this – what I’m sharing with you today, I use in my business all the time. Alright, so I’m going to use the goal, eating more fresh food. And not just at home, but during the day. So that’s my goal. Eating fresh food more often, even while I’m out and about during the day.

Why? List all the reasons. Okay, so the example could look like this. If I eat fresh food more often, not just in the evening when it’s easy to cook at night, I will feel better, I’ll be healthier – oh, I should eat fresh food because that’s the only way to lose weight, and my doctor told me to, and my wife could be so much happier, I could get her off my back.

Think about some of those statements. Some are motivating, but I don’t know about you. When I say ‘should’, or ‘told me to’, or I do something for someone else, I resist. I’m just a rebel like that. But look for you how you feel when you say each statement that were your reasons. Cross out any that make you resist. Those aren’t the right ones.

And create new ones if you have to that embolden you, that make you feel confident. Take a little bit of time with this. And again, don’t worry if you’re in the car just listening. The questions I’m asking of you here are in a worksheet that you can find at www.dianamurphycoaching.com/four. The link will also be in the show notes.

When you have two or three reasons that feel motivating, write them out. I like juicy ones. I love juicy goals, and it really comes from putting in good juicy reasons for those goals. So practice them and create motivation every time you’re tired, you’re not feeling it, you’re distracted, and making a decision to blow off that action.

You know, blow off eating fresh is our example here. It will move you from feeling lazy to feeling motivated. Remind yourself in these moments, but also a great way to solidify this is to read them in the morning. Tweak them every time you have to.

Like I should have tweaked them. Remember the Breast Cancer Walk? I should have – instead of – I think I really got into kind of a shame cycle with this. Like, oh my god, I was doing all this great walking, now I’m going to have to work back up, and I found all these reasons not to. So I got stuck.

But if I had simply known this tool to go back and maybe create some new reasons, I bet I would have gotten moving again. So you see here, we listed reasons and desires and that my friends, is motivation. Remember my definition?

Okay, in my workshop example, this fine, hardworking attorney simply didn’t have enough compelling reasons for the action he wanted to take. I think it was about working out. He didn’t realize that he could create motivation where he needed it. Also, he was trying to understand why he wasn’t, and he called himself lazy.

I don’t know about you, when I call myself lazy, and I have done it, it makes me feel more lazy. I don’t want to do anything, and that gets us even less motivated. So we have to be careful about the thoughts we think. I want to remind you why this works. Our circumstances, you know, busy life, I, you know, don’t have time, any of those things. They don’t create our results at all.

But every single time the way we think about something creates an emotion, and those emotions create either an action or many times, inaction, there are positive, negative, and even neutral emotions from those thoughts.

Again, if your reasons to complete this goal aren’t compelling enough, it will not create enough positive emotion to help you stick with it in those moments when you’re tired. That’s why we stay right where we are, and why we don’t take great action all the time or consistently. When we get tired or we don’t feel like it, you need to remind yourself of your reasons, your why. That will help you hop over any natural resistance that happens.

Again, our thoughts, they create those yummy – if we’re intentional – emotions that create great action that create great results. This, my friends, is staying motivated. I cannot wait to see where you’re creating more motivation in your life. Just remember, you can create it.

If something gets your attention and you feel like you’re losing at this or failing at being motivated, just step back and go through these steps again. Where do you want it to make a goal? Why? Why do you want to make that goal? Why is that important to you? Choose the good ones, and take some beautiful action in your life. I know you can do it.

Please be sure to leave comments, and most of all, be sure to review my podcast and give me feedback. Directions for leaving your review are laid out in dianamurphycoaching.com/itunes. I don’t know if this invitation will be too late, I’ll never know when you really pick up this podcast, but I have a special webinar on the 21st of February this week.

For those that have goals around weight loss, just send me an email to register, and I’ll send you the Zoom link, diana@dianamurphycoaching.com. I know that you can create amazing results, and I know that from just what you’ve heard today, if you just lay out a few compelling reasons, you’re going to see a great shift in your life.

Next week, we’re discussing rest ethic. Yes, I didn’t say work ethic. Did you know there was such a thing? I’ll see you next week. Thanks so much for listening, I really appreciate your time, and I hope that you are, in fact, feeling more empowered in your life, especially around wellness. Have a great day.

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