Help! I’ve Lost My Motivation

Setting new goals for ourselves is exciting. In the first few weeks, we’re motivated, we have a new way of looking at things, and it's a whole new Disney ride. But as the road gets harder, life starts to get in the way, and old thought patterns creep back in…how can we make sure we don’t throw the towel in completely?

Although we're just a few weeks into January, I want us to use this opportunity to take a quick pulse check to see where we’re at with the goals and intentions we set at the start of the year. Most of us tend to face a dip in motivation around this time, which is a great chance to evaluate what’s working and what’s not.

Tune in to discover why having the right systems in place is your secret weapon when motivation wanes. Plus, we’ll learn why building agility and flexibility into your goals is the key to making 1% upgrades every single day!

References

Episode from Jan 1st: The Art of Pivoting: How an Agile Mindset Enhances Your Health Goals

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Audio Stamps 

00:32 - We find out why, when we set new goals, there is inevitably a dip in motivation that happens.

03:56 - Dr. Rentea shares a recent example of a “dip” period and how she came out of it.

07:50 - We discover why it’s crucial to have systems in place to support you during your “dip” periods.

10:44 - Dr. Rentea explains the importance of reevaluating your goals and how to apply this to the goals you set for this year.

16:15 - James Clear’s book Atomic Habits covers a lot of these concepts around effectively creating a system to help you find the key to making or breaking habits.

Quotes

“Motivation is fleeting. Motivation wears out. Motivation, by the end of the day, you don't have it anymore.” - Matthea Rentea MD 

“This dip is normal. This dip is expected. This dip is welcome.” - Matthea Rentea MD 

“Not every day is going to go perfectly to plan. But overall, my goal is to show myself commitment, show myself consistency, and follow through on what I say I'm going to do.” - Matthea Rentea MD 

“I feel 99 percent of the time I don't want to do any of the stuff that I'm doing and the only reason it gets done It's because I've created habits out of it.” - Matthea Rentea MD 

“No, I don't need to be overly motivated. I don't need to be overly excited. In fact, it's best when someone shows up with just a calm, stable energy and they're not overly into it or out of it.” - Matthea Rentea MD 

All of the information on this podcast is for general informational purposes only. Please talk to your physician and medical team about what is right for you. No medical advice is being on this podcast.

If you live in Indiana or Illinois and want to work with doctor Matthea Rentea, you can find out more on www.RenteaClinic.com

Transcript

0:28

Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I want to talk about something today that, a little check in, a little seeing where you at. This is a few weeks into January, and I'm wondering where you're at with these goals that we set a few weeks ago, or these intention, or sort of what we want to go toward. Did you do that in the beginning of January? Did you think about what your year wanted to look like? Where are you at now that it's a few weeks later? Now I know this feels like a quick check in, and you might be saying, Dr. Rantia, you literally You just asked us this a few weeks ago, why are you here asking again? Because I want to know if you took action on it. Because one of the statements that I think is just the most profound is that with action comes clarity. So when you started to take that action a few weeks ago, if you did and if not, don't worry, pause right here. Go back to the January 1st episode, we'll link it again in the blog post or the show notes, wherever you're looking, and you go through, did you really write out, kind of, what were your values, what were your whys, what are you trying to achieve? Okay, and if you started to take that weekly sort of looking at what worked, what didn't, and you, and you started to get toward what you wanted, if you started to do that, Likely something has happened by this point, and that's the reason I put this episode at this time. I like to call it the motivational dip. So what ends up happening, now this is a variable time course for people. And I'm going to just speak from experience with patients in my clinic. So the first month or two people are pretty darn excited. They are motivated, they have a new way of looking at things, they're doing visits with me, they're meeting with the dietician, there's videos to watch, there's just a lot going on and it's, it's a new Disney ride and it's amazing. And then what ends up happening is it's not so fun. The road gets a little hard. The first stumbling block pops up. Maybe they went on a family vacation and they either didn't lose weight or gained weight, or maybe they had their first time of eating something that wasn't on their plan and they are starting to, you know, those old thought patterns are coming back. Maybe the weight's not coming off as quickly as they had thought once they started medication. Many things are involved. Maybe the kid gets sick at home and suddenly two, three weeks the whole house is going through a GI bug and next thing you know, here they are. They've popped back at the visit and they tell me, I've just made no progress and they're just sort of in a hopeless zone. This dip is normal. This dip is expected. This dip is welcome. This is why I don't use as one of my sort of main tenants when I'm working with people that motivation's at the top of that list. Motivation is fleeting. Motivation wears out. Motivation, by the end of the day, you don't have it anymore. You're out of that willpower and motivation. That's why we need systems that work. And so the reason I bring this up is if you're at this place where you don't want to do this anymore, but you still like, you're wise, you still, if you actually looked back at that list, if you actually wrote it out, you still want those things, you still, yes, you still want that to be a reality, but you're not as energetically going after it. Let me put it that way, right? That, that sort of vibrant energy of that starts out the race. It's not there anymore. That's okay. So part of what needs to happen along this journey as you're marrying the journey, and you're not just focusing on the result, is that you need to figure out, okay, so what is actually realistic now? What can happen? What can I still do? Given whatever scenario I'm in, What is realistic? I'm going to give you my own little example here recently. It's a micro example, but it's still what I want you to think about. So, I have been, again, you know, I always record these a few weeks beforehand, and I know that you're thinking this is weird. You're like, you're telling me this in January, but you're in December recording this. You know, it takes a few weeks to, to go through the pipes as far as editing the podcast, getting the show notes written, things like that. Alright, so, In December, I've been doing with Ali Novitski she had this 31 days of fit and it's kind of leading into this other program that I'm doing with her this next year. I'm really excited to be working more closely with her because remember everyone, I shared with you my main goal. for 2024 has been not having my body physically hold me back. A lot of that for me is involving a lot more strength training. I gave you that example, hopefully some of you could relate to that, where I was like, I'm not even getting in the lake, because I know I can't get up that rickety ladder, like I just didn't have confidence in myself with that. So, I had participated here in December in this 31 Days of Fit, where it was 10 minutes of strength training every day. It was a really nice way for me to recommit to strength training. Really show myself consistency, learn a lot of things. Anyway, so I went into the month of December saying every day I'm going to do those 10 minutes. Now, about 9 out of 10 days I can make that happen and it's great. But every so often, and the example was yesterday. So it's 5 o'clock in the morning and my son screams out in his room and he's vomiting. So he got a GI bug and you know what, normally when do I walk? I get up at 5 15 at 6 o'clock. I do my walk and then after that I do the 10 minutes of strength training. Well, guess what? For the month of December on that day, that was yesterday, it didn't work out because in the middle of cleaning vomit out of a carpet and making sure that he's okay, you know how that is when a kid's sick. It's so sad. You've got to take care of them. And so it kind of scrambled up the whole thing. Then I had to figure out me and my husband, okay, who's, okay, I've got these visits and I, okay, I've got a 30 minute in here and you've got that meeting and okay, I can do this and you can do that. And guess what? The 10 minutes was not the priority. Now, could I have done it later in the day? Maybe, but you know what I learned? I don't like doing exercise later in the day. It, I've even tried like in the middle of the day to do a walk. It doesn't feel right at the moment. So that day it did not happen on that day. I did not do the 10 minute workout the next day, which is today that we're talking, I actually did both of the 10 minutes I did the day previously, and the next one, it was really nice during those workouts because she's always it's always a different body part every day or flexibility or something different. So it wasn't like, you know, you're kind of doubling up. But the point of the message is this, not every day is going to go perfectly to plan. But overall, my goal is to show myself commitment, show myself consistency, Follow through on what I say I'm gonna do, you know, I really want to build up my body over time. I know that that doesn't happen overnight. And so yes, it didn't matter that the other day, but today I did it and I sort of regroup. I really spoke a lot in that first episode for January about how your agility, your ability to flex with it, to see what's needed, to kind of change, by the way, everything had to change yesterday. I'm very regimented. If you guys don't know this about my work schedule, I have time blocks, I know when I'm doing what, I always prepare for the next day, all of this stuff I know, okay, the podcasts get done here, this gets done there, I know everything that's happening. Well, guess what? That afternoon had to be blocked. So I did my patients in the morning and then I couldn't do anything else. He was vomiting the whole morning. He needed help. Right? And so, all right, I had to flex with it. This is part of life. Have you maybe got hit with some challenges in the beginning of this year where you already feel off kilter? That is okay. It is okay to go through those dips where you're like, shoot, I just set all these goals and now I either haven't done it or I don't even feel like doing it anymore. I can't even tell you that I feel 99 percent of the time I don't want to do any of the stuff that I'm doing and the only reason it gets done It's because I've created habits out of it. So I'm not thinking about the fluid intake anymore I'm not even thinking about the morning workout. It's just happening. It's like I don't want to do and you know, what's funny? I told my I told myself this morning because I'm almost getting into vacation time as I'm recording this I said, you know what? I'm going to give myself a treat and I'm going to sleep in. And I even told my husband, like, don't get me up. Cause he normally, he's really helpful with helping support me with, he sets his alarm, even though he gets up a little bit later than me in the morning, he sets that darn alarm and he helps me out. And I was like, don't set the alarm. I'm going to set it later, like right before patient. I like set this whole thing up for myself. And wouldn't you know it at five o'clock, my eyes open because my body is used to doing this. At this point, I don't even have to think about it anymore. I didn't even want to do it today and my body was like, nope, you're going to get up and do it. The only reason that these things work is because it's been created as part of a system. I talk a lot about this book, Atomic Habits. If you haven't read it yet, Atomic Habits by James Clear, time for you to get on it because I'm going to preach it all year. And spoiler alert, I signed up for an Entree Leadership Conference. It's going to be at the end of April. And James Clear is going to be one of the and I cannot wait to hear him as a speaker because I just, I've always loved all of his information, but one of the things he talks about is that you fall to the level of your systems. You don't rise to the level of your goal. And, you know, every decision that you make, it's a little vote for who you want to be. So, the reason I am such a fan in this, in these dip periods, these times when you find yourself just at the bottom of the barrel, you find yourself so low metaphorically, these are the best times to see, do my systems support me? How can I be agile and flexible right now? These are the times that that type of thinking is called for. So, I do not care how you feel at this moment. The question is, do I have enough around me that's supporting me? Do I need to start to Get some meal delivery services. Again, nothing is affiliated here, but we really are a fan in this house of factor meals. And why? Because they've got veggies and meat and the, the, the protein to, to fiber to fat ratio. All of it works pretty great. Now, if you're a vegetarian again, which has been me up to this point, I typically would eat only half of some of the carb, like they'll have. You know, veggies and they'll be like more of like noodles or something like that in it. And so I'll do normally a lot less of that and I'll either add an egg or I'll add cottage cheese. Like I do modification of the meals, but my husband, for example, he'll literally just eat it as is. There's no changes that he needs to make. So I'm a fan of that. I'm a fan of if every so often I need to get the groceries delivered. I mean, literally, we live like two seconds away from a grocery store, but guess what? It's too much sometimes, the way things roll out. I'm a fan of always reevaluating, like as, you know, I thought, Oh, 10 minutes is going to be so easy. It has not. It's not with strength training. And so I'm evaluating, okay, maybe I actually, and this is going to be options going forward again. I don't want to. speak about everything in Allie's program because that's hers to talk about, but she has lots of options always within her program, which I love. So I'm thinking to myself, Hey, maybe I do a version where, three times a week I do something instead of every single day I'm playing with it. I'm letting it flex. Do I like it? Do I not? You get the opportunity to do that in every single area of your life. And I encourage you because how you're going to do one thing, you're going to do everything. If you start to really listen to yourself with. nutritionally what feels good for me and in my work life what feels good for me and romantically in relationships what works for me. You will start to find so many opportunities to better your experience in life. How we do one thing, we do everything. And so kind of coming back to this, if you are at a point, this is very intentionally, I'm putting this episode out a few weeks into January. If you're already, Not feeling like you're on the trajectory that you need. Can we right now reevaluate? So at this moment in time, here's the homework. Let's take, let's look back just to January 1st. Okay, let's just do a 3 4 week look back here. What has worked about this time? You have to start there, do not start with the negative. What has worked? This is called harvesting the wins. You've got to start here. What has worked? Force yourself to find something. Your win could be the fact that you're even willing to sit down and do this exercise. Your win could be that you've listened to these podcasts. Your win could be the fact that you're even willing to do this one more time. Think globally. The win could be you one time ate a veggie. Seriously, give yourself absolutely any single win that you can. So what has worked up to now? And then you get to think about the second part is what has not worked. And you get to say there, okay, I will give you an example. Let's just take the same example and run with it. Okay, what has not worked for me, if I look at this past month, it's that I thought that I could do an every single day goal. I always tell everybody, coaching clients and patients, I'm like, we never set a seven day goal. Because we know that there's a day in there that you're not gonna be able to be perfect, right? So my, my, you know, what has not worked, okay, expecting seven day a week or 31 days straight, Or you could say every single, you know, all seven days to do something. And then the third part is, what would you do differently? And part of that, again, I've already kind of gone through the troubleshooting of that. But part of that is for me, that I need to be able to flex with it a little bit. So I actually don't mind having this goal of every day. But to me, if I can't do a day or two, I'm just going to bring it together. We're going to have a true confession time. This is day 21. I'm recording this on the 21st of December. So it's day 21 of this 31 days with Allie. And this is actually the second time that I have not done the workout. Why? Because 8 days in, I was really tired on that Saturday, or whatever that Saturday was. Whatever the 8th was. I was really tired on that day, and I'm someone that, although I'm going to show up consistently and do all the things, if I'm really tired and exhausted and fatigued and I forget the scenario that led into it, I'm not going to force myself. But again, I, within the course of the next few days, made that up. And so I very quickly learned, I will stay within the bounds of all these movements, but some days will be bunched together. So there you go, three week period, two times I needed to flex with it. So what would I change? Allow myself to flex. So that is what I would say right now if you find yourself that you are a little bit in that despair. By the way, this despair can go for anything. Oh, I'm not hitting the protein goal. I'm not hitting the fiber goal. I, keep telling Dr. Ntia at every single visit that I'm going to do the strength training and I don't. Okay, got it. So what has worked? I even thought about it. I even thought about wanting to do this, you know, whatever it might look like. I joined a gym. I got a weight set. I, agreed to register for a program, whatever it might be. Okay, what has, what has not worked? I haven't fully followed through on it. Or I realized that the level I signed up for is too hard. I have been there. Just committing to things that were well beyond my level, but I didn't even know until getting into it. And so this is something that I'm wanting to help my patients with more going forward is to tell them look this is sort of this level is where I'd like you to start at because some people if you don't have a lot of fitness background and if you do this is like not a comment for you but a lot of people don't even understand how far back we need to start and I know this because I've gone through it personally where I literally needed, like, ankle strengthening exercises to start out. Like, we were at that level, right? So there's no shame in that. There's no shame in that at all. Okay, and then you're going to look at, what do I want to change? Okay, do I want to, get a refund on that program because it's not for me? Do I want to pivot? Do I want to decrease the, the size of the goal down? You know, again, I just come back to these 10 minutes, I'm thinking to myself, that's such a small goal. No, it's not. No, it's not. To hit play, to actually physically do the moves. I mean, just even finding the space to do it, to not make the excuses. I mean, it's incredible, right? So I want today to be that episode where you just Even though we're only a few weeks in, that you, you just take a quick pulse check, you see where you're at, and you look at what are the ways in which you are going to celebrate yourself. What are you going to look at things you can work on and what are you going to realistically do about it, that 1 percent upgrade. Again, if you haven't read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear, Literally, all these concepts come from there, the 1 percent upgrade, the kind of how to build out habits, how to make them, we spoke in January about how to make them really align with your values and beliefs, that you fall down to the level of the systems, not these lofty goals that you set. I always think about. Successful people. I love reading about them. I love thinking about it and everyone always thinks, let's just take Oprah for a second. Everyone thinks, well, it's because they have a chef and assistant and this and that. I don't really think so. I think that that they're figuring out some systems that can support them to keep navigating through all the things that they're doing. And so, yes, them having Some additional help, but it's it's it got built over time. They didn't just like parachute into that Usually you don't know those first few days when the bricks were getting laid down. What were they doing? That's the part of story that I love to hear. I'm really a fan of listening to the podcast how I built this When you listen to how companies got built, they don't they don't just end up with a big company. They're usually pivoting a lot They're they're they're thinking differently. They're listening. They're they're reacting Okay, I want you to think for yourself. We're always here to talk about our metabolic health, whatever that looks like for you. And I want you to think about, for me, what pivots are required right now. How can I be reflective and, is the word introspective, right? How can I do that, but yet not beat myself up, still have compassion and keep going. And no, I don't need to be overly motivated. I don't need to be overly excited. In fact, it's the best when someone shows up with just a calm, stable energy. And they're not overly into it or out of it. They're just sort of somewhere in the dirty middle, right? It's muddy in there. Like no one knows what's going on in that middle space, but you're in it and you're willing to stay in it and figure it out. All right, I'm gonna leave this here. I really want to ask you a big, big favor. If you are someone that is listening to this podcast, I know there are many of you and thank you for the support and you have not left a podcast review in the past. I really want to ask you a favor that wherever you're listening that you would leave that. It really helps. Us to let other people know that there is something out there that can potentially be helpful for them. Or if you have a friend that you think, they'd really love this podcast, maybe share this particular episode with them, or tag me online, Matia MD on everything, TikTok, Instagram, you name it. Tag me on it so I can see what your thoughts are, what's really resonating with you. Alright, I hope you have a great rest of the week and we'll talk soon.