Hey guys, and welcome back to another episode of Change Why Right Podcast. My name is Angela Shorina. I'm your host, I'm your partner in change, personal and collective transformation. I'm just someone who's really passionate, obsessed with, and can't stop learning and being fascinated with human potential, unlocking and using more of it in our lives, in the world. So we get to live our most extraordinary lives and create the most extraordinary world all around us. Today, guys, we are talking about some fundamental understanding of how your motivation works. And you need your motivation for absolutely everything, whether you're trying to stay on a healthier diet or do regular exercise or work on your sleeping habits or lust in your business or your career pursuits alonger, working, you know, on important and hard things that move important goals, agenda in your life, or maybe you're trying to work on your communication skills or on your relationships. Whatever that is, you need motivation, consistent motivation to get going. And I want to address first the question of discipline. But before we even do that, I want to tell you guys that by the end of this podcast, you will understand what is the cause of you quitting too fast and not persevering with the things that you know are important to you, the hard things that you need to do to move yourself to the next level. Like, why do you quit when you do quit too early? So by the end of this podcast, you get to understand this. Perhaps figure out finally that missing piece that doesn't allow you to move forward, to keep going long enough to get a breakthrough in your life, in your relationships, and your health and your fitness and your business. So, gonna be a good podcast. But before we jump into all the talk and research and experiment in mice, before we talk about motivation, I want to address the question that's often brought up when I talk about motivation. It's discipline. It's like you don't need motivation, you just need discipline. And again and again, I more and more often understand that people who say those things don't really understand what motivation is. The definition of motivation is the reason to act, your motive for action. And without that reason, without that clear understanding of uh why you're trying to do the things that you do, I doubt you'll have any discipline. People who seem to be the most disciplined, quote unquote, they have a conviction, face, belief, the things that we're gonna talk about, that they can do it, that this matters, and the reason, the reward, the goal at the end of the tunnel is worthy of all the effort, worthy of all the pursuit. That's how you get to unlock discipline. But again, before you unlock discipline, you kind of gotta really in your gut understand why this is important, the thing that you're doing in the first place. Let me tell you a story. I was reminded of this research that has been around, I don't actually know for how many years, but I read it in many books by now. So Nir Yell and his new book, Beyond Belief, reminded me of this experiment, this famous experiment on they call it learned hopelessness. I call it learned optimist because researchers actually start thinking that by default, at least animals are quite hopeless, meaning they do not extend effort unless they learn the reason to be optimistic and work harder for certain things. Anyhow, the research. Researchers took wild mice, like a lot of them, obviously, to get all this research done. I don't even know, you know, where they get all these wild mice these days, but anyhow, so they drop this wild mice into water. And mice are not great swimmers, like uh well, at least not by any standards that we have for great swimming. Anyhow, so they dropped the mice into water, and that wild mice uh left by themselves, they swim for about 1 to 15 minutes before giving up and starting drowning. And apparently, well, probably researchers let some mice just drown, but then some mice they rescued, they dry them off, and then let them recover and then put them back into that water. And those same mice swam sometimes for up to 60 not minutes, hours. Guys, 60 hours from 1 to 15 minutes. They reason the researchers replicated this again and again and again, and actually, the same type of research was done on different animals. I'm familiar with the research done on dogs when they shocked them with electric shocks, and the dogs who previously knew that some of the efforts, like pressing some levers, would end up helping them to escape these shocks. They would try to do something even when they didn't have any levers to change the situation. And dogs who learned that no matter what they did, nothing worked, and they would be just continuously shocked, they did nothing. So that's why the experiments usually are called learned hopelessness, even though, again, researchers now actually think that hopelessness was there by default, and just some dogs learn the optimism based on their experience. And that is a very important note here. So animals learn to try harder when they have this experience of either being rescued or that when they try harder, their something to save them or something to give them reward or something to escape the suffering will end up giving them results. So humans are no different. When we believe our efforts can actually work, we try harder. Because, guys, when do you think people quit their diet? When they do it for, I don't know, several days and a week and they didn't lose much, or maybe even gate because they, I don't know, studied exercising or just, you know, our weight fluctuates, and they give up. And when they try enough times and it seems to quote unquote not working, people end up giving up for good. But when we believe, and especially when we see the evidence like mice do, that certain things can work, will last longer. We push through the moments that would otherwise make us quit. You know why most entrepreneurs give up too early before they ever get a chance to see their thing uh through to success? Because more often than not, you don't get direct experience or signs of progress. So you end up thinking, well, I'm you know, I'm trying and trying this thing, and I'm not really seeing the evidence that I can rely on. So, and I actually don't have my personal experience that I will succeed with this and the thing gonna improve anytime soon. And so they give up. We start believing that this thing won't actually work, and that is fundamentally the biggest reason for quitting. Now, whether that's right or wrong, you know, whether you pivot or not, that's a different story, but that's why we quit. So humans are no different. When again, when we believe our efforts can actually work, we try harder, we last longer, we push through the moments that would otherwise make us quit. But for humans, it also gets a little bit more interesting. We like unlike mice or dogs, we don't need the direct experience of making it that the mice or dogs needed. We don't need to be rescued first before we believe rescue is possible. We can choose what we believe by choosing where we direct our attention or where we focus on all the people who succeeded before us with fewer resources, or all the people who failed. We get to decide which story we are gathering evidence for. There is a reason why Roger Bannister, you know, broke this four-minute mile record and then everybody else did. Because it's not like he changed humans, he changed what humans believed about their ability to break that four-minute mile. So humans do possess this unfair advantage, cognitive advantage in evidence gathering. We didn't need direct evidence. We can curate our stories to believe into what gets us pushing harder if that's our decision to do so. We can direct and focus our attention on the stories that helps us to keep going. We can be proactive about designing the evidence, the stories versus animals. They just see what they see, and there is little they can do about their own cognition, right? So Nier Yell, in his book Beyond Believe, he even created this triangle, what I call now a new equation for motivation. And triangle has three sides. It's knowing one side is knowing what to do, the other side is knowing what benefit you'll get from doing that, and then believing the third side is that your efforts can actually get you there. Remove any one of those three sides, and the whole thing collapses. So if you're struggling to keep going two days into a diet, months into your business with no traction, weeks into trying to sleep better, improve yourself, talking about your relationship, or working on some problem. You know, actually, speaking of the problem, even Einstein said, or somebody maybe quoted it for him, that he believed that he did not possess any special intelligence, but he just stayed with the problem longer. And the reason why he stayed with the problem longer is because he believed he could figure out how the universe works, he could figure out it better. It's not like all the other people were more stupid, they just did not stay with this specific problem long enough to actually figure it out. He stayed with it for like years while working on uh as some clerk in a patent office. So do you actually believe that this thing that you're trying to do can change meaningful things for you guys? Not do I hope, not do I wish. Do you believe? Nietzsche famously said, he who has a strong enough why will bear any how. I think this was this quote uh while I was writing today's blog on this, I realized this quote is actually missing something very important. I'm not sure if Nietzsche ever said that or wrote about it, but this quote, he who has a strong enough why will bear any how misses a crucial piece. The why, your reason, only carries you through if you also believe that the how your actions can help you reach it, that you can make it. The why plus the how plus your belief equals consistent action. Remove one of them and the whole thing collapses. So over to you, dear listener. What story of disbelief are you telling yourself? The one that makes you drown in minutes when you have what it takes to go for hours, just like that mice have. They didn't know they have it, but when they believed, they lost it for up to 60 hours. Can you imagine how much longer you can go and persevere? Longer than you think you have? Review, revisit, audit your belief, whatever it is you can't stick with. Ask yourself honestly, do I actually believe that I can last and I can make it happen? And if you don't, which can be the case, borrow that belief from someone else. You know, everyone had Roger Bannister breaking that record, but also you have a ton of biographers, people on social media you admire, all kinds of leaders, all kinds of regular folks who overcame so many odds and made extraordinary stuff happen that nobody believed they could. So, dear listener, what story of belief do you need to tell yourself to get yourself motivated consistently and in a lasting fashion to see things through the important, the hard things, so you get the results that you want and create more meaningful extraordinary life experiences. So you unlock more of your full potential and get to live the most extraordinary version of your life. That's it for today, guys. I rambled long enough about one of my favorite topics to talk about motivation, the science of it, how our brain is wired for creating it or removing it from our efforts, so we don't end up waste a lot of energy and effort and time. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Again, the practical takeaway is to explore to audit your beliefs whenever you find yourself not sticking consistently with certain actions that you know you need to stick with in order to get to the next level of I don't know, health, career, your business, relationships, etc. So audit your belief. And then if it doesn't really work for your consistency, like you have some or a lot of disbelief, think about all the examples in again, books, social media in your immediate life that you can lean on to see that the change is possible with consistent effort and people with less sort of talent and will and discipline made it, and you probably can do too. Thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you for listening. If you found this episode inspiring, giving you more strength to persevere, and you'd like to help more people to keep going after their dreams, their potential, their most extraordinary lives, then please do share this podcast episode with at least one other person or a whole bunch of people. A review rate, all of it will help us reach more people so we together unlock more potential and get to live more extraordinary, extraordinary lives in a more extraordinary world. Thank you guys and till next time, keep growing.