How to Motivate Yourself in 2026 (PART 1)

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In this episode, Dr. Jon Finn explores what motivation really means as we enter 2026 — and why it will look fundamentally different in the AI era.

As AI increasingly takes over tasks humans have traditionally been paid to do, motivation will no longer come from pressure, deadlines, or external rewards. Instead, the people who thrive will be those who understand how to work with their Brain States and consistently access high-charge thinking that AI cannot replicate.

This episode introduces the first of the Six Habits of High-Performing AI-Era Professionals: building a 30-day focus loop. Dr. Finn explains why motivation starts with clarity of purpose, how understanding your brain states creates sustainable energy, and why knowing what you’re optimising your brain for is the foundation of future performance, wellbeing, and meaning.

You’ll also hear why creating a Future Ambitious Meaningful (FAM) Story is becoming essential in a world of constant change — helping you connect daily habits and brain state management to long-term health, happiness, and contribution.

This is Part 1 of a short series designed to help you build a clear, motivating foundation for 2026 and beyond.

Transcript

New Year Focus And Purpose

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Hello, habit mechanics, and happy new year. I hope you had a fantastic festive break and that you're now gearing up to have a thriving 2026. As I'm very passionate about helping people to be at their best, and I know that this year is going to throw up lots of challenges that we've never seen before as AI adoption accelerates. I want to help you. So over the coming uh days, I'm going to be releasing guides, uh episodes that help you to create your future ambitious, meaningful story, or help you to revisit it and sharpen it up. And this is the first of the uh is connected to the first of the six habits, the first of the six habits of high-performing AI era professionals, um, of which we call build a 30-day focus loop. So, in the coming days and episodes, I'm gonna go somewhere to help you to start that process. January naturally gives us uh a renewed sense of direction and purpose, or it gives us the the conditions to help us to do that. It isn't magic, but we can use just that little bit of momentum of being in a new year and the first week and weeks and first month of that new year to really help us to set out our stall to work out what are we actually trying to do to help us be healthy, happy, and at our best uh in the distant future, or just healthy and happy. And what does that mean that ultimately we need to be working on today? And the key to unlocking this, of course, is understanding our brain states and actually building the habits that make it easier for us to optimize our brain states. We are moving into a world, and this is going to accelerate in 2026, where neural network AI is gonna increasingly be used by organisations to do more and more of the tasks that traditionally human beings have been paid to do. It's real, it's coming. When we started speaking about this last year, many people were not really believing what we were saying. You don't need to look very hard now, you can see this is absolutely real. But it's exciting because if we understand our brain states and how to become habit mechanics, then we can actually use AI as a as a platform, as a almost like a trampoline to bounce off to moving to the kind of life and work that we want and that we know will make us healthier and happier. And it's the same if you've got a family, you're thinking, what are my kids going to be doing in five, ten years' time? Well, they'll be able to do whatever they want to do if they understand their brain states, so this is not going away. AI will not be uh it will not discriminate in the sense of it's not going to give people an easier time if they have ADHD or if they have trouble concentrating or if they're worried and beat themselves up too much. If businesses can make what humans currently do cheaper and faster, then they will do it because it's their responsibility to shareholders. We might not like that, but it's absolutely real. And that means that the people who are going to be healthiest, happiest, and at their best in the AI revolution are going to be those who are most brain state intelligent, and they're going to be those who are best at consistently getting into their high charge brain state so that they can consistently think and do in a way that AI can't. And in my opinion, I don't think AI will be able to do human high-charge brain states for a long time just because of the way the technology is developed, um, is very procedural, whereas uh our memory is very episodic. I'll get into that in more detail, uh, maybe in later episodes. But I see that if we can help people to get into high charge brain states more consistently, that is the key to being healthy, happy, and at and at their best. And of course, you will be even more valuable to your own life and other people's lives if you understand not only how to do that for yourself, but also how to help others do that, which is why we're training people to become certified habit mechanic coaches. And as you might expect, there's been a significant increase in interest in that just in this week alone, because people are really realizing now how disruptive AI is going to be. But again, we can turn that into a positive for ourselves, and it's not difficult to do. You've just got to get better at understanding your brain states, developing brain state intelligence. And we've got you covered. That's why I wrote Train Your Brain for the Air Evolution. That's why I wrote The Habit Mechanic. But the foundation of being at our best is always going to start with an understanding of why do I want to actually do this? What am I trying to achieve with my life? What do I need to do to be healthy, happy, and at my best? In other words, what do I need to do to become more brain state intelligent and to help me to manage my recharge brain states, my medium charge brain states, and most importantly, my high charge brain states every day, so that I can do the things that make me feel good about myself. And one of the very interesting things that I've been reading just over the um Christmas period is an insight from um an economist called Joel Mockler. Um, and he actually his work won um the Nobel Prize for Economics at the end of last year. And one of the very interesting things that I heard him talk about that I'd never heard anyone phrase it quite like that before, is that you know, for most of human history, we haven't had jobs. Jobs are quite a new invention, but we've always worked, whether that's bringing up our children, hunting, gathering, building our homes, working in the farmland, whatever it is, we've we've worked, and it's a fundamental part of being human because it allows us to feel good about ourselves if we if we're able to do the right type of work. And I think that that is going to become more important, just that understanding as we go through, as AI begins to displace more and more of the tasks that humans have traditionally done, and therefore free up humans to do different things, things that AI can't do, and that means getting into our high-charged brain states. So let I I'm gonna share with you actually. Um I've just got the book in front of me here, Train Your Brain for the AI Revolution, which by the way, we are now, you can now get the not only the digital book, but you can get the audio book and the physical book from our website at a very uh special price that you won't get anywhere else. So you can if you don't have a copy or you we want the physical copy, or you've got the the digital copy, but you want the audio copy, you can go to our website and you get it for a very special price. What I'm actually gonna be sharing with you over these episodes to help you to start building your fam story and uh build the platform for that 30-day focus loop, which is habit number one of the six habits of high-performing AI era professionals, is I'm gonna be sharing the key um chapters and the key insights from Train Your Brain for the AI revolution and step two. Step two is about planning with the task director. So inside train your brain for the revolution, um the we we we introduce will powers or will and powers, three assistants. They are the task director, the day designer, and the routine engineer. Um, so in the four-step success cycle, you work with the task director in step two, which is called planning with the task director. And this is about creating your future vision and working that all the way back to the next 30 days. So, what's going to follow is uh chapter 14 from Train Your Brain for the Ayah Revolution, and the title of that chapter is creating your future vision. So, what I'd really recommend that you do is don't think that you have to create a perfect future vision for yourself, but I recommend you just get started. So, the key is really thinking about what do I actually want in the distant future? And I haven't met anybody yet, and you can define the distant future however you want, it could be five years, it could be ten years, whatever you want. But I haven't met anyone yet who doesn't want to be healthy and happy, uh, and who doesn't want their loved ones to be healthy and happy. Um on a personal note, something that really saddened me just in the last few days. One of my very good friends from when I was younger, not someone I've been in touch with recently, um hung himself. He has children business. Um, I've just that's just devastated me. And from a personal motivation perspective, I'm just more motivated than ever to help more and more people understand what they need to do to be healthy, happy, and at their best. So that's renewed uh motivation for me to really help more people become brain state intelligent because I'm absolutely compelled if he'd have understood the kind of things that we're sharing on the habit mechanic platform, and you know, this just wasn't in his his orbit, it's just not this just wasn't part of his world, unfortunately. But I know that I've had so many stories of uh the ideas that we cover in our programme just changing people's lives, and um so yeah, and that's just saddened me, but again, it's making me double down on wanting to really help people. So, what you're gonna hear next is chapter 14 of Train Your Brain for the Aigre Evolution. Um, and it's and it and the title of the chapter is creating your future vision. Don't let it overwhelm you. Take your time, listen through it a few times, and then in the coming days, um I'll release the next chapter and then the next chapter and the next chapter, so that you've got that everything you need to get going with building out a really robust fam story that's going to be the foundation of your of the next 12 months, and it's something that you can update periodically. Um we recommend you update it every 30 days, hence why we have the build a 30 day focus loop. Um, but what we're sharing is only one part of that habit. But anyway, here is the chapter. Enjoy, take your time, write things down, make notes, and then I will um be back soon with the chapter fift fifteen, which is called Creating Your Fam Story with the Task Director. Enjoy. Chapter 14. Creating your future vision. Sarah sat in her favourite coffee shop, a notebook open before her. I had my brain state profile score, she explained, but I kept asking myself, what am I really trying to optimize my brain states for? What future am I trying to create? This is where you'll use one of the task director's most powerful tools, the future ambitious, meaningful story, which we call the fam story. Just as a lighthouse's beam guides ships through darkness, your fam story helps direct your brain's energy toward meaningful long-term goals, while managing your states day by day. Working with the task director helped me discover something crucial, Sarah shared. My brain state profile wasn't just showing me my current performance, it was revealing the gap between my present brain states and the ones I needed to achieve my biggest goals. Creating my fam story helped me see exactly how to use the success cycle to close that gap. Think of your fam story like an iceberg. The visible tip represents your long-term vision, where you want to be in ten years or so. Just above the surface are your medium-term goals for the next one to four years. Underwater are your twelve-month objectives. Then deeper underwater are your monthly targets, weekly priorities, and daily actions. Each layer connects your present brain states to your future ambitions. The power of your fam story comes from how it creates what we call a wave of motivation. This helps direct your brain's energy and willpower's efforts in three powerful ways. First, it helps you track progress. Research shows the single biggest cause of burnout isn't overload. It's working too long without experiencing personal progress. Your fam story lets you see the weekly, monthly, and yearly progress you are making in your life, all driven by brain state optimization. Second, it helps manage stress. Setting and monitoring goals makes it easier to reset and recalibrate when we falter. When set correctly, goals become powerful stress management tools. They're meant to be adjusted and refined as you progress or fail to progress, serving as adaptable signposts that help willpower and its specialists optimize your journey. Third, your fam story creates self-fulfilling prophecies. Walt Disney famously said, if you can dream it, you can do it. Columbia University professor Robert Merton's research showed that believing you can achieve something significantly increases your chances of success. Your fam story helps willpower guide you, your horribly unhelpful emotions, toward positive behavioral patterns aligned with your ambitions, making it easier to optimize your brain states today because you can clearly see how it will help you create a better tomorrow. The task director helped me understand something powerful, Sarah explained. Every time I updated my fam story, usually every four to eight weeks, I could see more clearly how managing my brain states connected to my bigger goals. Better sleep wasn't just about feeling less tired. It was about having the high-charge brain power to write my novel. Using AI tools effectively wasn't just about productivity. It was about creating space and energy for what mattered most. Sarah discovered something else too. As I mastered this process, I found myself naturally helping colleagues create their own fam stories. There's something powerful about helping others connect their daily brain states to their biggest dreams. In the next chapter, you'll learn exactly how to create your own fam story with the task director. You'll discover how to connect your brain state profile to your future vision through specific questions and exercises. Just as Sarah used this tool to transform her performance, you'll see how optimizing your brain states today shapes the future you want to create.