The planning mistake that kills your daily motivation. 12 000 work diaries can't lie.

What if the real reason your motivation fades isn’t what goals you achieve, but the way you plan your days?  

We open up a counterintuitive truth: the way to lasting motivation is understanding that your brain rewards visible progress toward meaningful goals, not big payoffs.  

Using the Progress Principle research on 12,000 work diaries, we break down why tracking inputs you control, reps, learnings, foundation work, creates renewable motivation, while fixating on outcomes you can’t control drains it fast.  

We get practical and specific.  

You’ll hear the exact daily ritual we use with clients to turn motivation into eternal fire that keeps you moving as long as needed. Along the way, we address common pitfalls like bloated to-do lists, optimism bias about timelines, and the quiet shame of missed goals. Instead of judging yourself when results lag, you’ll learn to inspect the system, adjust the channel, refine the offer, and keep stacking reps.  

If you’re a founder, builder, or leader searching for a reliable spark, this conversation gives you a simple, science-backed blueprint to keep your internal fire burning. Progress becomes visible, discipline becomes easier, and outcomes become more likely, even if they refuse to happen on your schedule.  

Better is always available.  

_______

THE CHALLENGE:

Ready to build systems for health, energy, focus, and consistent productivity? Apply for our free 5-day High-Performing Entrepreneur Reboot.

Transcript

Why Motivation Matters

Announcing The Five-Day Challenge

Motivation Fuel

The Progress Principle Explained

Planning Mistakes That Kill Motivation

Inputs Over Outcomes

Make Invisible Progress Visible

Weekly Reflection And Skill Gains

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Sharina. I'm your host, I'm your partner in change, personal and collective transformation, and someone who is really passionate about unlocking, using more of our human potential, creating systems, environments where human potential grows and thrives and delivers more positive impact. And you know, sometimes my friends ask me, like, why do I care about that so much? And I think this caring comes from nature, from the universal drive to explore, to improve, to grow, to create something new, and ultimately for the things to keep going. Today, guys, we are talking about one of the most important things to get you going, to keep you going, to keep exploring your potential, to keep developing and building things. We're gonna explore your internal fire, your internal engine that gets everything moving. And specifically, we're gonna talk about what kills your motivation and what builds your motivation. A very simple daily ritual that I work on with all of my clients, that I use it myself. And it is very powerful, also confirmed by 12,000 work diaries that you're gonna hear in a minute. But the most important thing you want to understand, guys, is your motivation. You know, they say motivation doesn't last, discipline, you know, you gotta develop discipline. But I always say, well, to develop discipline, you still have to be motivated. Like, why do you want to develop your discipline? Right? There has to be reason. And that reason, what is motivation? Motivation, the definition, it's motive, it's a reason to act. So even to develop discipline, you still need to have motivation. So, how do you build more of that? So every day you get out there and keep developing things, keep growing things, keep helping all of us to keep the world turning. So, motivation. But before we jump into one simple practice that you can use to boost your motivation and the mistakes that you can be doing with that, like a lot of my clients do at the beginning of our work together. And I realize that I still sometimes think that it's so obvious that I don't explain it enough. Before we jump into that, I want to announce something that I've been wanting to do and finally get to doing that. A challenge for fellow entrepreneurs, builders, business owners, leaders, a challenge to help you jumpstart your most powerful year yet by learning how to build systems in health, energy, focus optimization, in consistent productivity, mindset, and stress management. So every day you create more and more consistency and one might say discipline to keep getting better and keep creating more amazing things in your life. So five-day free challenge, which is gonna start either at the end of December, I think it's the Monday of 22nd or 23rd, or very early January. So I'm only gonna have 10 people, it's very limited, and it's high-performing entrepreneur reboot. It's again, we're gonna focus on building systems for health, energy, and focus optimization for consistent productivity, for mindset and stress management. It's gonna be five days, Monday to Friday, one hour of our meeting, and then you're gonna have certain assignments, and I'm gonna give you worksheets, and it's gonna be a WhatsApp group and ongoing support. You're also gonna be able to ask all of the questions that you are not sure of in terms of uh motivation and health and energy and sleep optimization and productivity optimization. I've been in this field for close to two decades, so and I still keep myself updated and getting recertified and always read the literature and most importantly put that into practice with my clients, which allows a very specific insight into how you actually do all of these things so they don't overwhelm you, but instead fuel your best, most extraordinary life and vision for the impact you want to create in the world. So the link to apply is in the show notes, and the reason why it's apply, not sign up, is because we I'm gonna have a very aligned group of people, so I need to go through each application manually. There are gonna be 10 spaces, and if you already taking, I'm gonna be starting advertising it next week, so you still have a chance to be one of the first to hear about that and sign up and also share it with friends. So, five-day free challenge, high performing entrepreneur reboot, health, energy, and focus optimization, consistent productivity, mindset, and stress management. Again, the link to apply is in the show notes. And now back to our episode. So, motivation. Motivation, guys, I want you to imagine fire, like real fire. And that fire has a potential to actually burn for quite a long time. It has in in my own in my home city, there is what they call eternal fire, you know, and this is like fire in stone and granite. But in order for that eternal fire to burn eternally, it is fat fuel. I think it's oil or gas or some combination of both. And the real fire, the one that you make in the woods, the longer you feed it the right kind of fuel, the longer it burns, right? So your motivation works kind of like that. Like a lot of biological systems work in that fashion. A lot of these systems in nature work this way. You need to give the fuel, you need to somehow support the thing if you want it to last longer and forever. So motivation is literally like that eternal fire. If you want it to go on forever, day after day after day, you just gotta fit it the right things forever. So 12,000 work diaries study done by the team led by Teresa Amabili, and they analyzed, and there is a book, by the way, The Progress Principle, and there is a TED talk based on that. So it's a very good study. Uh, 12,000 work uh diaries were analyzed, and they were trying to figure out what makes people tick, what people makes people feel good about their work, feel motivated, feel like doing their best work. And there were you know different things that they analyzed, but what they found is that the most important thing was daily progress towards meaningful outcomes. It wasn't some perks, some big wins, some big prizes, although prizes can be a part of it. But the most important thing that created this beautiful work-life experience for people where they feel good and they wanted to do their best work and they actually did their best work. The most important thing was visible progress towards meaningful goals. And yes, there were factors that helped with that, uh, you know, that the availability of resources and help from other people. So all of those, as Teresa Amabeli in her book calls them, catalysts. They are very much correlated with the progress, but the most important factor in how people felt about their work and how motivated they were to do their best work was visible progress toward what people thought was meaningful outcome. And why am I telling you this? Well, first of all, understand that progress is very important for your motivation. Your dopamine system, that is, you know, a little bit of nerdy neuroscience talk, is designed that way. So you work towards things that have the likely cool likelihood to produce the payoff, right? And if there is no progress, your system is designed that way to demotivate you. So then you switch your attention and focus and go and do other things, explore other resources so you don't get stuck pursuing a path that leads nowhere, and then you die of hunger and die. So that's how your biology works. The minute your brain, and some people are more sensitive, some people are less sensitive to that, but all of us are sensitive to that, and 12,000 work diaries are not trunk. So progress is very important for our motivation. And here is I'm gonna switch to another story and gonna bring it to where you might be making a lot of mistakes and why there are often people, entrepreneurs, but also just people who want to achieve a lot, feel demotivated, feel like losing while doing a lot of hard work. A client of mine said to me, Angela, like I don't want to do this planning habit. It feels very demotivating. I put all those things on my planner, in my planning, in my schedule, and I don't accomplish most of them. And so that is very demotivating. I don't see the point of continuing that. At which point I thought about two things. Number one, I didn't explain because at some point it became just so obvious that that's the things we do. But it's never obvious for all of the people. So another lesson to myself, just don't assume make sure that there is understanding, confirm. Um, so the first thing I thought about, well, I didn't explain the planning well that we are tracking the inputs that are in our control, not the outcomes that are influenced by so many factors outside of our control. So that's number one. And number two, I didn't mention that we were doing this habit not to add pressure and some sort of discipline and accountability, but to motivate the client to do more. And the way we motivate it is we plan the things that A are in our control and B, allow us to see some sort of progress every single day, like the learnings, like us building foundation for our garden or the launch of our product or service. So every day there is something meaningful to see that signifies the progress towards that outcome, that goal that can take, I don't know, weeks, months, or years. Right? So the way to do planning, so it motivates you, is to show yourself progress. And the way you show yourself progress is not to plan a bunch of things that are outside of your control, but to plan things that you are 99% in control of and that you're sure you can accomplish, and which in your understanding lead toward or have the potential, a big potential to lead towards the outcome that you want. Very often, guys, we confuse planning with predicting. What I mean by this is I actually wrote about that in my blog, and let me read it to you so it flows better. We confuse planning with predicting. We plan for outcomes we can't control, and then we judge ourselves on whether reality obeyed our script, right? Like who said that the reality should obey our planning? The goal of planning isn't to guarantee the result, which you can't, it's to guarantee the repetitions, the only part you can actually control. If you're losing motivation and work while working on things, it's often because you're tracking the wrong things. You're measuring the harvest, not the planting. You're trying to control outcomes instead of actions. And when you're trying to create results you've never created before, it will take longer, be messier, and look nothing like the version in your head. Optimism bias will fool you into thinking it should have happened already. It won't. And that's why I said the role of planning is simple. Make invisible progress visible, capture the learnings, capture the wraps, show the foundation forming. Write on your planner, get a client, get a sale, or finish launch on your to-do list. Write the actions you can actually execute with near certainty. And the more of those reps you do, if you correlated the actions with the outcome correctly, and you know obviously there's gonna be some adjustments, if you did that, the amount of reps eventually will lead towards outcome, but not on your terms, because reality does not work on your terms, no matter what your brain tells you. Then if those don't happen, your reps, your actions, then it's a good place to explore your systems, not your worth. And in my blog I conclude, so over to you, dear reader. Is your planner filled with things to do or things to get? And each which one do you think is killing your motivation? So the tool that will help you to build up your motivation, to have that fire of motivation burning almost to what feels like eternally, for eternity, for infinity of time. If you want to have that kind of motivation every day, planning is a very helpful tool, but the right kind of planning, the planning that tracks actions, learnings, progress, things that are entirely in your control, things that build the foundation for the outcomes you want to more likely to happen. And when you start planning that way, and every week at your reflection sections session, which I always recommend to all of my clients, and we work towards that, at your reflection session, every week you look at those actions, you look at the learnings, you look at the also your expertise, your skills that you are building, that you've been building, that you've built, which make the result, the positive outcome you want to create more likely. It is very motivating. And you start feeling, you know, maybe I haven't exactly hit the goal, but I am a bigger, more capable person because of all, and more also educated about the outcome than I was a week ago. And that is actually a very motivating thing to notice and to capture that will keep just like that wood or oil and gas keeps that fire going, it will keep your motivation burning, and that will keep you going, keep you doing more apps, which will make the outcome you want more likely. Not a guarantee. Life is never a guarantee, but a lot more likely. I always say this phrase, better is always available. Like if you look at your schedule and you take specific actions towards your outcome every day, do you think it is more likely to happen than not? Than if you just sit and wait and hope when the stars align? Which one do you think works better for the outcome to become more likely? Right? That's the question. So thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you for listening. This is a live recording episode, all human, not AI. So please ask yourself this question: Am I tracking the right things when I'm feeling demotivating? 12,000 diaries can't be wrong. There is some things that unite all humans, and the sense of progress is one of those things because our survival depended on it. So, are you tracking and planning to-dos or to get? That's the most important question for today. And then also don't forget, guys, to check out the link in the show notes, apply for our five-day free challenge, high performing entrepreneur reboot, health, energy, focus, productivity, optimization, mindset, and stress management. And don't forget, please share, review, put five star so this piece of work, this podcast reaches more ears, and we more of us will learn how to feel more motivated. So we get to do more things and create a better world for all of us. So thank you for listening. Thank you for tuning in, and until next time, keep growing.