if you're not motivated, do this

Summary

the internet is drowning in “just be disciplined” content. force yourself. push through. don’t rely on motivation.

it’s the wrong end of the problem.

you can force yourself for a year or two. then you quit. discipline without intrinsic motivation has an expiration date. so instead of building the willpower to do things you don’t want to do, build yourself into the person who actually wants to do them.

forty years of research, the self-determination theory, says three things drive intrinsic motivation:

1. competence. you’re getting better at a skill. you can see the progress.
2. autonomy. you chose it. nobody told you to do it.
3. relatedness. you’re doing it with other people who care about the same thing.

all three, distilled into one question:

what are you getting better at that you actually want to get better at, and who can you do it with?

answer that for fitness, business, parenting, any domain. you’ll stop white-knuckling discipline and start wanting the work.

Transcript

the problem with “just be disciplined”

A lot of people say that you can’t rely on motivation to achieve your goals, you just need discipline. But what if you could unlock your motivation? Would that change the game for you? The internet is littered with motivational crap that won’t help you pass the 10 seconds after you watch it. The amount of content out there saying just force yourself to be consistent is appalling, when in reality most people are tackling the motivation problem upside down. They are saying if you don’t want to, just force yourself to do it anyway.

I’m saying, how about you learn to be the person who wants to, that way you can chase hard things and actually achieve your goals.

operators vs. civilians: the real gap I saw coaching

So I’ve been coaching people for the better part of 15 years in both fitness and business. And when I started in fitness, I was fortunate enough to start with individuals who were kind of at the top of the motivation hierarchy. I worked with special operators within Air Force Special Operations Command. And these gentlemen that I worked with were incredibly motivated, incredibly disciplined. They had no issues sticking to the plan. I had the plan for them, they would just execute.

Then once I transitioned out of the military, I started to notice the gap when I started to work with regular civilians. And the gap being, I was no longer working on the plan as much, I was working a lot more on helping people stick to the plan. That was the biggest gap that I noticed between the two. And my coaching took different avenues. And I tried the, hey, if you don’t want to, just force yourself, force yourself to do it anyway. You can’t rely on motivation, there’s only discipline. And really, that just made me a bad coach.

It didn’t help me meet people where they were. And what would happen is they would force themselves for a little while, but then they would ultimately still quit, even if it was one or two years later, because you can only force yourself to do something for so long. So what you actually have to do is to tackle the motivation problem at the very root level.

self-determination theory: 40 years of research

And that’s when I found the self-determination theory, a whole body of research that was started in the 1970s that truly can unlock your motivation and get you down the path where you’re the person who can flip the switch and do what you say you want to do whenever you want.

So there are three basic tenets to the self-determination theory. And I’m going to sum it all up by asking you one question. Once you can answer this one question, you will start to unlock your own motivation. So the three tenets of self-determination theory are competence, autonomy, and relatedness.

driver one: competence

So competence is, are you getting better at something? Are you improving in a skill? Are you able to influence change, get better, grow? Competence, can you get better at something?

driver two: autonomy

Autonomy is, are you choosing the thing? So autonomy already within the self-determination theory is not congruent with the force yourself to do something, because there’s a lot of things you should do. There’s a lot of things you could force yourself to do, but if you’re not actually selecting what you want to do, you are no longer autonomous and you’re missing a major element of self-determination.

driver three: relatedness

And the final one is relatedness or connectedness. And this is where you find a community. You find others doing the same thing who can support you. You feel validated and you feel like you actually have a community of like-minded people who can also improve with you.

So like I said, I’m going to sum all of that up for you. 40 years of research distilled down to one question that if you can answer to your core, you actually spend 10, 15 minutes answering this one question, you will start to unlock your motivation. So that question is, what are you getting better at that you actually want to get better at and who can you do it with?

fitness example: aerobic gains without running

Going to an example, say you want to get fitter. You know what? I want to improve my fitness. I want to improve my aerobic fitness. And so you go to a coach and the coach says, you should run an hour, three times a week. And you’re like, I don’t want to run three hours a week. That sounds boring. I hate running. The coach is like, I don’t care. Do it anyway. Discipline, discipline, push yourself, force yourself, just do all these things. You’re like, but I just don’t want to run.

So you can be forced to run for a while. But if I ask you, OK, you want to increase your aerobic fitness. What do you want to do? And you’re like, well, I saw some guys doing kettlebell stuff. That sounds pretty cool. OK, you want to do kettlebell stuff. That’s what you’re interested in. OK, let’s do some kettlebell stuff. You have now selected that. That is your autonomy.

You have chosen to do kettlebell stuff and we’re just lumping that in as kettlebell stuff right now. Kettlebell stuff is a skill that you can actually get better at. We could get better at the kettlebell snatch, the kettlebell swing, the Turkish get up, kettlebell windmills, whatever you want. This is a skill that you can actually improve on. So now we have competence. The last piece here is all you have to do is find out who to do it with.

This could be an online community. This could be a group of friends that you can invite over who also want to get better at kettlebell stuff. And you are starting to achieve your goals of increasing your aerobic fitness through kettlebell training, doing what you want, something you actually want that you can get better at. And you are doing it with a community.

business example: more leads without face-to-face meetings

I can very easily translate this into a business example as well. Say you run a brick and mortar business and you should go do face-to-face meetings. That’s what’s going to grow your business. Well, we don’t live in a world where you can only do one form of marketing. So I ask you, okay, well, you don’t like face-to-face meetings. What do you want to do?

And you’re like, well, realistically, I just want to sit in my office and have people show up. Okay. How can we do that? We could probably do that through digital advertising. So now you’ve selected, okay, well, I don’t want to do that thing that I should do. I want the outcome.

So you can do digital advertising. Is digital advertising something you’ve selected? Yes. Because you want people to show up without leaving your office. Is digital advertising something that you could get better at? Absolutely. It’s a skill in and of itself. And could you find a community of other people who are learning, getting better at digital advertising and going through the same trials, tribulations, problems that you have with digital advertising, because it’s a very difficult thing to master?

Absolutely. You can find that online. If you’re a solopreneur, better yet, you can start to hire people who do this. So you can only focus on the things that you want to get better at, you actually have selected, you want to do, and you can find a community around.

final challenge: answer the question, then act

But in the meantime, if you don’t have the money for a team to start to hire out the things you don’t really want to do that you should be doing, you can just start to select things that go in line with the self-determination theory. Autonomy, competence, relatedness, connectedness, those kinds of things. That’s what you should be selecting. And you will start to see more progress.

When you start to look at everything you want to achieve through this lens, answering that one question, what are you getting better at that you actually want to get better at, and who can you do it with, when you start going down this line of thinking, you are going to unlock motivation.

I’m not kidding around here. This is not some untested theory. I’ve been coaching people for 15 years, and I tried a lot of the just force yourself, just do the discipline thing, but it doesn’t work in the long term. If you can build discipline over time, that’s great, but you’re most likely going to do it when you’re following these three tenets of relying on the self-determination, the intrinsic motivation within you, actually getting better through competence, actually choosing what you want to do, autonomy, and doing it with other people, which is the connectedness or relatedness.

When you start to do that, you will unlock your motivation, and you will start to see progress so much faster than everyone else. But to do this, you’re going to have to try harder.