5 Ways to Boost Your Motivation (The BraveHearted Woman’s Guide for Midlife Transformation)

Hey, my beautiful sister, my bravehearted friend, how are you today?

Listen, I wanna talk to you about this thing called motivation. Sometimes, let's be honest, we just lose it, and I wanna tell you that at our age, that becomes more and more potentially obvious in our life because let's face it, we just don't always have the energy that we had when we were in our thirties or forties. And it's true. Countless women will promise themselves every beginning of the new year these changes that they're gonna make in their lives, right? Time and time again, I say, I'm gonna do this, and I'm really serious this time. Only to find themselves back in the loop, that same stress cycle that says, Ooh, I lost steam. You start out well, but you find yourself after a short time quitting already, and then the guilt sets in, and you're thinking, I just don't know why I can't make myself do this. And you find yourself just with self-sabotaging behavior, and you wonder why.

You know, then the self-esteem goes down because studies do show that every year people make resolutions, but of those, only 16% will keep their resolutions. And if they're smart enough to make goals, only 8% will keep their goals, and they just quit. In fact, there is a national quit day or quit week. Maybe it's a month. There's a national quit month for people who make these goals and resolutions and then give up only one to six weeks at the most. Do people work on this new behavior? They just stop.

Then, studies also show that they don't pick up again until next year. We are too much in the last third of our beautiful life. We don't have a whole year to waste. We gotta get back on it. We gotta do it. And then, you know, people will blame their failure. Maybe you have, maybe I have. I blame my failure to fulfill my promise or my resolution on, well, I just didn't have time, you know, I didn't have the resources, or I lacked the ability to do some things. Maybe I was just a little bit overzealous, but really, sometimes in a word, we lose motivation. And the dilemma is for us, that we don't wait for motivation because motivation rarely shows up. It happens after the action.

Motivation is really a byproduct of you taking steps. That's the truth. If we waited till we felt motivated to do something, the truth is we probably would never get started. Or like I just mentioned, we'd get started and we would quit. And so many women just live day to day. You know, whatever comes today is what I'm going to deal with or what I'm gonna work on. They don't have a goal plan. They don't schedule things out. Some do, but they're not living with a vision. Their goals are just ambiguous, too general, vague, and they lack inspiration and luster. A goal without inspiration is not going to be a goal reached. So, why do we lose mojo? Well, I wanna give you some reasons today, in our time together.

There are some obvious reasons why we lose motivation, and those would be that we sometimes struggle with depression or anxiety. We need to just clear the slate. Maybe sickness has come into our lives, nothing that we've asked for, but it happens. There are just life interruptions, such as maybe job loss or. Financial setbacks, and those are true things. Those things happen to everybody. And when those things happen, you can notice that some women will get back up and resume. They'll start again. And some of us might just get stuck. We don't get back up, and pretty soon we find out that we're in a loop or in a cycle of just not doing much with our lives, reaching no goals, finding ourselves getting more and more addicted to TV and leisure, and we say, Hey, you know what? My life is not as fulfilled as I would like it to be. So let me offer these thoughts on why you might be losing your motivation or why you might have lost it. And then I wanna give you the fix, what to do about it, because if you fix it, you're gonna find that you're smashing goals and reaching your dreams. And after all, isn't that what we want?

So the first one, if you've been hanging around us for any kind of time, you know, this is number one. The reason why some women lose motivation is number one. I don't have a vision. I don't have any compelling picture of a future that I want. There's nothing pulling me forward. And we know that a motivated life is a life fueled by vision. If you think about a locomotive or a train, vision is the first car pulling the rest of the train down the track. You gotta have a vision, and without a vision, you'll stall out. Why get up in the morning if there's nothing pulling you, there's nothing juicing you up, saying, Oh man, you gotta get going on this day, because look at where you're headed.

So here's the fix. You need to get clear about what you want. What do you really want? For your life. Now, I wanna tell you, this takes time to really settle down, center down, and think about it and see yourself, what do you really want from your life? How can you see yourself living a dream life? And then once you get clear on that, keep that vision in front of you. It's not for a notebook that you put away or hide under the mattress, for goodness' sake. It isn't something that you just keep a secret. You put it in front of you. You. Frame it. We often frame our past in terms of where we've been and what we've done. I'm encouraging you to frame your future, connect with it, get it, make it real on the inside of you; that's where I'm going. Tell yourself, this is what I want. Make it real, make it vibrant, make it powerful, and that vision will pull you forward.

Number two, the reason why we might lose motivation is because whatever it is that we wanna do, or the goals that we say we want, the reward for reaching them is not great enough. It's just not enough to make us get up off the couch and do the thing. So there has to be a real deep purpose for why you want that. And you've heard this in many coaching circles, perhaps, but you gotta connect with your why. The why is what keeps you going. Why do you wanna reach this goal? How will your life be different if you reach it?

Now, if your goal is something that you feel obligated to do, it's something that you feel manipulated to do, or it's expected of you, or it's something you shouldn't do to yourself, I should do this. You're gonna find yourself resisting all of the things that will help you move towards that goal. You'll feel maybe even bitter about it, or frustrated, or a little bit, you know, agitated by it. Maybe you'll even feel resentment towards doing the things that you have to do to reach this goal. After all, it's not what I want.

So instead, make it about you. Make it about the reason why. You wanna reach this goal? Why would you invest time and energy and resources, and why would you invest your emotions in this project or this relationship? Why would you set this goal or reach this work? Okay, so make it yours. That's the fix. Here, I'll say it again. Let's do this. Write down three reasons why you want the goal that you say you want, and then write down how your life will improve. How will you be better? If you reach this goal, what will happen to your self-esteem? What will happen to your feelings of fulfillment, value, and worth? Okay, you're worthy of it, whether you reach it or not. I gotta say that, but it's about you respecting yourself. It's about you keeping your promise to yourself. You say you want this, you say you're gonna do it. Do it and watch your self-esteem skyrocket.

Alright, here's another reason why you may have lost motivation. You are still unclear on your strategy. Maybe you've done something and it didn't work, or maybe you don't have the priority of your goals, and so you're not sure which thing to start first, and that's leaving you kind of paralyzed. Maybe you have too many goals, and so you're not sure. You do a little here and do a little there, and you're not seeing any really great results, and so that makes you feel like you wanna quit. Well, let's get a strategy. That's also part of your clarity. What's the goal that you wanna reach? What's the most important? And also, which is one that you can, it's kind of low-hanging fruit. You can reach it like that. So identify those two. The easy goal. And the one that you really want the most. And then let's design a strategy around how you're gonna reach that. You reverse engineer it. What has to be true in order for you to say, This time next year, I did it. I reached my goal. I feel so happy and so proud of myself and so fulfilled. This has changed my life. You gotta get a strategy. Once you're clear on what you want, what's an easy goal to reach right away that gives you that instant dopamine boost that makes you feel like, I wanna go for the next one, and then identify the one that's really the most important for you, and then you build that strategy, get that blue.

Here's the fix. Many of us cannot do this by ourselves. I wanna tell you that I have coaches that come to me to coach them, and then in turn, they coach me because we need another set of ears to help us think about your goals and your dreams, maybe as big as ball of yarn in your brain, and you need to just pull out one thread or maybe two, and it's kind of tangled. You need someone to help you get clarity and get all of those thoughts and all of that stuff that's converging in your mind and your heart linear. So you can say that. Yep, I chose that one. A coach is a wonderful thing. I'm available if you need a FREE strategy call with me. I'll give you that information in the notes.

So here's the fix. Face your confusion with a plan. Get a coach, at the very least, write everything down that you're thinking about, and then break it down into the one I can reach right away and the one that I'm most passionate about. Identify the outcome that you want, and then reverse engineer, starting with one thing at a time. Make a plan of action. What's one thing I need to do this week, this month, to move myself forward? And if I were to reach that, what would be the next thing that I would do?

Okay, number four, and the reason why we lose motivation is because we don't have habits that catch us. When we start to lose our motivation, we don't have habits that catch us, so that we don't bottom out, but we only maybe just slip a little bit, and then we get right back on track.

My morning routine is a set of habits that I do on a regular basis, which helps me, and it works. I'm gonna tell you something. When I lose motivation, and sometimes it happens, I'm overtired or I've done too much, and I just need a break, and then I think, okay, any day now I gotta get back going again. And that doesn't happen very often if anything is true. I probably need to take more breaks. But to my point, I have a routine that helps me get back. Now the author of Atomic Habits. I love the book. If you've not read it, his name is James Clear, and he says this: “We don't rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems.” So what are your daily routines, or what are the systems that you have put in place that help you, that when you lose the edge, you land in your system, and your system is designed to get you back into flow? And once that happens, motivation will start coming. And so that is the fix. Write down, and I would say do it every morning. Write down your intention for the day.

If you win the day. You win the morning, you win the day. If you win the day, you win the week, you win the month. Okay? And winning days compile to a winning life. You know that. So write down every morning your intention for the day. What's important? Consider your vision. Now, what do I need to do? How do I need to fill this day with my energy? What resources, what am I willing to spend my time on, which is my most precious commodity? What am I willing to spend my time on? And if you can't do it alone, again, ask somebody to hold you accountable. It's not scary. It's a good thing to be determined.

And if you say, I just don't feel determined enough, then you don't have a compelling enough goal. You don't have a juicy enough, beautiful, powerful, audacious goal. Your goals are impotent. They lack motivation. You don't really want 'em bad enough if you can't reach a goal within a year; that's doable. Okay? To reach within six months or a year, then you're just not that passionate about that goal. So ask someone to help you, hold you accountable to reaching your dreams. The Bible even makes it clear, by the way, that a vision comes to pass with much painful effort. Yeah, you're, it's not gonna just land in your lab. I know. I wish it would, but rarely, maybe sometimes. But I always tell you that when opportunity knocks, it is discipline that brings you to the door. And if you don't have it. You might miss.

Alright, number five, and I'll leave you with this. You might lose motivation because you're battling with limiting beliefs, and I know once again, we hear a lot about that. I wish I could find a better way, and I will, in fact, find a better way to say that. Limiting beliefs are false narratives. Limiting beliefs are like the choke chain on your mind, that you start going after a dream, and you can only go so far, and then whoop. You pull that choke chain. I've got a couple of dogs here today, and one, I have to put a little chain on her 'cause she's a wanderer. She likes to just, you know, explore in somebody else's yard. So I got a little chain. It's actually not a choke chain, but you get the idea: pull that thing, and she comes back. That's a good thing in our case, but it's a bad thing. If it's a limiting belief for us, it's a good thing. If it's wisdom saying, ah, you go that far, don't go any further.

But if it's a limiting belief that's holding you back, then we need to identify that, and you need to find out. That it's not true, that probably, that belief was formed in childhood, maybe in your teenage years. And whether you know it or not, it's operating, it's in your operating system, and it will sabotage your progress, and you'll find yourself all of a sudden getting close to reaching a goal or being successful. And then suddenly these limiting beliefs. A lot of people talk about imposter syndrome these days. They must have something to do with low self-esteem or a low evaluation of our abilities and our skills, or an unworthiness. And I hear over and over and over again, coaches saying their clients deal with unworthiness. I don't believe I'm good enough for this. I don't believe I deserve this. I don't think I really did this right. They're insecure. Women are insecure. So let's defeat that once and for all. And the fix, of course, is to begin to deposit in you what God says about you, what's true about you, your worth, your value, your personhood, and you know what? You are very capable of achieving great things, doing, growing, learning, and changing, and probably performing. Beyond what you even realize. You're stronger than you know. You're probably more talented than you know, and if pushed to the edge, you would discover that you know you can do it. You can do hard things. This last season of podcasting, and I hope that you'll keep tuning into the podcast because I have some great guests coming up for you. These are women who have faced incredible situations against all odds and have overcome, but many of 'em went through very challenging and difficult situations, and so many of them said to me, I found out I was braver than I knew. I was stronger than I knew. I was smarter than I knew. I was more capable than I knew.

So let's smash those limiting beliefs one way. I wanna help you do that. I can help you reignite your confidence, and I'm very excited to let you know that the BraveHearted Transformation, which is my course, is available for you. It's a work at your own pace. You can go as fast or as slow as you want to. But if you wanna awaken your courage and you want to step into your God-given dream and purpose, without second guessing, without doubt, and saying, I don't know if this, but with boldness, if you wanna stop wondering if it's too late and discover it's not that there's still great things inside of you, then I wanna invite you to check out my course. It's for the woman who knows there's more. There is so much more. I can't just do nothing anymore. I'm finding myself in a pit, and I need to rise above this for you. Visit my website, braveheartedwoman.com/braveheartedtransformation. Again, that's braveheartedwoman.com. Check that out.

All right, beautiful Bravehearts, that's what I have for you today. I hope you find this to be helpful, and I believe in you. I know you can do it. Write those goals down. As we're getting ready to come to the top of the year very soon here, I don't want you to look back and say, I didn't do it last year and I didn't do it the year before. Make this your year. You can finish it out. You can finish the last quarter. Strong. Come on, let's do it. I'll help you. Let's do it together. I'll leave you like I always do. Is this your moment to find your brave and live your dreams!