Hi, This is Wayne from Life Back On Track.

Welcome to the latest episode. Today I want to talk about something that's a little bit of a challenging, complex and very deep subject, and that's one of motivation.

I have people who do ask me, How do I get motivated? There's been many books written on motivation. How to get motivated, how to stay motivated and all of this sort of thing. Ultimately, motivation comes down to one of two things, and sadly, there's no guarantee that either of these are going to work. The two reasons we get motivated, one is to move away from pain and the other one is to move towards pleasure.

Most people are more motivated by moving away from pain than they are from moving towards pleasure. Basically, that means when you're in enough pain, then you may do something about it. The problem is, sometimes the drivers that are causing us to not be motivated, to be distracted, to procrastinate, do all of these things and not achieve what we say we want to achieve.

Because those drivers can sometimes be so deep, they will override any desire for motivation. One of the most extreme examples I've ever heard of, is I worked with his chap years ago and we were in a very masculine environment. So it was all men. It was very blokey, you know, we all sat down to a mans meal at lunchtime and all that sort of rubbish. This chap sat down and he had a container full of just salad, and I think he might have had a bit of tuna, bit of chicken or something, but it was a very light meal in comparison to a lot of what a lot of the men were eating.

I was curious, and I said "What's the deal with the salad?" He said, "Well, a few years ago, I was told by my doctor, you know, that I was very overweight and my blood pressure was very high and my cholesterol was very high, and if I did nothing, I'll be dead within 12 months." He said "So I started walking and I started watching what I ate, minimise my drinking, all of this sort of thing, cut out the bad foods."

He said "I lost all the weight, my cholesterol came down, my blood pressure came down and I'm all good. You know, I've dropped nearly 20 kg" and all this sort of stuff. Then he said something which I found quite astounding is his mate was in exactly the same situation, where his doctor had said to him, "You need to do something about your weight, your cholesterol and your blood pressure or you'll be dead within 12 months".

This chap kept eating chip butties, which, if you've never heard of them before, it's where you get hot chips and you put them between two pieces of bread and you make a sandwich out of them. He kept eating these and the chap, I just remembered his name, forgotten for ages, but it's Ian, Ian said to his mate, "How come you still eating these chip butties?" His mate says to him "It'll be fine. It'll be fine", and about seven, eight months later, he dropped dead.

The sad thing is, of course, he had a wife and he had two young sons and the drive to keep eating poorly was greater than the threat of his death. So that's one of the most extreme examples I've heard off where you're actually faced with that possibility of you're going to die, but your driver's still push you to go down that path.

Now. I've put some thought into this because I've myself, like a lot of people have struggled sometimes with motivation. You know, you get distracted, you procrastinate and what I found is, sometimes people get overwhelmed with getting a result.

They want to get fit. They want to get healthy. They want to have more money. They want to have better relationships, and they look at the big, overarching journey and they get overwhelmed with it. They think "I'll never be able to achieve that". "It's going to be too difficult". So one way to get motivated is to break things down, make them doable. Then what you do is those little steps, once you've made them doable, get someone to hold you accountable. That's what I've heard called "Holding your feet to the fire".

If you have someone who cares enough about you, they will say to you, "You said you were going to do it, why haven't you done it?" And they will push you to look for the reason the motivation that has held you back from achieving your result, because sometimes that motivation to not achieve is stronger. That could be one way to get motivation.

Another one is to make that pain so uncomfortable, not death, but so uncomfortable that you achieve it. So the one that I heard, ages ago, which I think was brilliant, and I might have mentioned this in other podcasts was these two women who wanted to lose weight and they had both tried all the diets and they'd struggled, and they realised the only way they were going to achieve this was to make it so uncomfortable that they had to do it.

What they did then was they went into the shops and their bought a can of dog food, and they're made sure they picked a can that mentioned that it contained horse meat. So they had these cans of dog food that contained horse meat, and they knew that it contained horse meat and the deal was if one of them had skipped on their exercise, or didn't want to work out, the other person had to force them to eat this can of dog food. What they found was, every time they felt the need to or the desire to skip their exercise they would look at this can of dog food and say, "I would rather put up with, you know, 20 minutes of exercise rather than eating that can of dog food. Ultimately, though, they achieved their result, which is what you want.

There's a number of different ways you can do this. It's up to you. You can get creative. I've heard of websites where you put a donation into their account and they have a list of charities that you would never support. What you do is you pick one of these, and if you don't achieve your goal, they donate money to this charity that you would never support. I've heard of those websites, and that's a good idea.

However, if you do make it a bit closer to home, it tends to get you more motivated. So there's a couple of ways you can get past your motivation slump, is you may feel that its too big or you may not have enough discomfort. There was a saying I came across years ago, which is a beautiful summarisation of this situation, and that is, "People only change when the pain of change is less than the pain of staying the same".

Sometimes our pain of change is difficult. We see the exercise every day to get fit as too much, so we don't try. We find the discomfort of putting aside money for investing too discomforting when we just want to buy something and feel good for the moment. So it's balancing out the two and getting the pain of not achieving it high enough that it pushes you, and then making the steps small enough and do-able enough that you'll actually go out and do it.

One I've heard is, if you want to exercise, say to yourself, I'll just put my shoes on or I'll just do one push up because then once you're in that situation where you've done one push up, you say well I'm down here, I've already done one so I may as wall do another nine or ten or twenty or whatever it is so breaking it down, making it do-able and having accountability.

I've always found accountability a good one because if someone cares about you enough, they will hold you accountable. They will say, "Why didn't you do what you said you were going to do? Do it. I care about you. I want you to get your results. Let's get them."

So I hope that gives you some insight into motivation. I hope that gives you some ideas for motivation. What I found is from talking to a lot of people is motivation doesn't always work. It is such a personal and internal challenge that we have. There are a couple of tips that I find that have worked for me and for others. Not all the time. You can find that they will assist, but ultimately it comes down to you and how badly you want it.

If you want something badly enough, you achieve it. So there you go, a quick one. I could have made this hours and hours long. I just like to keep these short, simple, give you some usable information, do-able tips, processes that make sense. So go and use them. Have fun. Achieve what you want to achieve. Let me know how you go. I love getting feedback and keep up the good work.

Thank you for listening. We're getting more and more listeners, which is fantastic. Take care of yourselves. Enjoy your day. Remember, here's to a good life

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