The unexpected secret ingredient to your motivation at work
5:30 am. Your alarm clock goes off. You try to get up early to exercise. You turn around: “The horror! I’m anything but rested … I have to sleep!” You reschedule the alarm in 45 minutes and slip into the arms of Morpheus. No motivation! The result? You are disappointed, frustrated, and you start believing that you suck!
You’ve managed to do it two to three times lately, but, my God, how painful it was! You are not a morning person! Yet the goal makes sense, is realistic, and attractive to you. In short, it has everything to please you. So why does it get stuck? Why is it so hard to implement?
And you could replace getting up early with so many other topics: how to motivate yourself at work in COVID times? Working remotely? With a demanding boss? When you’re depressed?
What if there was a way to achieve the result by avoiding those annoying sides?
You’ve read forty-five articles on tips and tricks to motivate yourself. You dream of fluidity, of well-being. You dream of being in the flow while achieving what is essential to you. You dream of having the will to do what matters to you.
You’ve probably already thought about giving meaning to what you want to achieve. You have set a goal and articulated it in steps. You already have the reward in mind. You take regular breaks and know how to be kind to yourself. So why do you feel so stuck? All the ingredients seem to be there!
The truth is that there is a crucial ingredient missing, which you don’t hear about and which I wish they had taught me in school. Of course, it will have its limits when faced with our major blockages requiring heavier artillery, but it will be a precious ally for most of the situations you meet.
The traps for your motivation
Motivation is an impulse, an emotion that supports your action. It’s great, but it’s not constant for all sorts of reasons. Things usually get tough when everything inside you screams, “No! I can’t take it anymore! I can’t take it! I’ll never make it” or “it can wait until tomorrow.”
This is the critical moment when your mind reaches out to you with an alternative to your initial desire and plan. And, of course, a variety of feelings goes along with it: total despair at the idea of moving. Low energy and depressed feelings in the background. Or even better: contained anger at having to go through this. The menu will depend on each person and the context, of course.
In these moments, two paths appear:
- The one I will call escape: you either go back to sleep instead of getting up, drink a coffee instead of calling that grumpy client, or join Netflix and the couch instead of the gym.
- The one I’ll call obsession: you freeze on those emotions and that unhelpful speech, and you turn it over and over. Sometimes you even end up in total “fusion” with it and go from “it sucks that I can’t take that step” to “I’m a complete failure.”
In both cases, the result is the same: you have not been able to find the motivation to achieve what matters to you.
High achievers’ secret to staying motivated at work
What if there was a third way? What if, faced with this exact situation, you could “get over it”? Beware, the secret ingredient is not the ability to ignore your feelings and sweep everything under the rug. There is plenty of research on the effects of repressed emotions on your health.
No, the invitation here is more to consider “being with” these emotions, in observation, in welcoming them, and not in repression or escape. In other words, to learn to cross these turbulent zones with ease and constancy.
Thus, the ingredient missing from your entire motivation strategy is often your ability to tolerate discomfort. Better yet, it’s about finding “comfort in discomfort.” The key is to get past the good reasons for not doing anything and doing it anyway!
“The missing ingredient in your entire motivation strategy is often your ability to tolerate discomfort.”
As we will see next week, you can develop this skill. For my part, I surprisingly learned it on a yoga mat many years ago. I have been maintaining it like a muscle ever since, and it still works wonders every day of my life.
In a nutshell
So even when everything is aligned (meaning, steps, rewards), motivation is not taken for granted.
Often, you are missing a key ingredient in the difficult moments on your way to your goal. You lack the techniques to negotiate those pivotal moments filled with suspicious messages and disturbing emotions: to do or.. not to do!
Your ability to tolerate discomfort becomes your secret weapon! Quickly said? We’ll go deeper into the subject next week and see how to develop it. Not very sexy? Could be. Nevertheless, this ability to self-motivate is one of the critical elements that distinguish those who achieve more than others, according to Professor Fischbach in an article in the HBR.
“Effective self-motivation is one of the main things that distinguishes high-achieving professionals from everyone else.” — Prof. Fishbach, HBR.
The first step will be to become more aware of what is going on inside you in those moments. Then, once again, it will be a matter of activating the observer consciousness (see the five secrets cheat sheet).
I leave you with these thoughts and questions. How do you feel when you are not motivated? What are your tendencies? And how do you manage them?
I’m looking forward to reading you and going deeper into the subject with you!
Want to learn more? Get “The Five Secrets to Success & Fulfillment at Work”! Click here!
This post was originally published in French on the blog www.theworklab.org.
