What is Your Motivator?

Ep #26 - What is your motivator?

The difference between the emotion that motivates you and the one your brain uses thinking it’s motivating you. This is going to be fun.

Somewhere along the line, our brain learns emotions that it thinks are motivators, and they are not the ones you’d expect.

So right off the top, what does motivated feel like: Powerful, certain, grounded, calm, excited, driven, committed, contentment

Those sound about right. When you feel each of those, they feel energizing and clear.

You know what you’re doing.

You can make a confident decision from that place.

When you feel committed and driven, do you have to force yourself to workout?

When you feel powerful, do you blame yourself or want to hide?

No because those actions don’t come with those emotions.

Our emotions drive the actions we take, but we are not at the mercy of them. So once you are clear on what each of those emotions are, you’ll know when your actions line up with what you want to do.

The motivators I mentioned earlier are ones we know intellectually, but there is a part of the brain that is keeping you alive. That part that breathes for you and digest your food. You don’t have to think about those intellectually for those actions to happen. The brain just do.

It’s what we’ll call the default brain. It’s where those habits you want to change are on automatic.

What can happen is our brain links certain emotions as motivators, and they are not motivating at all.

I’ll give you a personal example. I thought I had to wait to be proud of myself for reaching goals until they were done. Sounds logical, right? So I kept waiting. But thinking I had to wait made me feel disappointed and feeling disappointed didn’t make me do anything except sit on the couch, grab the chips, eat right from the back, and question why I wasn’t there already.

Not super productive, right?

I kept offering that to myself as motivation, you’ll be proud of yourself there. It’s worth it., but again, only made me feel disappointed.

What I didn’t realize at the time was my default brain thought disappointment was a motivator.

Feeling disappointed felt necessary in order to stay focused on the goal. ‘Don’t get to happy or content cause you’ll quit.’ That was an automatic thought that my brain would launch at me.

I just said OK and went on not being proud of myself and feeling disappointed.

This is the thing. Disappointment is not a motivator. What? LOL Was it on that list above? Nope.

How many personal trainers do you hear yelling out ‘let’s get disappointed!!’ Hmm not going to work.

But my default brain did not know that. Somewhere in my life it picked that up, and I followed the automatic thoughts and feelings as a-OK, and went about creating the same results.

Now this can be hard to spot because it feels so automatic. Guilt and nervous may feel like motivators if those are ones your brain linked to being necessary to avoid something.

But nervous is not a motivator. Guilt is not a motivator. They are magnifying glasses. How you can tell the difference is you don’t feel motivated when you feel guilty. You don’t feel motivated when you feel nervous.

You may think you need to feel guilty to make the best decision, or you need to feel guilty not eat the cookie, or feel guilty to drive you to behalf in your plans for the week.

Guilty has it’s place, but it is not a motivator. Actions that come from feeling guilty are: judging yourself, blaming yourself or others, hiding, overeating, overdrinking, overconsuimg in some way whether it’s sleep or something else, avoiding others, and stuck.

We don’t need to eliminate guilt. It has it’s place, as a magnifying glass, but not a motivator.

This is not limited to guilt. If you notice any of those emotions that seem like motivators but aren’t motivating, ask yourself why you feel it. Then use it as a magnifying glass to what you want to address. Then you can let the guilt, disappointment, and nervous go and use it for the next time.

Just like any tool in our tool belt, if we don’t use it for the job it’s intended for, it might not seem like it’s working. But there’s not a problem with the hammer or the nails.

Guilt is not a problem, nervous is not a problem, disappointment, not a problem. But they are not motivators, they are magnifying glasses. Take a look at why you feel it, and if you see there’s something to change, you can put the magnifying glass down, release the guilt, and grab a real motivator out of your tool belt: Powerful, certain, grounded, calm, excited, driven, committed, contentment

This takes practice as with any tool. Avoiding a magnifying glass moots it’s purpose. Look guilt right in the face. Look nervous right in the face. Look disappointment right in the face, and ask yourself WHY.

Why do I feel this? That will be your gem. If it’s something you’re changing, grab a real motivator out of the tool belt, if it’s false alarm, drop it like a hot potato and still grab a real motivator and get right back to what you’re doing.

False alarms happen all the time with our brain. It’s OK. We don’t have to fix that. We get to look at it with the magnifying glass and see, is there something in there I need to address: yes, no? Both OK

You have tools for both.

This is part of the work I do with women every week. If you want to take this work deeper and create a better relationship with yourself, schedule your consult, and we can discuss what your current motivators are and if that’s working for you. If not, we’ll get to the root cause of the relationship with yourself and clear of that filer. It’s a beautiful thing.

Love all of you ladies so much. See you next week.

www.mschristiewilliams.com