EP 72: You Don't need more Willpower in your life to hit Your Goals

Episode 72 of The Hormone Helper Podcast:
You Don't need more Willpower in your life to hit You Goals
Summary
In this episode, Coach Andrew explores the differences between motivation and willpower. He emphasizes the importance of having a strong why and real motivation, rather than relying on temporary motivation or willpower. Andrew explains that willpower alone is not enough to achieve long-term goals and that motivation is necessary for consistent action. He shares the story of a client who successfully lost  more than 100 lbs of weight by staying motivated and taking action. Andrew concludes by asking listeners to share topics they would like to learn more about in future episodes and send topics to:  info@fit4allstudio.com

Takeaways
Motivation is the reason or reasons behind a person's actions or behaviours.
Having a strong why and real motivation is essential for achieving long-term goals.
Willpower alone is not enough to sustain consistent action.
Sustainable motivation and willpower require surrendering to the process and embodying both at a high level of desire.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction: Motivation vs Willpower
06:02 Motivation: The Importance of Having a Strong Why
09:21 Real Motivation: The Reason Behind Actions
14:52 The Role of Willpower in Achieving Goals
17:17 Sustainable Motivation and Willpower

Transcript

0:40

Thanks for tuning back into the podcast today, my people. In today's episode, I want to do a well-needed deep dive into the topic of motivation versus the very interesting willpower. So you may or may not know this, but there are huge differences between what motivation is and how you use motivation as opposed to what willpower is and what you're actually going to use your willpower for. It was literally a few days ago that I was walking down the street with Lorna for... one of our daily strolls, probably one of three, and we were discussing how great it feels to attract and to work with clients who tend to set great boundaries, who take the time to wanna learn food at a deeper level, and who are about long-term life implementation instead of the kind of all or nothing style that most people tend to put into their lives. So I mentioned to her that every single time that I speak to someone on a call, they always have such a high level. of willpower and that they always take full responsibility for what they need to change and they are willing to be open through the process of making changes with things like their food and things like their hormones. So this is when she said to me that willpower by itself doesn't work. Now I had to take a kind of a hard couple of seconds to process what she said and in those moments And there's a lot of moments like this between me and her I always try to place my past life experiences into those things to see what something like that actually means and Here's what I came up with. I think that anyone can have temporary willpower Okay, quote-unquote temporary willpower to do anything once like for a single attempt or a single try and that anyone can also Have what I call pressured willpower where you feel pressed to make a decision because you feel uncomfortable with where you are. So take weight loss for example. Most people will attempt to lose weight on their own willingly at least once or twice and when they do so they have enough willpower to say to themselves, hey, I've gained enough weight and now it's time for me to feel better again. It's kind of what the willpower is. Now this willpower exists and it continues to work with conditions. The condition being, one, I'm gonna keep up with this weight loss as long as I keep seeing weight lost, which means I gotta keep seeing the scale go down. And two, I will keep making changes with food as long as it makes me continue to feel better. But in that situation, the moment they see a stall in their weight loss, they stop what they're doing and they feel defeated almost immediately. And for the second, if their diet or whatever they're doing will lose weight, makes them feel like crap, then they're also going to stop because they feel that it's not sustainable. Now, this single attempt wipes out a person's temporary willpower because it's really not routed in anything but the want of short term results. Now, in the case of pressured willpower, using the same person with a weight issue, if you keep leaving the weight issue and not addressing it, it gets to the point where medically, you can't ignore it anymore. So while I don't tend to work with these people, I've seen it where someone can go to the doctor, they might get scared as hell when they see a huge weight number, maybe the doctor's like, hey, go weigh yourself, and then they get a huge spike in pressured willpower when the doctor tells them, hey, you need to lose the weight or else you might not make it, that kind of type of deal. Now, pressured willpower is also temporary, but the conditions of this willpower are actually different. The condition of pressure willpower is one, the fear has to still be there, and two, the pressure to change also still has to be there. Meaning the moment someone loses enough weight to be at a danger zone health-wise, and the doctor stops checking up on them, they stop their weight journey and they never really finish it through. So both of these willpowers can be used in other cases in life too. So after all, I see people use temporary willpower when it comes to starting businesses, where most people wanna work for themselves until it becomes hard, which is why most businesses typically fail within the first two years. It's also used from a temporary perspective in saving money, where you might keep stashing money and seeing it grow until you have a big purchase or wanna buy something that might be out of reach, and then you give up the saving because it actually stops you from feeling good in the moment. So in terms of pressured willpower, life literally runs on this. Most people do things out of pressure. Think about this. We work off of due dates and workplace timelines so we can get things done at work. We have friends who haven't gotten engaged yet and the pressure's on because the little ultimatums and shows and things made by their partner to finally tell them, hey, put a damn ring on. We even find pressure from our parents or from family members to perform well or do best in sports and in life. So while these types of willpower aren't all bad because it makes some action, they also aren't made to be successful on their own. So what is willpower actually? Well, it's really a person's ability to control their own actions in order to pursue some type of long-term goal. So other names for this could be like self-control, discipline or resolve. Either way, a steady willpower is really about channeling your actions in a positive way so you can get what you want out of your own damn life. So now back to that comment that Lorna made about willpower not working. I agree that willpower by itself is useless because we actually need motivation behind our actions to do something consistently. enough to see the changes that we want in our lives. And this is where the motivations come into play. Now I'm sure most coaches are gonna tell you not to rely on motivation. At least I hope they do because I tell people that literally all the time. I tell people this because from what I see when working with clients, most people don't understand how to motivate themselves properly. Most motivation for people kinda looks like this. It's just a general desire or willingness to do something. So for most of the things we do in life, I'm sure at a very surface level, we desire many things. I mean, I desire Mercedes Benz GT class, right? It's like freaking $600,000. I desire a boat where I can take my friends and family on. I desire a brand new home with like 16 bedrooms. I desire wearing glasses without needing a prescription because I kind of like the way they look on my face. But let's be real for a second. I don't actually want or need any of these things. Like if you told me that I had to give up 50 hours a week just to cram and save for 600K to buy a useless car, I wouldn't. I know I don't need it. Truthfully, I don't actually want it. And although I have a surface level desire, my desire of this car is really for a 30 second photo shoot and maybe a 10 second test drive. So being motivated for something in this way is mostly rooted in a result. or a temporary feeling of feeling good like the one you get from buying something new. It's really all about the hit of dopamine, that feel good hormone that brings us like 10 seconds of pleasure instead of long-term fulfillment and satisfaction. So I call this way of motivation kind of the shot glass approach, where you go from goal to goal, setting an even higher bar when you miss the last one. So you can overcome that looming fear of failure that we sometimes feel when maybe we didn't quite hit the mark, maybe we missed it just shy. So when people are using this type of motivation regularly, they get stuck in stages like the planning stage where all we do is book stuff into our calendar, we create the same game plan and rewrite it over and over again, but we never really actually act on anything. that we need to take action on in our life. Normally in this stage, it's followed by that pressured willpower as due dates come up. So you just kind of shoot your shots, so to speak, to make changes in your life. You may also find yourself kind of stuck in the stage of struggled action, where every day you keep making random decisions on your business, or you're doing random diets and workouts, trying and praying that this is gonna work for you this time. Now your motivation in this stage, it's gonna be in random spurts, just like your willpower, because you're gonna be all in on the next diet or the next business idea, and that's gonna drop what's kind of working for you so you can search for something else. Now, regardless of what stage you might find yourself in, this is not the way to be motivated, because it never works for us long-term. So what does real motivation look like then? Well, to me, real motivation looks like the reason or reasons that a person has for acting or behaving in a real way. This is what you call your motive. It's behind something. I ask myself all the time before I start something new or before I decide to choose another action in my life, questions like, why am I doing this? Why do I want this? Or why is this important to me? I also ask all of my clients starting up. Why are you doing what you're doing? And what do you envision success to look like for you? These questions are important because they build reasons and an actual substance for the decisions that we make and the actions that we choose to take. It gives us far more than kind of that little shot glass we get when we are at a surface level of what we want to turn into a real desire. So in using this type of motivation, holy cow, medication. No, just motivation. And using this type of motivation, which we're gonna call motivation in this example, it can look like this. A recent client of ours, Ben, he came to me and he wanted to lose weight. He was at his heaviest that he'd ever been, and that weights 332 pounds. Now when I asked him his why, he said this, I have two kids already and a third one on the way, and I wanna be able to walk my baby daughter down the aisle. That is real. It's deep, it's meaningful, it's true desire with love and with hope. You can't push a why like this off. It's not made from fear. It's made with determination, a willpower like determination. So motivation like this stays and it stays because it's made from emotions. So when our client Ben had tried to lose the weight on his own, like four or five times, but he didn't quit because he knew that there was a solution for results that he wanted out there, he decided that he was going to make plans. And instead of creating plans over and over again, if they didn't produce the result he wanted, that didn't matter because he didn't stress. He kept doing the process of elimination. He kept taking out things that he knew. He tried to change his food. He tried to change his workouts. He tried different sleep routines. He saw the doctor to make sure his thyroid was okay. He did all of the steps. Now, when it got a point to where he tried what he knew, he realized that Hey, look, there's things about food and metabolism that I don't know. So he made the decision to work with us in this case, to learn what was missing. By not giving up, he took the hits, he learned what didn't work for him, and he started on the path towards losing weight sustainable. You know what's crazy is along the way with this motivation and why, he inspired several other people to start their weight loss journey too. He joined a local gym to train with our program because it was close to him. And he became a motivator for the few other guys that were there because they got to watch him show up. They get to watch him put in the work. He changed physically, he changed mentally, and emotionally literally right before their eyes. So over the span of just one year, Ben went to lose more than 120 pounds. It was like 122. I'm so damn proud of him, not just because of the weight he lost, but because of the internal change that I got to see every single call that we had together. It's really what lit me up and what lights me up as a coach. Now I share this story about Ben because people are motivated by how they feel, not what they know, which is why willpower doesn't work. You could know all the tools, so to speak. Maybe you're aware of every diet like keto, intermittent fasting, you've learned about food and cooking classes, you've done all of that. Maybe you've... done something like take social media courses and you've watched and listened to hundreds of episodes of podcasts to run your business or how to attract leads. Maybe you're doing things like you've got a family member or friend who knows finances and they give you the PDF of how to invest. The tools alone never changed anything for you and they won't change anything for you. People in this world today, They have access to every bit of knowledge and can look up how to do a million different things on places like YouTube, Google, you name it. You most likely have tons of books on shelves that are on topics that you're trying to implement in your life that you've probably never even read. You don't need another tool. You also don't need more information. From a willpower perspective, you don't need more willpower. Because your will alone is not gonna change the result of what you want in your life. After all, you can't will yourself to lose 100 pounds in a year. Or you can't will yourself to find your person or the love of your life. You have to take actions on what you want daily. You have to make decisions on it weekly. You have to make decisions on it monthly to not sabotage your success. You also don't need. a shot glass of motivation to temporarily prop up what you're doing, because that whole like grass is greener on the other side type of thing, or I'm going to be happy when I hit this goal. It's not going to make you feel fulfilled enough to stick with what you're doing and have it as a sustainable part of your life. That's not motivation, that's not willpower. So here's what I want you to consider and to think about coming out of this podcast. To start, what is your damn why? Ask yourself all the time, all the why questions about whatever you can for whatever your current desire is. Ask yourself, why am I doing this? Why is this important to me? Why does this matter to me? Why now, like all the whys? Get clear on this step. Don't just do surface level whys. And I tell all my clients to go at least seven levels deep of whys. This involves you asking why to maybe the answer you just wrote down for the first why. Like for example, if a client says they wanna lose weight and their why is like to be healthier. I ask, well, why do you wanna be healthier? Then they go a deeper level and they say for my family. And then I say second level like. why for your family and not for yourself. Asking deeper levels of why forces you to look inwards to determine if the desire is something you actually want. It puts feelings and emotions, or as my good friend and mentor put it to me, it puts energy in motion to move you towards your goal. Now at this point, you then ask yourself this, what control do I have over the actions needed to make this actually appear in my life? Write a list down of all of the actions or things involved in making this desire happen. Then cross out the ones you can't control and get to work on the actions you can control. So for example, if you want to lose weight and ditch decades of dieting, you can control where you put your free time, what content you listen to learn skills, as well as you can control how you show up for yourself and your relationships. Here's what you can't control. You can't control how long it takes for you to lose weight. You can't control how much weight you're gonna lose each week. And you also can't control what changes you might have to make from a food perspective in order to see sustainable results long-term. That's all there is to it. Now, truthfully, for this motivation and willpower to work, you're gonna need to surrender to the process. But in the act of surrendering, we actually completely embody both motivation and willpower at once. Now I teach this to my clients and they can do it. So I know that you can do this too. This is what sustainable motivation and willpower actually looks like. So I wanted to share this because it's so important. So many of us are looking at just willpower alone or just motivation alone. And that doesn't cut it. You need both, you need them both at a high level of desire, at a high level of want, and you need to be super, super clear, which is why I wanted to share it with you guys. I appreciate your time for the podcast. And just before you head out, I kind of wanted to ask you, I have an ask, I'm extremely interested in what you guys and gals want to continue to hear from this podcast. And as this year, I've kind of opened up the episodes to mindset and emotional awareness, along with things like hormones and metabolism. I'd like to ask that if you have a topic in health that you want to learn about, or you want to hear more on, would you share it with me? You can send me an email, my email's in the show notes, or you can drop it to info at fitforallstudio.com, and that's the number four, and just write a little on what topics you wanna learn more about, because this helps me kinda continue to make great content on what you guys want info on. So I really appreciate this, I appreciate you listening to the podcast, and I will see you on the next episode soon, FitFam. Take care, bye.