Staying Motivated When You Feel Anything But

Hal Elrod (0:02)

Hello, and welcome to the Achieve Your Goals Podcast, the show that empowers you to wake up to your full potential and achieve your biggest goals and dreams. I am your host, Hal Elrod, and I invite you to join us each week as we share actionable strategies to take your life to the next level, as well as interview world-class experts and entrepreneurs who have achieved extraordinary goals themselves, and we ask them to give you a peek behind the curtain and teach you exactly what you need to do to do the same. Ready? Here we go.

SPEAKER_2 (0:35)

All right.

Hal Elrod (0:36)

I got a question for you. You ever struggle with motivation? That's what we're talking about today. How do you stay motivated when you don't feel motivated? How do you get yourself to do what you need to do when you don't feel like it? And I want to start with just being vulnerable. Like I struggle with motivation too. I know that sometimes you listen to a podcast or I do this too where I see somebody on stage. I'm like, oh man, they've got such confidence and conviction. I must have it all figured out. Nope, I am human. Every human is human and staying motivated is something that all of us have to figure out for ourselves. And that's what I want to break down today is how do you get yourself to stay motivated consistently so that you can achieve your goals, do what you need to do in every area of your life, your health goals, your fitness goals, your relationship goals, because very often, I don't know about you, but life's exhausting, it's tiring. Like I just don't want to do it. I'm so tired, life is so tiring. Two real examples for me right now are writing my first sub-stack article. I've started it a dozen times at least. In fact, I have, I think, four or five, six different sub-stack articles. Perfectionism kills it every time. And it's like, this is my first sub-stack article, it has to be perfect. So raise your hand if perfectionism is something that you also struggle with, I would guess so. And the other one for me is speaking engagements. I don't know what to do, meaning I am a professional speaker, but all of my speeches have always come in where folks are reading the Miracle Morning and it's a CEO or an executive, and then they say, oh my gosh, this is changing my life. I want to bring the Miracle Morning into my organization. And so that's how I get all of my speaking engagements. I don't actually pursue them. In fact, I'm in Dallas right now, I'm speaking in an event this afternoon, recording this for my hotel room for you. But the bottom line that you can relate to is like, how do you get motivated when you don't know where to start? I've never had to, I remember book speaking engagements, I've never reached out proactively. So what do you do when you don't know where to start? So that's where motivation can often lag. So it's either fear of the unknown, something you've never done before that's at your comfort zone or perfectionism. Those are two main causes that cause us to choose the opposite of motivation, which is in a lot of ways it's procrastination at least that manifests as procrastination. So I'm not speaking of a pedestal here, I'm speaking from somebody that is in the trenches consistently working on staying motivated. However, I've been teaching motivation and I've been implementing it for 26 years. So I do have that place of experience to draw from. So here we go. Today I'm gonna share with you four keys. I call these the four cornerstones of motivation that you can use in your life right now. Something that's totally concrete that you can immediately start applying. And before I dive in, I just want to say the biggest myth is that waiting for motivation to arrive before acting doesn't work. Motivation doesn't proceed action. In fact, you've heard me say this when I'm talking about discipline or getting yourself to do what you need to do. I usually reference one of the philosophies that I learned, I don't know, 20 years ago, 10 years ago from John Maxwell in his book, Failing Forward. And it was the idea that most of us are sitting around waiting for the feelings that we think we need. Oh, if only I felt motivated, if only I had more energy, when the reality is those things must be generated by us. That's what these four cornerstones I'm going to share with you today, that's what they do. They will help you generate motivation. And the Prince of Weatherton and John Maxwell's book was, you have to act your way into feeling, right? You can't feel your way into action. You can't wait for the feelings that you think you need. You have to actually take the first step. I always use the example of, if you go to the gym, if you're like, I don't feel like exercising, well, grab your gym bag, get in the car, head to the gym. I'm just not motivated. Well, when you, A, first of all, just driving to the gym, you're now leaning into the activity that you need to do, that you don't feel motivated to do. You're acting your way into feeling. And then when you get out of the car with a gym bag, you walk into the gym and the music's pumping and people are on the treadmill and literal human energy is infused in that room. You will feel significantly more motivated than you did when you were sitting at home on the couch, thinking about not feeling motivated, right? So you have to act your way into feeling.