What ACTUALLY Motivates You

Listen Below:

Related Episodes:

• Weight Loss and Your Emotions
• Thought Habits and Your Results
• Overeating and Your Brain’s Job

Tired of struggling with the same bad eating habits?

I can help you transform your eating habits and lose weight sustainably in my 1:1 coaching program, Eat with Intention, Lose Weight Sustainably.

Imagine going through your day feeling healthy, confident and free.

Why delay this? Book your free 60-min consultation with me.

Enjoying the Show?

Help make the show more discoverable to others who are frustrated with their eating habits by leaving a rating/review.

Just use the links below (or go right onto the app you normally listen on). Thank you!

• Rate/review on Apple (iTunes) HERE
• Rate on Spotify HERE

Know someone who’d benefit?

Just send them a text with a link to this page.

Full Episode Transcript:

What ACTUALLY Motivates You

Hi there, welcome to the podcast. I’m excited to share this episode with you today because I think that it’ll really help you to understand that motivation is something that you can create. This is great news because that means you can never run out of it.

Motivation is something that helps you to keep doing actions or to avoid certain actions to create results that you want. Whether those results are to stop eating sugar every day, lose 20 pounds, eat more protein and vegetables, stop overeating, anything.

So, in this podcast episode I’m going to clear up some of the misunderstandings about motivation. I’m also going to explain what motivates you in general as a human and then help you to find what motivates you to want to change your eating habits. And I mean what truly motivates you.

I’ll share exactly how to find this out. I will also be sharing how to create more motivation, so that you never run out. This is gold, so you’re going to want to listen all the way through on this one.

Okay, so one of the biggest misunderstandings that I see around motivation is that it’s finite and you just have a certain amount of it. This amount being determined by your genetics. This is incorrect. Let me repeat, you don’t have a finite amount of motivation and it’s also not determined by your genetics.

Motivation is a feeling, also known as an emotion. Feelings and emotions are one and the same. As you know, emotions are not finite. Therefore, neither is motivation.

So, there’s not a certain amount of a particular emotion that you can have and that’s it. Just as you can’t “use up” irritation or happiness, you can’t “use up” motivation and just run out, like it’s a tank of gas with no gas stations to fill it back up.

I’d prefer for you to think of motivation like a tank of gas, but there’s gas stations all over the place to fill it back up, whenever needed. The gas stations are your own thoughts. Thoughts are what create emotions. Thoughts are also what to keep emotions going.

For example, if a work colleague said something and you got irritated by what this colleague said, it’s not what the colleague said that irritated you, it’s the thought you had in your head when you heard the comment from the colleague. Your thought then created the feeling of irritation. So, you may have had a thought like, “Of course he would say that. He didn’t do any of the work.”

If you stayed irritated at that work colleague for the next hour, it was only because of the thought running through your head that we’re keeping the irritation feeling going for that hour.

So, if you wanted to stay irritated at that work colleague for the rest of the day, you would just need to continue having thoughts that would keep that feeling of irritation going. Or, if you preferred not to have irritation for the rest of the day, you could switch your thoughts, so they no longer created that feeling of irritation. Pretty great, right?

The same thing is true for motivation. If you want to have a feeling of motivation, you will just have to have a thought that generates that feeling of motivation in your body. I will tell you how to do this in a little bit, but first I want to explain the motivational triad, because this plays a role in what motivates us as humans, so will be helpful for you to understand.

The motivational triad was an idea established by Dr. Douglas Lisle and Dr. Alan Goldhamer. This is the idea that there are three things that motivate human beings to perform actions.

Back in the day, these actions resulted in survival. So, the motivational triad encompassed the three things that motivated humans to survive. Because we’ve evolved as humans and society, the motivational triad is ingrained in us, but is also used to drive other actions that we do that are not necessarily required for survival. However, it all came about because it was based on that need to survive.

So, the motivational triad consists of seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and conserving energy. The pleasure-seeking part of it helped to motivate us to seek food and eat it, getting pleasure from both finding the food and eating it. The pleasure part also helped to motivate us to recreate (for obvious reasons) and keep our species going for many years to come.

There are of course lots of other things needed for survival that pleasure does play a role in, but those are just two of the bigger examples.

The avoidance of pain, or discomfort, comes into play with illness and danger. As humans, we needed to avoid danger and prevent and treat illness. So doing things to avoid pain or discomfort, meaning illness and danger and whatnot, was crucial to our survival as humans.

And of course, the third part of conserving energy was extremely helpful when food was scarce. We needed to eat calories and not burn more than we ate. That way, we could actually survive.

So, conservation of energy was what motivated humans to think of different ways to do things more efficiently. This has certainly helped us to grow over the years. From basic tools to the industry and technology that we have today.

The reason why I bring up the motivational triad is because seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and conserving energy were seen as great things. They’re results that were desirable. They were essentially the rewards that humans got for their actions.

If they found food and ate it, they got pleasure. If they didn’t eat the poisonous plant, they avoided pain and illness. If they invented a tool, or an easier way of gathering food, they conserved energy.

Rewards all had a deeper reward of survival. Survival was the deeper reason why they did the actions to get the results or rewards of increasing pleasure, avoiding pain, and conserving energy. So, survival was their true why. The true reason why they did the things they did or avoided the things they needed to avoid.

When you have rewards, and you think about obtaining those rewards, that creates that feeling of motivation. That motivation is then needed to drive the actions to get those results or rewards.

When you then go deeper and find those deeper rewards, that creates a stronger feeling of motivation. It kind of just adds more gas to the tank. But always remember that there are plenty of gas stations around to keep that gas tank full. And that’s your thoughts.

So, I’m not exactly sure what some of the thoughts were back in the day that helped create some of that feeling of motivation for our ancestors, but they might have been thoughts like “I want to keep my family alive.” This thought would have potentially created a feeling of motivation to go out and hunt for food for the family, even if the human was feeling tired that day.

Now, that there are lots of different feelings that can act very similarly to the feeling of motivation. So, it doesn’t necessarily just have to be a feeling of motivation specifically. There are lots of different feelings that are similar. Like drive, determination, excitement. But again, these emotions are all felt in your body because of a thought that you’re having. This is where coaching comes in.

The purpose of coaching is to help you become aware of your thoughts and feelings, around circumstances or things happening in your life or that have happened in the past. And coaching helps you to take charge of your thoughts and feelings to do the actions you want to do or avoid the actions you don’t want to do, to create the results you want in your life.

Such an amazing thing, because you then realize that your circumstances don’t cause how you feel, what you do, and your results, it’s your thoughts that cause all these things. I know that’s a hard sell, but it’s true. And it’s such a good thing that it’s true because this means you control your results. That’s because you’re in control of your own thoughts.

 A coach helps you to master that skill of getting that control of your own thoughts, so you can create feelings, actions and results you want. I learned this when I first had my own coach a few years ago. I feel so much more in control of everything I think, feel, do and create.

And, just to tie this more into the motivation feeling, I never fear that I’ll run out of any motivation or similar emotion, because I know I can create any of those emotions. So powerful.

So, when you want a certain result or reward, you’re going to need some sort of motivating emotion to help get you that result or reward. Again, the emotion doesn’t have to be exactly motivation, but can be an emotion that acts similarly. Like I had mentioned…. something like drive, determination, excitement. Those feelings are emotions will help you do the actions you need to do, or avoid the actions that you need to avoid to get the result or reward.

In my role as a coach, I encourage people to find their true why. Meaning, find the deepest rewards. Those deeper level rewards just really help to increase the motivation because the reward is greater.

That’s going to increase the desire to get that reward. Just like with the motivational triad the deeper reward was survival. If there was no deeper reward, the motivational triad wouldn’t be quite as strong. There’s always going to be a deeper reward though. And I will help you find it. And this is just one of the ways to really helped to increase that motivation or a feeling like motivation.

So, I’m going to help you find your true reason why you want whatever results it is with your eating habits. I’m then going to show you how your thoughts tie into this. That’s going to be the key thing in increasing that motivation and keeping that motivation tank full. You’re going to basically be taking advantage of all of those gas stations along the way to keep that tank full.

Alright so you’re going to take whatever result you want regarding your eating habits and write it down. Start with the basics as far as the eating habit itself. For example, if you want to stop overeating, write that down. Then you’re going to ask yourself why you want to stop overeating.

Maybe it’s because you want to lose 10 pounds or maybe it’s because you don’t like feeling overly full. Maybe it’s something completely different, like you feel like you always beat yourself up when you overeat.

Whatever your reason is, write it down. Then, ask yourself why regarding that reason. So, I’m just going to take the losing 10 pounds as the example for this. I would ask myself why I want to lose 10 pounds. I would write down that reason.

Let’s just say that I want to lose 10 pounds because I wanted my husband to be more attracted to me. Now, I just want to mention that the purpose of this exercise is to be honest with yourself. Not just write down what you think you SHOULD write down but write down whatever comes to mind as to what you really desire.

As a coach, I understand that attraction is a feeling and only my husband can create that feeling in himself with his own thoughts, not with the circumstance of how much I weigh. However, the point of this exercise again is to determine your true why. To write down what is coming to your mind and what feels true to you.

Many times, things that come up are thoughts that can be explored later by the coach and client.

So, I think we’re up to asking yourself why three times or so. You’re going to keep going with this until you can’t answer the question any longer. You’re kind of going to be that annoying little child that keeps asking “well, why?” If you need to get into that mode of being that little child and just being very questioning, do that. When you do that, you really get to your true reasons why. Those deeper reasons.

All those reasons that you wrote down are going to be so important because it’s not just that first result or reward that’s going to motivate you, it’s going to be all of those things. When you find all of those reasons why, you can use them cumulatively to really create powerful motivation.

Now, once you have your list of all your reasons why, those are obviously your rewards or your results that you desire. All the actions or inactions you do will be geared toward getting those results. But to do those actions or inactions, you’ll need to have some sort of feeling like motivation, drive, excitement.

As I mentioned earlier, your thoughts are going to create any of those feelings. There are lots of different thoughts that you can have to create any of those feelings, but because you’ve done this exercise on finding your true why or finding all those results that you truly desire, a simple thought that you can practice having to create an endless amount of that motivating feeling, is to think about being the person who has those results.

Another variation of this is to just simply think about how much you want those results. That can be as simple as a thought like “I so badly want to stop overeating, so I can lose 10 pounds, so my husband will be more attracted to me, so I will feel more confident.”

So, for this example, feeling more confident was the deepest reason why. Or, if I wanted to think about being the person who already has those results, I might think a thought like “I love that I don’t overeat, and 10 pounds lighter, feel more confident, and feel more attraction between my husband and I.”

When I just said that sentence right there, I got such a good feeling in my body, and those were just examples. I wasn’t even truly thinking I want those things for myself. I just said them and instantly felt something in my body.

Can you imagine if you truly were thinking those things and wanting those things, just how powerful that would be? How strong of an emotion that would elicit?

I really like people envisioning their future self with all the results and things that they want and using that to help get them those results. That’s how I got a lot of the results in my life, so I know first-hand that it works.

Alright, so give that exercise a try. I recommend doing this as soon as possible so that you don’t forget, write down whatever eating habit it is that you are trying to change or would like to change period then ask yourself why you want to, and keep doing this until you can’t answer the question any longer.

Those are your deepest reasons why, and that very last answer that you come to, is your true why. Thoughts about these results or rewards, will help you to keep that gas tank full of motivation or another Emotion that can act very similarly to motivation.

If you want guidance with this, so that you can get your results more quickly, I can help.

Change your entire life with the skill of being able to feel any way you want, do any actions you want to do or avoid any actions you don’t want to do, and create any result that you want regarding your eating habits, weight loss, etc. Just let me know because this is what I do.

I’ll put a link in the show notes where you can send me a message and we’ll set up a time to chat that works for you. So easy.

Thanks for joining me today, take care, and I’ll talk with you soon.