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Let’s talk motivation… I hate motivational quotes…Well that’s not really a completely true statement.

What I mean is I hate hearing them from people who simply linger in a pool motivation but never actually swim.

Know what I mean?

The guy who can recite the most motivational quotes in the world about business or performance yet he never applies the lessons contained in these little gems.

if you are at least not working to apply the lesson contained therein you lack authenticity.

Creating your vision without the execution on that vision is hallucination (Steve Adams came up with this)… basically you’re crazy.

You must always drive for the hoop so to speak. Talking about it is cheap.

Something I noticed early on in my own life and later as I began to coach and mentor others is the way people actually frame their motivation sets them up for failure.

Inevitably they don’t achieve what they set out to do and ask: What’s wrong with me?  Why am I unable to motivate myself to do the things I really want to do?

Here’s a notion on motivation: It’s not your fault if you are unable to motivate yourself.  Motivation is an elusive concept, because it actually cannot work in the long run.

What is motivation?

First, let’s define motivation.  Here are three definitions I found on the interwebs:

1. Providing a reason to act in a certain way.
2. The reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way.
3. Motivation is defined as the process that initiates, guides and maintains goal-oriented behaviors. Motivation is what causes us to act, whether it is getting a glass of water to reduce thirst or reading a book to gain knowledge.

Here’s the hard candy about motivation and how it relates to accomplishing anything you set out to do.

The fact is people act in a particular manner relative to their own beliefs and not as the result of being presented a reason to act.

Reasons are not the driver behind “the process that initiates, guides and maintains goal-oriented behaviors”, this only happens in alignment with your beliefs.

Motivation doesn’t cause us to act but rather our beliefs are responsible for our behaviors.

To be very clear here, you will never be motivated by some ingenious quote or by another person for that matter regardless of the reward or punishment.

If you want to do something it must first be in alignment with your beliefs. This is the only way an initial motivation will extend beyond the first 24 hours when something seemed like a good idea.

I could give you countless examples of people who tell me they want to get into shape and yet it does not align with their beliefs and therefore they never accomplish anything.

In order to crush your goals you must align your beliefs and be motivated by those beliefs for long term success.  

Beliefs that are holding you back might be an internal dialogue such as  I’m not good enough, I’m inadequate, I’m not capable, and I’m not competent.

Here’s where you do the work to change those beliefs and find the motivation that support your beliefs such as I am good enough and I am competent and so on.

Finally, I want you to consider the competition.  Most of us are very competitive and it can either be a destructive force or highly beneficial.

My experience is in situations where I have achieved success the only competition I worried about was myself.

I do not compete with others ever, they are not relevant. The only thing I must do everyday is try to improve on what it is I set out to do.

I can measure that success by logging my improvement along the way.  Doesn’t matter if it is in the gym or in business, you must compete with yourself alone and have some yardstick by which to gauge your performance.  

By and large when I look back overtime, even when there were periods which I felt as though there were no changes, over the long term the improvements that I thought were so incremental were actually quite drastic.

Align your beliefs and your purpose with your motivation to improve and nothing will stop you.

Stand Apart

Todd