The Power of Summoning Motivation
Sep 09, 2024
Books Referenced
The End of Overeating - David Kessler
Unlimited Power - Tony Robbins
We all want to feel more motivation.
And I get it.
It is that magical feeling that can help us take action even when we really don’t want to.
Need to work out? Motivation will help you do it.
Need to eat better? Motivation is there!
Need to have that difficult conversation? Motivation will help you take the next step.
But the fact is, motivation is a feeling, and feelings are transient.
We are not supposed to feel motivation all the time.
This is why we need systems and discipline.
These allow us to take action even when we lack motivation.
I have already written about discipline (and will never stop teaching how to create it).
However, motivation IS a powerful emotion. When we feel it, we can take massive action and do great things.
This article is about summoning motivation.
Learn this skill and you will never have a reason to say, “I need more motivation.”
It will be just as accessible to you as if you were opening a can of Pepsi…
Or a can of whoop-ass.
Let’s roll.
What is Motivation
Before we can talk about summoning motivation, we first have to understand what it is and where it comes from.
Motivation is a feeling.
It is an emotion or a drive that moves us to take action.
The feeling occurs when we are out of homeostasis.
When we are in homeostasis, our body is content. We are safe. We are satiated. We are not injured.
When we are out of homeostasis, like being hungry, or the feeling of fatigue when we exercise, our body initiates a hormonal and neurological response to help us move back into a homeostatic state.
When we are hungry, for example, we have elevated levels of ghrelin hormone which signals we need to eat.
If we don’t eat, our dopamine kicks in to remind us how awesome it feels to eat foot.
If we still don’t eat, our serotonin drops to create a larger imbalance in our neurotransmitters to motivate us to eat even more.
(You can read more about this process in the book The End of Overeating, by David Kessler)
Meanwhile, our stress response is also triggered, and our body begins to release cortisol. This adds to the feeling of stress which drives us to take action to find food.
All of this chemical business going on in the body creates the sensation of motivation.
That is a very brief summary about where motivation comes from, but let’s keep it simple.
At the end of the day, there are two main drivers of motivation:
Pain and pleasure.
Pain can come in the form of literal pain, like an injury. But it can also come in the form of stress or anxiety.
And pleasure is the current or future state of satisfaction, of feeling good, which we seek.
Our bodies like to avoid pain.
Any feeling of pain is a reminder to our brains that we might die if we don’t take action.
Hunger is a pain that could lead to starvation.
Injury is a pain that could lead to physical trauma and death.
Feeling judged by others could lead to being ostracized, and therefore at risk of losing the protection of our social group (our herd).
Avoidance of pain is a huge motivator.
Also, attaining pleasure is also a motivator.
If we see something that could raise our social status, we feel motivated to get it.
If we recognize an opportunity to eat satisfying food, we are motivated to eat.
If we see an attractive person of the opposite sex, we are motivated to connect and potentially spread our genes.
Given that we are not always in pain, and not always seeking pleasure, motivation is not an ever-present feeling.
This is how it is supposed to be. If you felt motivated all the time, your body would always be pumped and ready for action and you would never rest.
This would destroy you.
But again, generating motivation when we feel slow is a powerful skill.
So how do we conjure motivation?
With a system.
How to Summon Motivation
If we want to summon motivation on command, we need a system.
Tony Robbins describes a system we can use in his book Unlimited Power.
Tony’s method relies on leveraging your mind and changing your physical state. I really like his method and draw heavily from his system.
Here is a truth we have to acknowledge:
Our feelings and our body are connected.
When we feel a certain way, our body language will follow.
When we are happy, we stand tall, and when we are sad, we tend to hunch over and keep our head low.
We tend to think that there is a unidirectional relationship here.
We feel happy, therefore we walk taller. We feel sad, therefore we slouch.
Feelings lead to movement changes.
But the opposite is also true.
When we move in certain ways, we tend to feel a corelated emotion.
If we walk taller, we feel more confident. If we frown, we trigger a sad feeling.
Try this experiment: regardless of how you feel in this moment, try standing (or sitting) tall, look up to the ceiling, and smile.
Then hold that position.
Notice what happens.
Try feeling sad in this moment.
I bet you can’t.
Now flip it.
Hunch over. Frown. Position yourself in a sad state.
Now try to feel happy.
I bet you can’t.
Crazy, right?
The same thing happens when we move vs remain still.
Do you feel better or worse after exercise? Happier or sadder?
Movement matters.
It gets the blood flowing. It stimulates the stress response (mildly) to prep our body for even more action.
Movement also has an impact on our dopamine and serotonin. Exercise creates a bio-balanced state which makes us feel more at ease and more focused.
So, what did we learn here?
The first step in summoning motivation comes from controlling our physical state.
If you want to summon motivation, stand tall with your shoulders back.
Summoning Pain
Now that we have controlled our physical state, let’s talk about pain.
We hate pain. Typically, we humans try to avoid pain at all costs.
And we have natural mechanisms to help us avoid it.
When we feel pain, or think we might experience pain (this is fear), our brains trigger a stress response. This stress response gives us the feeling of anxiety and moves us to take action.
But the perception of pain does not just give us the will to act.
It also gives us a reason to quit.
We tend to avoid taking action because we perceive it will be painful.
Sticking to a diet is painful (hunger).
Sticking to a workout routine is tough (time commitments make us feel we are missing out).
Difficult conversations are risky (social judgment and ostracization).
So here we have two challenges:
- What do we do to overcome the perceived fear of taking action?
- What happens when no pain is present, and therefore no motivation is present?
The answer to both of these is to imagine future pain.
And, the future pain we must imagine has to be greater than the perceived pain of taking action.
You may have heard the saying, “you won’t take action until the pain of not changing is greater than the pain of changing.”
Easy to say, right?
How do we do this?
We use the power of our imagination.
Imagination is a powerful tool.
In the personal development and high-performance space, we call it visualization.
Visualization is intentional and strategic imagination.
The cool thing is, visualized experiences fire up the same parts of the brain as a real experience. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between a real and imagined experience.
Because of this, we can leverage visualization for summoning pain.
Essentially, we imagine future pain and allow our brain to do the rest.
Here is my visualization exercise for summoning pain. Feel free to write this, copy this, or whatever you need to keep it handy. It works.
Step 1: What do you want to do?
- What thing are you not doing which you know you should be doing?
- Consider the outcome you believe will come from taking action
Step 2: Visualize the painful future
- What will happen if you don’t take action?
- How will your life be worse off?
- What will the negative repercussions be?
- How would you feel?
Step 3: Embody your negative future self
- Allow yourself to feel all the feelings of that worse-off future version of you.
- Steep in it for a moment.
When you summon pain with the steps below, you should start to feel motivated to avoid that future version of yourself.
Go deep. Imagine the worst case scenarios. The bigger the perceived future pain, the better for your motivation.
While this exercise alone may be enough, remember that there is another side of the equation: pleasure.
Our brains get motivated to seek pleasure and satisfaction. So this is a system we can leverage, too.
Summoning Pleasure
Just like the body has a stress system which triggers feelings of pain and moves us to act, the brain has a pleasure center which motivates us to find pleasurable things. Dopamine is a key ingredient here.
The latest craze is for influencers to talk about dopamine and dopamine detoxing. This is a rant and rabbit hole I won’t go down right now, but suffice to say our dopaminergic system is a powerful motivational system.
We can use the same visualization process we use for negative imagination for positive imagination, as well:
Step 1: Visualize what you want to do
- What thing are you not doing which you know you should be doing?
- Consider the outcome you believe will come from taking action
Step 2: Visualize the positive future
- What will happen if you do take action?
- How will your life be better off?
- What will the positive repercussions be?
- How would you feel?
Step 3: Embody your positive future self
- Allow yourself to feel all the feelings of that better-off future version of you.
- Steep in it for a moment.
It is important that you allow yourself to actually visualize and feel the emotions of that future version of you. Positive and negative. We WANT that contrast.
And go deep here, as well. Imagine the best case scenario. Imagine having the best outcomes, most positive gains, and epic results.
When you are done with exercise, you should feel energized to take action and seek the positive change you desire.
And voila, another step is complete.
So far we have talked about physical state, visualized negative consequences, and visualized positive consequences.
But we are not done yet. This is one more way to summon motivation.
Summoning Indignation
I have already written about this, and you can read more here.
But let’s give a summary.
Indignation is the emotion of unfairness.
For our purposes, it is the feeling you get when someone acts like you can’t do something when you believe you can.
It is the response to an accusation that misaligns with your self-image.
It is the feeling of “how dare you!”
Sometimes we have people in our lives who verbally underestimate us.
They might say things like, “you can’t do that, who are you to do that?”
We can leverage the feeling of indignation to take action.
We essentially say, “oh yeah?! Watch me!”
If you don’t have a person challenging you and triggering indignation, you can recognize the verbal s#*t talker within yourself.
Yes, you already have an internal s#*t talker. We call it your “inner critic.” It is also known as your:
- Fear voice
- Inner bi**h
- Gremlins
- The judge
It is that voice of irrational and negative self-talk that is meant to keep you safe.
It makes internal comments like this:
- “Who are you do do that?”
- “Don’t do that, everyone will see.”
- “No it has to be perfect.”
- “It’s ok, you can do it later.”
Sometimes these voices seem rational. Most of the time they are inner fear emotions pretending to be our conscious. But these are lies.
There is also a positive side: your inner advocate. It is also known as your:
- Faith voice
- Inner boss
- Higher self
When you hear your inner critic chime in and share some BS about how you are not worthy or capable, allow your inner advocate to step in and feel indignant at the accusation, and motivate you to act.
The advocate can step in and say, “shut up, critic. Watch me crush this.”
Just as above, take time to be intentional here. Feel the emotions of your inner critic. Then step into the emotions of your inner advocate.
Motivation is an emotion, so step into your feelings!
The Wrap Up
Remember, motivation is a feeling that is supposed to be temporary.
Discipline is more effective that motivation for long-term success. However, if you want to summon motivation, you can do so by:
- Imagining the negative
- Imagining the positive
- Steeping in those emotions
- Changing your physical state
- Leveraging indignation
Go out and crush it, my friends. We need your skills, your energy, and your impact.
Thanks for reading.
Clark