Ep #244: No Motivation Required

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, episode 244, No Motivation Required.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there, welcome to another episode of the podcast. We are having a snow day here, which doesn’t happen very often. I live in Kansas and we are having a snow day and the teenagers love it, the dogs are mixed, which just goes to show you that even snow is a neutral circumstance.

If you have heard me talk about neutral circumstances before, the little white Wheatland Terrier, Zoe, she thinks snow is amazing and she would like to be out in the snow and run around in the snow. And she just streaks around the backyard and then she comes in with snowballs matted into her fur, and she thinks it’s the best thing ever. And she would really just rather stay outside.

And then there is my dog Sadie, who Sadie was my dog with Hugo. We got her together. And Sadie is, she’s kind of a mix of a lot of things. I had her doggie DNA done and she’s a German Shepherd, Rottweiler, Labrador, part Pitbull, and then 25% mixed, something like that. Sadie would just rather take a pass on the snow. She will go out long enough to go to the bathroom and come back in, but she has very different thoughts and feelings about the circumstance of the snow, so there’s that.

Okay, before we get into no motivation required, I want to make sure that you know that once a month I do a free public coaching call called Ask Krista Anything. I’ve been doing it actually since 2020 when COVID started. I decided people needed a lot more help and support, and so I started doing this free monthly call and I just kept doing it because I love doing it and people love coming and maybe you don’t know about it and maybe you want to come. So if that’s you, go to coachingwithkrista.com/askkrista and you can sign up to be notified.

If you’re already on my email list, you should be getting notifications anyway. So this is for those of you who are missing out and you would really like to either come to an Ask Krista Anything call or at least get the recording sent to your inbox, coachingwithkrista.com/askkrista. So I just want you to know that that is there.

Okay, let’s talk about motivation and why it is absolutely 100% not required. Right now, if you’re listening to this episode as it comes out, we are at the end of January. And we know what starts to happen at the end of January. We know that people come into the new year having decided upon resolutions, things they want to change, things they’re excited about doing, this year is going to be different and they start off great.

And then about the end of January or maybe even into mid-February, they stop feeling so motivated. And because they aren’t feeling motivated, they stop doing what is necessary to create something they said they wanted. Not only have I experienced this personally, but it also shows up in coaching requests all the time in Mom Goes On. People will say things like, “I was feeling so motivated, but I don’t feel that way anymore. How do I feel motivated again? I can’t do this thing unless I feel motivated, so how do I increase my motivation?”

Or maybe it’s, I always start things but I don’t finish them because I run out of motivation. So how do I make myself a more motivated person? And I get it because I’ve also done it. But what I’ve learned is that asking ourselves to increase motivation isn’t nearly as useful as what I want to propose to you today. It isn’t nearly as useful because yes, thoughts cause feelings. Motivation is a feeling which means it’s caused by a thought. So yes, there is something we could think that if we believed, would have us feeling motivated.

But sometimes we don’t believe the thought that we need to believe in order to feel motivated. Sometimes we know what that thought is. I’m so excited. I really want this. This will be amazing. Maybe those thoughts are easy to believe at the beginning before something gets difficult or monotonous, but then later they become less believable and they stop working. And so then it becomes really hard to believe the thought that we would need to believe, to feel more motivated and so we don’t.

And then we think motivation is necessary so we quit. And we tell ourselves we can’t do the thing until we feel motivated. So what I want to offer is, what if we stopped trying to solve for a lack of motivation? What if we decided, motivation just isn’t required at all? Right now in my life I am working on building more muscle and I don’t always feel motivated to go and do what is required of me to build more muscle. But also I don’t expect myself to feel motivated to want to do it anymore.

In fact, I want you to think about all the things you do and you just do them, but you don’t expect yourself to feel motivated to do them. You get gas when you need gas in your car, you brush your teeth, when you have an eye exam you go to the doctor, you file your taxes. There are a lot of things that you do that motivation isn’t fueling you to do. You do them because you’re committed to doing them. You do them because you want what’s on the other side of having done them. But you don’t tell yourself you need to feel motivated to do those things, you just go do them.

So I bet there’s also a list of things, maybe it’s New Year’s resolutions, maybe it’s not, but I bet there’s a list of things that you’re telling yourself that you need to feel motivated before you can do. And so how much easier would it get to do the thing if you stopped insisting on feeling motivated before you did it and you just started doing it because you’re committed because you want what’s on the other side of having done it. And you don’t expect yourself to feel motivated anymore.

So whatever that thing is that’s coming up in your mind, as I mention this to you, I want you to ask yourself this question and be honest, be honest. Why are you committed to doing it, really, truly why? Why are you committed to doing that thing? Would you benefit from continuing to sell yourself on your own commitment? Meaning, would it help you to cultivate your own sense of commitment?

So right now I’m listening to podcast episodes about why muscle matters and the health benefits of having more muscle. I’m intentionally selling myself on my goal of having more muscle. And listen, I used to own two fitness centers in a past life, in my mid-20s, early 30s. I have studied kinesiology. I know a lot about muscle and still I am going to the effort to sell myself on it because I really want to believe it in my bones.

I want to reinforce my own decision to commit to something by selling myself on my commitment to it, by selling myself on the result of it, by wanting it even more. So that I’m taking action to create it without feeling motivated, without needing motivation. And also if you’re doing something that you don’t feel committed to doing, when you really get honest with yourself about that. Why do you want to keep doing something that you actually don’t feel committed to doing? Because you could just stop, you could just give yourself permission to not do it anymore.

Just because at some point you committed to something, I don’t think that’s a very good reason to keep doing it, if it’s not really what you want. If it no longer feels aligned with what you value, if it no longer feels like it fits in the vision that you have for your life, if it’s just no longer relevant.

And sometimes where I see this happening with widows is that it’s something we decided to do when our person was alive. It’s something we decided to do because we were going to do it as a couple. And we liked our reasons for deciding to do it then, but now not so much. Now we’re kind of holding ourselves hostage to a commitment that we made before, when we’re really not even that interested in it anymore. We just don’t know how to let ourselves off the hook and be kind to ourselves.

So I want to offer that that’s also an option. Are you committed to doing it? Would you benefit from continuing to sell yourself on your own commitment? And if you’re not committed, you could just stop and that would be okay too. I think that’s actually an honorable choice in many circumstances. But if there’s something you’re committed to doing and you really want to do it, you might not want to do the action that it requires of you but you want what’s on the other side of having done it.

I don’t want to go downstairs and lift weights, maybe at some point I will, but I don’t right now. And I don’t expect that of myself. I don’t expect myself to feel motivated. We do the thing because we want it done, no motivation required. That’s what I have for you this week. Alright, I love you, you’ve got this. Take care and I’ll see you next time, bye bye.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence. Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve. Go to coachingwithkrista.com and click Work With Me for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.