If you’ve ever wondered why you “just can’t get motivated”…you’re asking the wrong question.

In this episode, I’m telling you exactly why motivation disappears, why it’s NOT your fault, and why waiting to “feel ready” is the very thing keeping you stuck.

If you think something’s wrong with you because you lack motivation…you need to hear this.

A lack of motivation isn’t a problem. This is.

Get my FREE weightloss videos (The Secrets to How I Lost 100lbs):

www.nobsfreecourse.com

Welcome back, everybody. Today we're going to talk about motivation. And I'll tell

you right now, if you've been waiting for motivation to just magically show up on

its unicorn so that you can finally lose weight, that is one of the main reasons

why you ain't losing weight. A lot of people think that motivation is supposed to

come first, like you're supposed to wake up one day and feel all excited and ready,

and you're finally going to lose you weight. And then That's the day you start. No,

that just hasn't been the way motivation has ever worked. For me,

for any of my clients, and it's just not how motivation works psychologically. So

here's what you've got to know. Motivation doesn't show up before you do something.

Motivation shows up after you do something. I'll say that again. Motivation shows up

after you do something. It is a response. Motivation is your brain's way of

rewarding you for taking some action when you fucking didn't want to. So if you're

sitting around waiting to feel motivated before you join no BS and lose your weight

for the last damn time, all you're doing is waiting for something that can't happen

until you get your ass doing something. Motivation is not going to come tap you on

the shoulder while you're scared, overwhelmed, tired, and upset. Your brain does not

work that way. If anything, your brain is trying to protect you, especially if

you've tried to lose weight a thousand times like me. You have been burned. You

have been disappointed by past diets. And you have quit when they weren't teaching

you the shit you really needed to know. And then every

time. So back when I was losing weight, motivation was the last fucking thing I

felt. I was scared to death on day one. I was embarrassed as hell to even try

again. I didn't want nobody to even know what I was doing. I didn't trust myself

to make it to 10 o 'clock in the morning. I had this constant fear every single

day that if I tried again and I failed again, I would just prove that I really

couldn't lose weight. So, no, I didn't feel motivated at all on day one.

And expecting to feel motivated was setting me up to fail before I even started

trying to lose weight. So what actually helped me was doing some small things. And

I am talking the tiniest of things that didn't freak me the fuck out to get them

done. Things I could do even when I was scared or tired or convinced that nothing

would ever work for me. Like back in my early days, it was things like when we

ordered a large -ass pizza, my husband and I used to split it right down the

middle. Well, guess what? I ate one less slice that I normally did.

Instead of eating a half of pizza, I ate half a pizza minus one. I remember when

I started switching to drinking half sweet tea, half water, half sweet. And I

thought that was a big fucking deal. And it was for me. I was just telling

somebody the other day, like, you know a Gen Xer. Gen Xers, we must have been

fucking dehydrated and near death through the 80s and 90s. I don't ever remember

water being important, much less we weren't carrying around no damn Stanleys. So I

remember when I first started adding water, it was like a big deal. And I remember

the day that I decided to get my ass off the couch and I was going to start

walking every day for 15 minutes, whether I wanted to or not. I remember the first

time I added fruit to dinner. because I thought, you know what, maybe if I add

fruit to dinner, I won't just run straight to the ice cream. Now, in the moment,

none of those things felt big, they didn't feel life -changing. And I remember

sitting there thinking that none of them were going to work and none of them were

good enough. But you know what else? I knew that they were doable.

That was about all I could handle in that moment, that I would risk quitting if I

didn't start smaller. And I also knew that if I would do those things,

that that was epically better than what the fuck I was doing every day, which was

jack shit nothing. And surprisingly,

it wasn't that it wasn't good enough. It was better than enough. Because When I

started doing those little things, all of a sudden, some motivation started showing

up. All of that fear started getting turned down just a little bit.

So my motivation, honey, did not show up the day I started.

It showed up a few weeks after I started because I gave myself a fighting chance

to let motivation happen. So what I really want to explain about motivation for you

and why it's so hard for you because there's more to this than you're just scared

or you've been failing all this time and that's why you aren't motivated.

I want you to understand we all have parts of ourselves, these little inner voices.

If you listen to one of my past episodes, I went through all nine of them. And

these little voices, they pop up when you try to change anything in your life, even

the smallest of things. And if these voices, if they don't feel safe, if you're not

talking to them and reminding them that this is okay and here's why and what you're

going to do for yourself and having those kind of conversations, the second they

sense that something's different or risky, they're going to shut down motivation

quickly because they think they are protecting you. So I want to talk about three

of them. These are the ones I think are some of the most popular ones. We're going

to talk about the perfectionists, the chaotic, and the underachiever. These are the

ones where motivation can feel particularly hard to show up until you've been doing

things. So let's start with our perfectionist. She wants you to do everything

perfectly the first time and every time. She ain't got no shits to give for slow

and steady. She ain't got any interest in tiny steps. She wants a gold star,

a check box. She wants a crown on her head and she wants that shit right now. And

if she thinks you can't do it right, her solution is, well, don't even try. We

might as well not disappoint ourselves. We might as well not bother if we can't do

it right. So, of course, motivation ain't going to show up in her world. She's

already telling you that you're going to mess up before you even start. She's

bracing for disappointment, trying to protect you from it. She is for sure not

interested in any kind of motivation because to her feeling motivated, puts your ass

in harm's way. But what she really needs is those tiny steps.

She needs you to tell her that it is okay if we take it small and everything

doesn't go exactly the way she thinks it should. That you are going to,

the second she beats you up, you are going to reassure her that we are okay. She

needs to know somebody else gives a shit about us.

Somebody else is trying to show us there's a better way. And she needs you to quit

turning weight loss into the big, dramatic event of your life. She needs you to

just calmly say, you know what? Every time you think it's not good enough,

I promise you, it's better than what we're doing. It's okay. Because she's going to

relax when things are doable. She's going to calm down when you stop only thinking

that everything is a test and everything has to be done right. And once she calms

down, guess what?

Motivation has a chance to enter the room. Now we got our chaotic one. This is the

part of you that loves to be overwhelmed. She gets overwhelmed by everything going

on in your life. She looks at your day and she sees piles of tasks. She sees

dishes, laundry work, kids, aging parents, errands, the dog hair on the floor, cat

box that's not changed, and she assigns equal importance to all of it. In her mind,

everything has to be handled, and it should all be handled right now. And she don't

even know where to start because she's given everything equal importance. So when you

try to add weight loss on top, she's freaking out. Not because you don't care about

you health or you ain't got enough whys and all that for shit.

and make all the other things she's got on her list somehow not able to be done.

She needs you to also to stop giving every single thing on your list the same

importance. She needs you to say, your health and the cat box do not hold equal

weight. Whether or not you fold your towels and whether or not you complete your

food plan for the week does not hold equal importance. And she needs you to look

at everything in your life and understand why does it feel so urgent.

She desperately needs new perspective. She needs you to break things down into small

steps. She needs to know what deserves attention and what actually can wait and

nothing bad will happen if you do put it off. And when you give her something

small, like starting with dropping that extra piece of pizza or adding fruit to your

dinner, half sweet, half unsweet, she calms down because she doesn't feel like all

the things she thinks are important are now being threatened. And that's when

motivation, again, can show up. And then we got our underachiever. And she is the

most understood one. She does not think you're, she doesn't think you're incapable.

She is not trying to sabotage you. She really is just trying to protect you from

big time disappointment. She remembers every diet that didn't work,

and you felt horrible about it. She remembers every time you went in excited,

thinking something would work, and then you came out on the other side, feeling

hopeless and defeated. She remembers the promises you've made to yourself and you

didn't keep them. She's so scared to hope. She's so scared of failing again.

So she tries to keep you safe by keeping your expectations low or non -existent?

She says things like, don't get your hopes up, don't try too hard, this probably

ain't going to work anyway. She needs reassurance. She needs you to say it's okay.

I'm going to keep you safe. I'm not going to do big sweeping changes. We actually

are going to do some of the smaller ones. We're going to build some consistency in

our life, not intensity right now. She needs proof, like little tiny glimpses of

proof that you're not dragging her back into some miserable ass diet kicking and

screaming. She needs you to set some realistic goals for what she can handle right

now so that she can slowly build trust again. And she needs you to tell her that

you will not only talk to her like an asshole if something doesn't work out,

that you will tell her that you are proud of her for trying and that we will

figure this out because when she feels safe, she's going to let you try things

again. And when she lets you try motivation now has a gateway to enter.

So if you think about it, how are you supposed to feel motivated with all that

shit going on? You got a perfectionist expecting perfection. The chaotic one,

overwhelmed by everything you think you should be doing. An underachiever who's

terrified and just being hurt again. They are all working so hard to keep you safe.

But in doing that, they make it impossible for motivation to show up first. And

this is why those tiny actions matter so much, because tiny actions don't scare

them. Tiny actions don't set off all the alarms. Maybe it tripwires a few little

ones, but not the big ones. Tiny actions don't trigger so much your perfectionism.

They don't overwhelm the chaotic one. They don't freak out the overachiever. They're

small enough that your inner voices can say something,

but also the logical voice inside of you that's listening to these podcasts that I'm

putting out, that's listening to me every week, that logical one can talk to her

and help her. And once those voices feel a chance that they can breathe,

motivation can start showing up because we've made room for it. This is why

motivation feels so hard. You're expecting it to show up before you take action,

and it's just not how it works. Your brain needs a reason to get motivated. It

needs proof that it's okay to be motivated, that it's safe and that disappointment

isn't just waiting on the other side of you doing things. And if you can reassure

yourself and give yourself proof with some tiny easy things,

you will find quickly that motivation can show up. So remind yourself, it's not that

you're not motivated to start. You're scared. You're overwhelmed. You have been burned

by diets that didn't teach you this shit. And now your brain is reacting to all of

that. So there's nothing wrong with you. You don't need to fix your motivation. You

need to give yourself something simple enough that the fear -based part of you

doesn't freak out. So the next time you think I'm just not motivated, I want you

to remember this. you don't need to feel motivated to start. You need to start to

get motivated. And you start with something so small that those parts of you, the

perfectionist, the chaotic one, the underachiever,

you want to start so small that they can handle it. That's how I lost my weight.

I wasn't motivated, but I had doable steps that created motivation for me. And

that's how you're going to lose your weight too, one tiny thing at a time. All

right. I'll talk to you next week.