059 – Motivation is Like Hygiene: 3 Key Ways to Replenish and Sustain Motivation

Released Monday, 11th June 2018

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059 – Motivation is Like Hygiene: 3 Key Ways to Replenish and Sustain Motivation

Monday, 11th June 2018

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Just because you showered on Monday doesn’t mean that you’ll still be shower-fresh on Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday, or Friday. Motivation and inspiration work the same way: you have to constantly nourish and replenish that motivation muscle, and sometimes it takes a little bit of building up that kinetic energy to overcome the inertia of standing still, but eventually you can chip away and press forward again with fire.

059 – Motivation is Like Hygiene: 3 Key Ways to Repenlish and Sustain Motivation

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Welcome to The Wealthy Healthy, the podcast and blog dedicated to inspiring better mental, physical, and financial health. I’m your host, Riki Newton, and before we get started, I want to thank anyone listening to this right now. Odds are you’re a regular listener or reader and you may have noticed we fell off the map for the last month. This is the first time in the show’s year-and-a-half run where we just didn’t put out any episodes for even two consecutive weeks let alone four.

There are a lot of reasons for this but at its core, this project only works for me and for everyone listening or reading if my heart as the primary content creator is really in it. I can’t turn up and clock in without my heart in it. That’s not fair to me, to you, or the messages we share with this podcast and blog.

The truth is simply that after a somewhat chaotic first half of the year, my motivation for a lot of things I am normally fired up about fell a little low, and we’re going to talk about getting out of that for the topic of this show. The reality was simply that over the last 6 weeks or so, my usual appetite for sitting down at the computer to write or sitting in front of a microphone were just not there. And I don’t say this to mean I was at all in a bad place, in fact I’ve had an amazing several weeks full of great experiences and connections and I have extremely little to complain about, if really anything at all. But my motivation to raise other people up and to be raised up was low.
Here’s the thing, do you ever look at someone who’s really crushing it and think to yourself, “Man, how do they do that? How do they have the motivation or the time or the energy or the inspiration to achieve everything they’re achieving?” Another thing I often hear or read from others is that they used to have motivation for something or in life generally and for some reason that’s no longer the case. The truth about motivation is that motivation is like hygiene. Just because you showered on Monday doesn’t mean that you’ll still be shower-fresh on Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday, or Friday. Motivation and inspiration work the same way: you have to constantly nourish and replenish that motivation muscle, and sometimes it takes a little bit of building up that kinetic energy to overcome the inertia of standing still, but eventually you can chip away and press forward again with fire.

There are plenty of ways to replenish and then sustain motivation, and different things will work for different types of people no doubt, but I wanted to highlight a few things that very often work for me, and that I think generally speaking will work for nearly everyone just by virtue of how human beings work. Obviously, what ultimately pushes a CEO through a difficult time in the business or what keeps a touring musician enthusiastic 200 days into a world tour might be different from what moves you and I, but again, I think these are near-universal ways to “bathe” your motivation muscles and overcome minor slumps in achievement energy. (As a side note: if you’re in a very significant slump, check out Episode 33 of this podcast or blog, which gives you four rules for turning your life around).

1. Surround Yourself With Motivated, Non-Toxic High Performers
It’s absurdly often said that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, but there’s a reason it’s said. There is certainly a degree of truth to it. As an example of this that everyone can see, one of the most common “rags to riches” stories in athletics is a kid who grew up in a bad neighborhood, got “in with the wrong crowd,” and found their way out by identifying new friends, coaches, or mentors who got them on a new track and focused their energy toward something productive. I see this type of proximity influence in myself, as I often become unproductive when I spend extended periods of time around other highly unproductive, negative, or whiny people. It can be very difficult to distance from or eliminate these people or groups from your life, but it can very quickly hold you back from realizing your potential.

One reason I am so specific with this rule in stating non-toxic high performers is that it’s not enough to just surround yourself with friends, colleagues, and mentors who are go-getters; you have to find people who will root for your success, and whose success you can easily root for. Fortunately achievement is not a zero-sum game: just because someone else achieves something doesn’t mean they’ve taken from some universal achievement fountain that you can no longer drink from too. It’s healthy to be competitive among your go-getter peers, but it can be horribly detrimental to find high-performing peers who do not root for your success and build you up. Surround yourself with motivated, non-toxic high performers so you are held socially accountable for your success and achievement in life, but the type of peer pressure that exists remains strictly of a healthy nature in both directions so that you and your “crew” can take over the world together.

2. When You Lack the Fire To Create Content or Produce Outcomes, Voraciously Consume Content of Those Who Inspire You
Many many high performers create a lot of content or are surrounded by content created about them. Whether it’s Tim Ferriss, Karlie Kloss, Whitney Wolfe Herd, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, your company’s CEO, whoever it is, identify someone who motivates and inspires you and begin going through their catalog, whether it’s podcasts they host, books they’ve written, books written about them, talks they’ve given, or interviews they’ve participated in, start filling your head with it.
Look, it’s totally okay to spend an hour here and there going down a YouTube cat video rabbit hole, but don’t do this for too long, and don’t do this exclusively. And when I say creating content, I mean it broadly: whether that’s literal content you enjoy creating like a blog, book, podcast, music, etc., or achievement in some other field such as simply going above and beyond the requirements of your job description at work, the typical byproduct of increased motivation is increased output of some sort, and I’m broadly referring to that as content. So when you’re not feeling the motivation to create content or produce outcomes, voraciously consume the content of those who inspire you. If a spark is lit from something they’ve done, follow it, even if you feel like you’re about to do something totally derivative.

Look at music as a clear example of why this is acceptable, especially as a starting point: Bob Dylan has released several dozen albums over the course of a several decade music career, and his legendary and influential status in Americana and folk music in general has a ripple effect in nearly anything created by anyone similar. In fact, many artists created careers out of what basically started off as creating a crappier version of what Bob Dylan did, before the artists made it their own. Nearly all songs across many genres of music are simple 3 and 4 chord progressions that the musicians learned by playing along to Bob Dylan songs. That doesn’t mean that everyone is derivative and ripping off of each other; legendary careers in music and elsewhere were manifested and created by individuals who were inspired by their heroes. You are allowed to do the same: voraciously consume productive content by your heroes and allow them to help light your spark.

3. Reflect Deliberately on the Cause for Your Temporary Decrease in Motivation
There are a ton of possible causes for why your motivation has decreased for a stretch of time. It’s completely normal for motivation to fluctuate not just day by day but even hour-by-hour: ever get into the office and feel ready to crush the day, and you put in a killer 3 and a half hours, leave for lunch, and come back at 1 pm with no mental or physical energy to continue that pace? And some days you slog to the end of the day and others you muster the energy back up somehow and from 2 pm onward you’re a titan again. This is all totally normal. A longer-term lapse, however — two, three, four plus weeks of decreased motivation — is more potentially detrimental to long term outcomes and achievements both in work and personal hobbies, projects, or other pursuits.

The worst thing you can do in this scenario is fail to muster even the motivation to reflect on why the lapse, instead opting to make easy excuses or to justify the decreased motivation somehow, by convincing yourself, “well I’m just not excited about work right now,” or “my girlfriend has been out of town so I’m just bummed and it’s made me lazy.” Really sit down and address what the source of the temporary slump might be. This might mean actually taking pen to paper or writing something on a word document around potential causes and potential solutions.

A recent example I saw in someone else was my good friend Kyle, who was the second interview guest on the podcast back in February of last year. He’s also the singer of our band and recently he asked us if we would be okay with taking two months or so off from the band. He explained that he wanted to allow himself the space and time to better understand how he would like to prioritize his life, between his freelance photography and videography work, his music, his relationship, his family life, and so on and so forth. Were each of those things still fulfilling to him? Was he treating some areas too seriously and others not enough? As a professional creative, did he want music to be part of or the focal point of his professional work, or did he simply want to enjoy music as part of his recreation and expression? These were all valid questions that he felt were either unanswered or required re-evaluation, almost like a software update — what made sense for last year might not make sense for this year, and it’s perfectly okay to take a step back and re-calibrate everything. For the record, Kyle did use that time to hone in on what was important to him and where he wanted to put each of those activities in his work and play, and he seems to me to have a renewed fire for how he plans to move forward as a professional storyteller and storytelling facilitator.

All right folks, I hope that was helpful. I’m personally excited and revitalized about creating more podcast and blog content for you all so thanks for sticking with us and stay tuned for what the back half of 2018 brings us. And as always I gotta mention it, we’d love to hear from you, whether you’re a regular listener or brand new, if you haven’t yet you can check out our blog and other content on thewealthyhealthy.com and follow us on instagram @thewealthyhealthy… if you have not yet done so please hit that subscribe button wherever you listen to podcasts so you never miss an upload. As always be good and be great and until the next time we talk… lata!!