In this podcast episode, host John explores the concept of motivation from a fresh persepctive.
Topics Include:
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In this podcast episode, host John explores the concept of motivation from a fresh persepctive.
Topics Include:
Buy my book! 75 EASY: the ultimate challenge for personal growth
Amazon US
UK
CA
AU
Weight loss coaching - Join the Weight Loss Freedom Academy today
To inquire about 1 -1 Coaching with John - email John at john@oakesweightloss.com
Check out the EASY WAY OUT Blog/Newsletter site
Join the free "Lose Weight with John" community
Watch the Easy Way Out on Youtube
Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - Hello and welcome. Today we're going to be talking about motivation. How can we get more motivated than we are right now so that we can engage in all the things that we really, deep down, would like to, to feel free and to see our lives move in a direction that's healthier, more abundant, and overall more enjoyable. Before we jump into that, if you enjoy this content, I would really appreciate it if you could leave a review if you could share the show with a friend. If you go below, click the link to join my newsletter. Sign up to become a paid subscriber to the newsletter. Anything you can do to help support the show. I would really appreciate and I don't have a Patreon or anything for this podcast specifically, but over on the Easy Way Out blog newsletter site you can subscribe. It's inexpensive and I really appreciate the support, and that will get you access to the Sunday newsletters, which are only for paying subscribers. The full archive of everything I publish over there, and if you have any other ideas for fun incentives for paying subscribers, just let me know.
Speaker 1 (00:01:00) - Super open minded. This time of year has a lot of people thinking about the holiday, and that either gets them thinking a lot about improving their fitness and their health and their weight, or it has a lot of people putting up blind spots so they don't have to think about it because they're just going to enjoy the holiday, enjoy their treats. And then that's January 1st problem. And if you've been following me for any period of time, I really advise that we not do that because digging a hole deeper is not what we need to do. We can start today. You can have a very enjoyable holiday and you can start your journey today. Because starting your journey doesn't mean you have to be in a calorie deficit today. Starting your journey doesn't mean that you're not allowed to drink wine with your friends at a Christmas party. There are so many things you can do to take steps in a positive direction, and by appreciating that fact, it's going to help you get out of that all or nothing thinking.
Speaker 1 (00:01:52) - Or you're shocked that I can read your mind. Yes, I can read your mind. I can look into your soul and see all the all or nothing thinking. And hopefully this topic today will help you realize that there's a ton of stuff you could do practically here in December, before the New year, or whenever you're listening to this, it's always a good time to implement these ideas. And here's the thing. The whole point of this is how to do it easily. I'm not going to try to add a bunch of to do's to your to do list. That's already plenty full. What we're actually trying to do here is take weight off, remove shoulds, remove shame, remove fear of failure so we can engage more with our desires, our abilities, and our freedom to move in alignment with our values and our instincts and what makes us laugh and happy. All that stuff. And if you really take these lessons to heart, it could really improve your holiday season. Because for a lot of people, the holidays are tough because there are so many traditions that remind them of family and traditions are fun.
Speaker 1 (00:02:51) - But maybe if you find yourself not motivated to do some holiday stuff today, might help explain why and give you an idea of what might be a good idea for you to change up so you can stay more present through the holidays, enjoy them more, and be more you, and not just so much feeling like you're just trying to get through it. So in the normal model of motivation, we think of it as something we have or something we don't have. We think of motivation as a tank, and it's really not like that at all. And I'll give you an example. Let's say that you're on the couch and you feel like working out, but you just have no motivation, right? Well, it could be that you have plenty of motivation, but something is suppressing it. Now, if I change the value proposition, if I said, hey, if you go work out right now, you get $10,000, all of a sudden you're going to have motivation. Why? Because you see a financial incentive in working out and maybe thinking, well, John, that's obvious.
Speaker 1 (00:03:50) - Then the the money is motivating me, not me. No, it's always you motivating you. It's always you doing a cost benefit analysis and saying, is this worth my effort or my time? That's just an extreme example, because the truth is, for a lot of people, it's something small could really shift their motivation. A friend calls you up while you're thinking about going to the gym and they're like, hey, you want to go to the gym? And you're like, yeah, I actually do. I just I didn't have the motivation to do it on my own. But now that you have called me up, I do feel like going, I can actually get out the door. We're not talking about whether or not you have the motivation. We're talking about whether or not your motivation can express itself. So think of motivation is like a hose through which all your motivation is flowing at any given moment. If we were to wrap our hand around that hose and slowly squeeze, we would throttle down the flow of that motivation.
Speaker 1 (00:04:40) - And this is what happens when we're scared, when we're feeling ashamed, when we feel oppressed by shoulds and obligations. Anytime we're trying to keep ourselves safe, that flow of motivation starts to throttle down. And when we start to feel free and we're in play and we let go of false beliefs. It's like relieving pressure on that hose. We throttle it up. Do we allow the full flow when we are in a good place? So I want to quickly cover the three main factors in what's going to throttle you down, and maybe a little bit about how to throttle back up. So if you notice like wow, okay, I'm trying to go to the gym, I'm trying to do X, Y or Z. I'm trying to get psyched for decorating the house even though I don't feel like doing it. And I know I should feel like doing it, but I just don't. We're going to we're going to go through the three main directions. That pressure gets applied to that hose. So you can think of it as like a, like a triangle that's pushing, that's going to restrict flow.
Speaker 1 (00:05:40) - And these things are shame should and feelings of obligation and the fear of failure. Now each of these on their own is what I call a centripetal drive or a centripetal cycle. It's a drive, but it's avoidant and therefore it tends to cause us not to expand our lives. We don't have more options. As these cycles kick up, we start to have fewer and fewer options. We end up getting smaller and smaller. This is how we construct our prisons. This is how we create this. This gravitational pull inside our own mind that keeps us from feeling like we can go and step out and do new things, or do old things that have suddenly become super scary. So think of it as like an inward spiral. The more shame you feel, the more you spiral inward. The more you want to hide, the more fear failure you feel, the more you spiral inward. I can't do that because I'm afraid I'll fail. And the more you feel shoulds and obligations, the less you're going to be connected to your genuine desire to do things.
Speaker 1 (00:06:37) - And that's going to cause you to say no to a lot of activities, or you have to drag yourself through them, and it feels like it's a huge imposition on your soul or your dignity, or it's just a huge drag. And all of these things will sap your energy, your ability to say yes, and ultimately the alignment of the things that you really want in life and them happening. So when your motivation gets throttled down really low by one or a combination of these three things, the amount of effort it takes for us to create action to execute goes up dramatically. And the key with understanding motivation, the key with unlocking your motivation is noticing when you're feeling like you have to put a lot of effort into something in order to be able to do it. Here we are Misspending our effort, we are spending. We're burning a lot of fuel and exhausting ourselves to do things that we're already motivated to do, instead of trying to add in effort. What we really need to do is find out what's suppressing the flow of motivation, what's throttling us down, and learn how to open that back up.
Speaker 1 (00:07:41) - So to summarize so far, it's it's not a tank. It's not a reservoir that runs dry. It's a, it's a conduit that we can throttle up or throttle down. And we do that. We throttle down with shame, obligations, shoulds and failure. Fear of failure. So now let's talk about how we can throttle up. We resort to violence maybe with a lowercase v to get ourselves moving. We start to whip ourselves. We start to catastrophize what happens if we don't do the thing? And we basically create a giant problem that's big enough to scare us into movement. This is a culturally celebrated and accepted form of self harm because it's not helping us with the core problem. It's just adding insult, pressure, fear to a situation where that's already probably present plenty. And it has to be said that a lot of the fitness industry is profiting directly from offering you these forms of motivation, these external forms of motivation that are supposed to supplement what you lack on the inside and fix you, quote unquote.
Speaker 1 (00:08:50) - But it never works. You're never going to motivate yourself with someone else's motivation. Motivation is innate. You cannot supplement it from the outside. You can for a minute. But in the long run, no, you can't. And if you have anything worth doing, if you have any project that's going to require a real shift in how your motivation is able to flow and express itself, then watching YouTube videos and getting hyped up and following your favorite social media influencer. It's never going to be enough of a substitute. Never. Yeah, we can see this motivation by violence a lot. In our fitness culture. We celebrate military types because they they are tough, they display resilience. They have lots of skills. They're badass all around. But think about a world where our fitness culture wasn't so heavily dominated by military personalities. Notice how much of the social media space uses the language of warfare to try to describe getting up and going to the gym, right? Everything is cut into this black and white dichotomy of victory and failure, right? And we see this idea.
Speaker 1 (00:09:56) - You've probably heard this trotted out before, but. Motivation will wax and wane. That's why you need to have discipline. Today, I'm not going to get into discipline in particular, but there's a massive cultural misunderstanding around what discipline is and how we get it. And these types, basically, they put on these performances of putting themselves through needless pain as a way of gaining status. You do not lack pain. You do not lack for toughness. But this idea that, well, motivation comes and goes, so you can't rely on it. I think that yes, practically speaking, motivation does wax and wane, and that's totally natural. What I'm suggesting is that we can understand why it does that. And if we understand why we can diagnose our lack of motivation and make adjustments, you may think, well, John, why does the entire industry talk about motivation in these terms? Well, because there is no capitalistic incentive to solve your lack of energy and motivation, because in a context of widespread misalignment, a context of widespread lack of energy and motivation, energy and motivation become commodities.
Speaker 1 (00:11:03) - They become what they sell you. They sell you energy, they sell you energy drinks. They sell you pre workouts, they sell you vitamins, they sell you supplements. They sell you all the things you're supposedly missing. And they have to convince you that you are missing them. So if all of a sudden everybody felt adequately motivated to do the things they wanted to do, all the people who are selling motivation would have nothing to sell. And what does it look like to sell motivation? I think it comes in dozens of forms. I think a lot of times when people are selling workout programs, what they're really selling is motivation, because the cognitive bias of the consumer is that when they're buying the program, they think they're buying the motivation. This is something we've all fallen into. I've done it many times. A lot of times we will spend money as a way of trying to motivate ourselves. Spending money to motivate yourself is just the same as spending a bunch of energy to motivate yourself. It's not always this like super damaging form of self harm in every form, but is it good for you to waste your money trying to buy something that you already have, setting yourself up for failure and deepening the cycle that's going to keep you stuck? It's definitely not good for you and for me it qualifies as self harm.
Speaker 1 (00:12:11) - So everybody has the answers, right? Oh, it's just about discipline. You just got to you just got to want it bad enough. Basically when the stuff that they're selling you doesn't work, it's always your fault. And it deepens the cycle of you're a piece of shit and they're awesome. They live up on this mountaintop, and you need to keep listening to them and worshipping them and trying to grab it, the scraps falling from their table so that you can maybe someday be good enough. And this may sound harsh, but this absolutely is happening in fitness culture, right? It's like that one Kardashian, who owns a makeup company that made like $1 billion influencer culture, has dominated what used to be advertising. Now, marketing doesn't really rely on advertising so much as personalities and influencers because instead of having, let's say, a sports star or a celebrity personify the product for the consumer, we just let influencers personify the products and then promote them, pay them to hawk whatever we want to sell. Why? Because they've connected organically with the audience in that relationship of I have the thing and you want the thing, so there's a vested interest.
Speaker 1 (00:13:16) - As long as influencers want to sell you things, they need to keep up an image that they have things that you want. And this doesn't mean that every influencer is some predatory thing, but there is this conflict of interest where if the influencer wants to keep selling you stuff, whether it's whether it's their consumable products or the consumables that they're selling for a third party brand and they're taking a commission, I don't think most people realize that they're doing it because this model is so baked into our culture, and it's not the only industry where it wants to sell us Band-Aids, but not the real solution. And it's not because it's necessarily like a big conspiracy, but they're making billions and billions of dollars on Band-Aids. So who needs to find a solution? There's so much money in the Band-Aids that there's never been a need to give people better, more long term solutions. And we have, as consumers become so accustomed to buying Band-Aids for all of our issues. So often, your use of caffeine and sugar and nicotine or whatever it is, whatever combination you use to push through, doing things that you don't want to do or things that you're scared to do, or things that you're afraid you're going to fail at, these, again, are just like the kinds of motivation that you can, quote unquote, buy from influencers or in other places in popular culture or in the fitness industry adding in caffeine, adding in sugar, adding in nicotine, any chemical.
Speaker 1 (00:14:37) - Again, these are mild forms of self harm. I'm not saying drinking a cup of coffee is self harm, but if you're drinking 1000g of caffeine and God knows what else a day in energy drinks and eating sweets, trying to get that synergistic effect between sugar and caffeine that fuels them up momentarily to do hard things. And for some people, yes, this is a chemical reaction that does. Give them a boost of serotonin or dopamine so that they can get something done. But also this is largely a learned response where we tell ourselves a story that, okay, now that I have sugar and caffeine, I have the motivation to do this. So let's quickly give some examples of the things that throttle us down in our motivation, and some of the things that can throttle us up when it comes to shoulds or obligations. Let me let me give you this example. Let's say that you go to the gym, and the one thing that you really like is the rower. For some reason it's hard, but you just like it.
Speaker 1 (00:15:32) - Yeah, sure, walking on the treadmill might be easier, but you just like it. It's fun. You can get into a rhythm. There's things you can listen to, like a podcast or whatever. Or maybe you've got a TV set up in your gym or garage or whatever, and you finally connect to an activity that allows you to do it regularly. Well, now let's say that they make a law that says everybody has to work out on the rower, and at first you're like, okay, it doesn't really matter. I was going to work out on the rower anyways. After a while it starts to eat at you that well. Now that I can't do anything else now, I'm more interested in it. Now that the stair climber is illegal, I find myself thinking about the stair climber. We want what we can't have, right? So as soon as something is restricted via authority or a cultural should or cultural obligation to do something or not to do something, we start to resist it.
Speaker 1 (00:16:22) - Because oftentimes we see this as an imposition on our on our ability to make our own decisions, which our brains interpret as lesser ability to move in whatever way profits us or benefits us the most. So now, slowly, by slowly but surely, your relationship to getting on the rower every day starts to become less and less intrinsically focused, and it's more and more focused on the exterior, the fact that it's being coerced. And once you start seeing that, you start seeing more all the things that you're not allowed to do. And it's so easy for these to become the focus of your attention. I gave an example to a client the other day that in my town, there's a law that you have to shovel snow off the sidewalks. It's public property, but if it's if it runs through your front yard, you got to take care of it. And I like shoveling snow. It's an amazing workout. Good Lord, it's fun. Like, I just like it. I like taking care of my space.
Speaker 1 (00:17:15) - I like people walking in front of my house knowing that, like, I made sure to clean off that sidewalk so that it's safer and easier to walk on so the things look nicer. Things get pretty dreary in the winter. If I start fixating on the fact that there's a law and I'm like, oh geez, I got to get the the sidewalks shoveled, even though I got stuff to do. Like, damn it, I don't want to get in trouble. I don't want to get a ticket from the city. I don't think that they really enforce it. But still, I started to notice that after our first big snowfall, I was starting to get stressed out because of this thing I had to do. And then I remembered I was like, I don't need to think about the city ordinance at all. I do not need any sort of motivation, exterior motivation to do this. That's irrelevant. I'm going to do it because I want to do it. And as I'm doing it, I'm going to be focusing on the fact that it's satisfying.
Speaker 1 (00:18:00) - It's a fun workout, and I'm making my walkways and the public walkways safer, which as somebody who likes to walk a lot, that's one of the worst things about wintertime in the North is that a lot of our a lot of our public spaces become unusable. And it's a real shame. So that's an example of something that I want to do, getting swallowed up by a should, by an obligation because of the role of authority and me starting to buck at it, starting to resist it because I feel it's a thing I have to do rather than something that I want to do. Whereas if I change my focus and forget about the obligation because it's irrelevant, I can maintain my focus on the fact that I actually desire doing this. And that way when I think about it, it's like, oh, I want to do this sidewalk, let's go do the sidewalk before we do this other work. Let's just knock it out real quick when that's the way you're relating to going to the gym or going for a walk, when that's the way you're relating to cooking some meal prep on a Sunday or cooking any meal.
Speaker 1 (00:18:59) - There's a lot of people just really don't like cooking. It's it gets in their head. It's it can be a little overwhelming. So if you find yourself not wanting to do things because you should do them or you have to do them, then you want to sit back and connect to the place where you actually genuinely desire to do the thing. Notice everything that's trying to complicate that, and over time, start to push those things to the periphery. As you focus more and more on your innate desire to do things, next, we have fear of failure. Here's another example I was working out a ton throughout 2019, 2020, 2021. I reached all my weight goals in 2020. So at the end of 2020 and all through 2021, I was basically just like lifting a lot, trying to put on as much muscle as I could. And I had succeeded at that majorly. And I was really pushing constantly, pushing harder and harder. I was working really hard, and one of the reasons that I stopped working out so hard and I did, I basically took all of 2022 off.
Speaker 1 (00:19:58) - It's been a bit better. This year. But still, I'd like to do more than I'm currently doing. And part of it is getting out of this mentality that I found myself in. When you're lifting weights, if you want to gain muscle, if you want to gain strength, you need to engage in what's called progressive overload. So over time, it doesn't have to happen session to session, but over time you need to be lifting more weight or lifting the same weight for more reps. Practically speaking, you need to be lifting more and more weight over time, and that's the only thing that's going to consistently signal to your body that, hey, we need to grow muscle cells. And I got so fixated on making those progressions that I would start to be, like, genuinely afraid going into the gym. Like, I don't know if I don't know if I'm going to beat last time. I don't know if I'm going to get 11 reps on X, Y, or Z thing at this weight.
Speaker 1 (00:20:43) - And it's like it became this kind of an all or nothing thing, like where it's like, I like lifting weights. I push myself hard in the gym, right? I don't I'm not the type of person who has to worry really about am I going to get results? Because genetically, people who tend to tend to gain weight easily also tend to build muscle a bit easier. It's definitely the case for me. I'm a bit intense and competitive with myself and stuff like that. I don't need to be told to try hard, and yet I would be so worked up going into these workouts like having anxiety about success or failure when that was completely irrelevant, I started to develop a fear of failure that was sapping my enjoyment of the activity, and eventually one of the one of the things that just kept eroding at my desire to go to the gym had a couple of bad experiences at the gym. I just got tired of some of the personalities. There's an altercation where this guy was being a huge dick and like, verbally assaulted an older woman, like a 70 year old lady, because she got on the free motion machine and he had claimed it as his even though he wasn't there using it.
Speaker 1 (00:21:50) - He's super setting things from one part of the gym to the other, and I'm just like, I'm over it like that. That pushed me over the edge and I just I was going through a lot at the time. This was December of 2021, and if you've seen any of my TikToks recently where I talked about how things started to really go haywire for me at the end of 2021, this was the last straw with the gym. So if I hadn't been in such an adversarial relationship with myself and my working out, if I hadn't let it become something where I was so afraid of failing that I stressed myself out of just doing the thing, I would continue. I would have continued to work out. I would continue to make progress, and I'd be stronger and fitter today than I actually am. So in that sense, that fear of failure contributed to some burnout, which the fear of failure is whether people realize it or not. Usually an ingredient in burnout, because we can't really get burned out unless we're doing things that we feel like we have to do, even though we're not connected to the desire, there's usually shame involved, and there's usually a fear that we're not going to accomplish something.
Speaker 1 (00:22:54) - And that constant fear that constantly living on the edge is a big part of the reason why burnout happens. I think burnout really is where the fear of failure, the shame and the sense of obligation, and then the shoulds where they all just conspire all at once and then bam, you just you completely stop doing something. So that's what happened with me at the gym was burnout. I was also experiencing shame I was having dealing with some body dysmorphia and just being really upset at myself because I gained like ten, £15 more than I wanted to do. Yeah, maybe that's a good way of putting it, is that burnout is what happens when you're really getting you're really getting it from all three angles all at once. If you realize that, okay, I'm not going to the gym, I'm repeatedly making an intention to do X, Y, or Z. It doesn't matter what it is. We could be talking about anything and I notice that I'm not doing it okay. The first place I'd ask you to look is shame.
Speaker 1 (00:23:44) - Why can you not go to the gym? Well, I don't want to be seen in the gym. Okay? Why don't you want to be seen in the gym? Because I just because I'm overweight. Okay? Why can't you be seen as being overweight in the gym? I don't know, I just feels like, oh, fat people aren't allowed here. I'm not allowed to be overweight here. Okay, you write that down and you realize, okay, this is the shameful thought that's keeping me out of the gym. Fat people are not allowed in the gym. And you just sit with that thought, right? You don't try to fix it. You don't try to. You're not arguing a court case against it. You just sit with it and you accept the feelings that are coming up. You breathe and eventually you see that. Hold on. And this is the trick I tell clients all the time. Ask yourself if somebody said, okay, now you're president of the world, and we're establishing rules for all different kinds of things today, we're going to make rules that the whole world has to follow about gyms.
Speaker 1 (00:24:39) - And one of your advisors says, here's a rule I think would be really great. Fat people aren't allowed in the gym, and it was your job to say yay or nay to that rule. What would you say? You'd say what? No. That's stupid. How could.
Speaker 2 (00:24:51) - People get fit if they if they're not allowed to come into the gym in whatever shape they're in.
Speaker 1 (00:24:55) - And all of a sudden it breaks this thing in your mind and you see how silly it is. Because you're looking at it from a logical point of view. Would I implement this belief today? And oftentimes just by asking that, it breaks, right? Trying to extricate it is really hard because it's been there for a long time. It's embedded, it's slippery. But if you ask yourself, would I install it today if I had the choice, seeing that you wouldn't and understanding why will help you pry it loose. So of course, fat people are allowed to be in the gym. Of course, overweight people can be in any public space, especially public spaces, that they need to be in to get better.
Speaker 1 (00:25:32) - And plus all the people at the gym is everybody. They're fit, know and even the people who are fit. How many of them started at the gym not so fit a good portion of them, right? The majority of people who go to the gym weren't always in the best of shape. That's why they started going to the gym. And so you start to realize like, wow, this is just self-hatred. This is just me trying to stay small and stay cooped up in my apartment or my house so that nobody can hurt me. But the only person who's really hurting me here is me. And it's this shameful voice in my head trying to keep me hidden so that my my dark secret can't get out. And then you may still be uncomfortable, but you go to the gym the next time, and every time that shame comes up, it says, oh, you need to be small. Crawl into a little ball so you can't be seen. Just go, man, this is the gym.
Speaker 1 (00:26:18) - It's like telling me I can't take a broken car into the mechanic. That's silly, that's silly. So when we confront our fear of failure, when we realize that, hey, I'm telling myself I can't do the thing because I might fail. Which is basically saying, you can't experiment so you can't learn, you can't grow. You're literally saying, I am not allowed to improve my life in any way, because I guarantee you any way that you're going to significantly improve your life. It's going to require some free play, some experimentation, some learning, some. Why did I fail at that? Okay, let's try this. Failure is the point. You have to be able to fail. If you're not free to fail, you're not free. End of story. And if you're not free to express your desires in your actions, you're not free. End of story. And if you don't have permission to go to the places and do the things you want to do and to be seen, then you're not free.
Speaker 1 (00:27:09) - The way we open up the throttle of motivation so that any one activity can be part of that easy flow of motivation is by identifying, okay, if I'm dealing with shame, I have a permission issue. If I'm dealing with a fear of failure, I have some question about my ability that's getting in my way. And if I have a should or an obligation, that's just like sapping the joy and making something just feel like a giant drag. I'm connecting to some authority, some societal should, some expectation, rather than my own genuine desire in connection to this thing. And you can reevaluate these things. This is where journaling, talking to a friend, talking to your counselor therapist, hiring a coach like me to help you work through these things, you can see a remarkable shift in your motivation. You can let it open up so you can experience more of a flow of the energy and motivation that already exists inside of you. This idea that people don't have motivation bullshit. It's complete and utter bullshit.
Speaker 1 (00:28:08) - You know how I know? Because every human being starts off as a kid. And what do kids do? Do they lack motivation? No, they are motivation. They're running around trying things. They live in a state of pure permission, pure desire and pure ability. And if they can't do something, they just keep doing it until they learn, right? They maybe start off not even be able to walk. They can't even crawl. How did they learn to crawl? They just keep trying to do it. And then one day they can do it. And then they keep trying to get on their feet. And one day they can. And then they keep trying to walk and fall down. And one day they can walk. And then they try to run. They fall down. But one day they can run. Their total freedom and permission to fail is why they grow so rapidly. And sure, the brain is set up to do this right, but part of the reason that children grow rapidly and adults do not.
Speaker 1 (00:28:54) - It's not just the power of the developing brain. It's how much permission, how much failure are you allowed to experience with it not being a big deal with nothing riding on it? And even though your brain might be 25, 35, 45, 85 years old, our brains do change. They can change all the way up until the end. At any age they remain shifting all plastic. They are not fixed. These things can shift and we can, by re-evaluating our relationship to desire, our ability and permission, we can allow ourselves access to the stores of motivation that we have. Because you are motivated, you're a human being. You are the byproduct of 4 billion years of evolution. Every single generation succeeded for you to get here. Every single one of your ancestors had to win, had to survive when many other people did. Not just untold billions or trillions or quadrillions of genetic lines got snuffed out because life is hard. And those who can't adapt don't survive. Those who can't get up and run.
Speaker 1 (00:30:03) - Those who can't get stuff done. They don't survive. You are the byproduct of doers. Sure, our minds do have a desire to conserve energy at times. We want to spend our energy on things where we think there's going to be a return by our nature. At our baseline, we tend to see value in a lot of different kinds of movement, a lot of different kinds of doing, being active. And if we've lost that, it's not that we need to go find it because it didn't one day leave the house and not come back. You don't lose it. You lose access to it. It simply got buried underneath something, and you need to dig it out. And any time you spend wandering around the streets calling your dog's name like, no, Sparky is not lost. Sparky's buried under a bunch of boxes in the basement, and the more time you spend looking for Sparky outside the house, the longer Sparky is going to remain buried and disconnected from you. And so it's the kindest thing you can possibly do for yourself to stop looking for motivation on the internet, to stop looking for motivation on social media, and to start noticing where it's getting choked off inside of you, and learning how to kindly and peacefully and lovingly let it loose.
Speaker 1 (00:31:10) - This is a big part of coaching either one of my coaching programs, my one on one program, or my weight loss Freedom Academy. If you've got major problems with motivation, you're in good company. It's one of the most common things that that people deal with when they come to me, second only to emotional eating. And it's not either or. It's usually both for most people. And I find that how we regain our motivation is the other side of the coin of how we let go of emotional eating, because we're either shutting down things we want to do, or we're compelling actions that we don't want to do. Either way, it's something inhibiting our freedom, shutting down what we are and gassing up some kind of survival mechanism. So if you are an emotional eater, if you do suffer from compulsions, finding a healthier balance, creating a healthier flow and open flow for your motivation is going to really prepare you to let go of emotional eating or whatever compulsion you're dealing with. And the same thing.
Speaker 1 (00:32:06) - If you were to deal with emotional eating, it would prepare you to let go of the things inhibiting your motivation. I mean, imagine if you had plenty of motivation and no real desire to emotionally eat. How hard would it be to lose weight? What would it happen? Sure it would. Sure it would. And that's why, if it's important to you to lose weight or to change your life in any significant way, in any way, that requires regaining motivation, regaining access to your motivation, I should say, and letting go of any sort of compulsive behavior that's limiting your enjoyment of life and actively harming you, then you owe it to yourself to take it seriously. Get the help you deserve, because there's nothing in your life that's going to benefit you more than getting this seen to then getting the healing that you deserve. And if you're thinking that, oh, I don't have time to do this, I don't have the bandwidth to do this. I don't have the money to do this because of all my responsibilities or the people that I'm caring for.
Speaker 1 (00:33:05) - All the things that need me. Ask yourself, which version of you is going to be more help to your coworkers, your business, your family, your friends, the version of you that took some time and got this handled, or the version of you that just let it continue to drag at you day in, day out, making every step way harder than it needs to be. This is why making the investment, taking the time, making yourself a priority is never actually an imposition to your finances, your your responsibilities, the people you care for. It is ultimately an investment that is going to pay off many times over. So no matter what form it comes in, invest in yourself and don't wait till the new year. Do it now. Whatever you're going to do. If you've been thinking about reaching out, learning about coaching, do that. You can find my email in the show notes below. John at Oaks weight loss Joe at Oaks weight loss. Com but if you have some other plan that's been on your mind that you're like, I'm going to do that, I'm going to do that.
Speaker 1 (00:34:04) - Don't wait, don't wait. Start right now. And if you can't do it, list the reasons why you can't do it and try to figure out, okay, all of these reasons which ones are the biggest. Start with the top 2 or 3 and say okay, is this a should? Is this shame or is this a fear of failure? And then work through it accordingly? All right, I will wrap it up there. Please do consider subscribing to the Easy Way Out newsletter blog thing. I don't know what to call it Substack. It's run through a website called Substack. If you got value out of this, I'd love it if you could leave me a review, share the podcast with a friend, share it on social media, and if you're interested in coaching and you'd like to learn more, I'd love to talk to you about it. You can email me John at Oaks Weight loss.com. Take care and we'll talk to you again next week.