MOTIVATION – Spoiler – It’s not all it’s cracked up to be!

How to hack your mind and switch from motivation to the one thing that will actually help you do the things when motivation fails you!

Right now, in the midst of Lockdown many of you have a unique opportunity to change your habits.

So let’s start with reality – Motivation is flimsy and fleeting.

I recommend you don’t rely on it as a robust strategy to change your life and the truth is you kind of already know this – It’s rarely there when you need it.

Instead, I’ve got an alternative that works much MUCH better! Watch the video to discover the secrets of how to achieve so much more. Once you start making continual progress you might just find some extra happiness too! And if that is what you are looking for check out what my health and wellbeing programme can offer you.

? 3.5 minute watch

Struggling with Motivation Part 2

Hi there, my name is Gordon McCrorie I am The Happiness Guy. This is a video to give you an alternative strategy instead of motivation! 

An Alternative Way To Get Things Done

In part one I talked a lot about motivation and how to improve it but also confessed it wasn’t my favourite way of reliably getting things done! Motivation is for most a bit flimsy and fleeting, it lacks robustness and it’s unreliable. If you have something really important that needs to get done, you really don’t want to rely on motivation as you might not do it,  let’s face it – you often won’t do it!

So instead of motivation what can we use instead? Although you might not like the answer to this, the answer is key to help you have a really great life. And that is self discipline. 

SELF DISCIPLINE

Start Small

Most of us need to grow our self discipline. We need to use just a little bit more of it than we currently are. By using our self discipline instead of motivation we will actually get things done AND feel better about ourselves as well.

Let me talk you through how that might work in a practical sense. Let’s say we want to form an exercise habit and we’re not going to rely on motivation, how could we rely on self discipline instead?

Gain Clarity

Let me guide you through an example of what to do. 

1. Become really clear on what you are going to become disciplined to do. And that thing might be: 

‘I’m going to exercise three times a week for a minimum of ten minutes.’

Broad Rules

It can be more than that but it can’t be for less time than that; that’s a broad rule. 

Your thing could be walking, it could be yoga / stretching, it could be abs based, jogging, doing a class (at the moment on line!) . Basically anything at all you could do and might want to do. But it has to be small, that’s  key to developing your self discipline muscle. 

If you make it too big, self discipline is not going to work. Not at this stage. Make it small and when you have made it small, the parts of you that would argue you don’t have much of a voice. There’s far less internal arguments about not doing it. Make it small enough so you can’t argue against it.

Use It Often

Make it frequent enough that there will be progress!

At the same time, don’t make it too often that you are going to rebel against it because we do rebel against ourselves.  

Getting It Done Strategy

So you have set yourself up with something small and frequent enough. Then here is the deciding factor. Add this expression:

 “I’m going to do it whether I feel like it or not”.

This is the opposite of motivation – recognising that in advance you might not feel like it but will do it anyway.

Influence The Environment to Make Winning Easy!

So lets say it is doing some exercise. You may use the environment to support your self discipline a little. If you decide in the morning you are going to go for a walk, you can lay your clothes out the night before that you would choose to go for a walk. Or you are going to do an ab exercise, you could lay out maybe your shorts, t-shirt and trainers. 

Seeing these things laid out may actually make it harder for you NOT to do the thing. You lay them out so that you see them, so that when you wake up in the morning you get triggered to remember what you said you were going to do.  And that you were going to do it whether you feel like it or not. 

So there you have it, self discipline and doing the thing whether you feel like it or not is a much better strategy for success than motivation. Once you start to develop and use this, you can apply it to anything. The more you do it, the more your self discipline will grow and the effects of how you feel about yourself when you actually do what you said you would do are huge! So give it a go and let me know how you get on.

I hope that is in some way useful. If  you have any questions drop me a line and have a great day!

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