Ep. 196: When You've Lost Your Motivation… and Don't Even Recognize Yourself Anymore

Hey friend, welcome back to The Intentional Midlife Mom podcast. I'm Jennifer Roskamp, and I'm so glad you're here.

If you feel like you've lost your ability to make a decision of any size, your motivation, or your ability to follow through… you are absolutely not alone.

I get messages every single week from women who tell me the same thing. They say, "Jennifer, I used to be so capable and competant. I used to handle everything. And now I can't even decide what's for dinner without second-guessing myself three times."

And here's what I want you to hear right from the start: if that's you, you're not broken.

You're not lazy.

You're not slipping.

You're tired. And tired brains don't behave like lazy brains—they behave like overloaded systems shutting down.

There's a difference. And when you understand that difference, everything starts to shift.

See, somewhere along the way, you started believing that your inability to follow through was a character flaw. That your lack of motivation meant something was fundamentally wrong with you. That if you just tried harder, wanted it more, or had more discipline, you'd snap back into the woman you used to be.

But that's not how this works.

Your brain is tired. Your system is overloaded. And when a system is overloaded, it doesn't push harder—it shuts down. Not because it's broken, but because it's protecting itself.

So today, I'm going to show you the real reason you feel stuck. And I'm going to give you one shift—just one—that brings your capability back online faster than you expect.

No hype. No fluff. Just the truth about what's actually happening—and what actually fixes it.

Let's dive in.

Get some powerful mantras to inspire, encourage, and life you up when you need as little something intentional to focus on. 

We have a beautiful pdf download of the 6 Mantras For Intentional Moms you can keep or print. Request them right HERE.

Visit The Intentional Mom

Follow us on Instagram HERE

Visit our YouTube Channel HERE

Rate & Review The Intentional Mom Podcast on Apple . We'd love to hear your thoughts on the podcast. If you listen on Spotify, you can rate & review us there, too. 

Transcript

So let me paint you a picture of what your average day likely looks like. You wake up and before your feet even hit the floor, your brain is already running through the list, right? What needs to happen today? What didn't get done yesterday? What you forgot? What's coming up tomorrow? What someone needs from you? And then you move through your morning trying to make a thousand tiny decisions. What to wear? What to eat?

whether to respond to that text now or later, whether to say yes to that request or figure out how to say no without feeling guilty. And that's just all in the first hour. By noon, you've made more decisions than most people make in a week. And I'm not talking about the big life-altering kinds of decisions. I'm talking about the invisible mental labor that no one sees but you. And you might not even see it, but you feel it. You're wondering things like, should I reschedule that appointment?

Do I need to pick up groceries today or can it wait? Did I respond to that email or did I forget? What's my plan for dinner? Is my kid okay or is something actually wrong? Should I push through this or should I take a break? Every single one of those questions, no matter how small, requires your brain to assess, to weigh options, to predict outcomes, and to make a choice in every single one of those.

Micro decisions uses up your mental capacity. Now, add to that the emotional variables, the worry about your kids, the tension in your marriage, the aging parent that you're trying to support, the friend who's going through something hard and you're trying to show up for her, the guilt about not being enough, the frustration that no one seems to notice how much you're caring and you're doing it all by yourself, while also wondering how long it will be before the dam breaks and you just break.

You have some sort of breakdown or maybe just drive away. Sort of kidding, but sort of not. So in the middle of all of this functional stuff that you're managing, you're also making decisions. You're managing emotions. You're holding space for other people's needs. You're trying to keep everyone happy, keep everything running, and keep yourself together all at the same time. And on top of all of that, you're playing multiple roles at once. You're the mom, the wife, the daughter, the friend.

the employer, the business owner, the caretaker, the planner, the problem solver. And each role comes with its own set of expectations, its own mental load, its own invisible to-do list. And so here's what you need to understand. You are operating at full capacity and then some. And your system isn't designed to run at this setting for 24-7. No one's is. When a system is overloaded, it doesn't push harder, it just simply shuts down.

not because it's broken or there's anything wrong, not because it's failing, but because it's protecting itself. And that shutdown, that's what you're calling laziness. That's what you're interpreting as failure or a lack of motivation. That's what you're beating yourself up for. But it's not laziness or a lack of motivation, it's depletion. And there's a massive difference between I don't want to and I simply can't right now.

Lazy people don't feel ashamed for not doing things, but exhausted women do. And if you're sitting here right now feeling guilty or frustrated or disappointed in yourself for not being able to follow through and just do the thing, well, that tells you everything you need to know. That's not laziness. That's exhaustion masquerading as inadequacy. So let me give you a new way to think about what's actually happening. Fog isn't failure. It's feedback.

When you can think clearly, when you can't think clearly, you can't make decisions, you can't find the energy to do the things you know that you need to do, that's your brain telling you something. It's not telling you that you're lazy, it's telling you that you're overloaded and it's asking you to stop, to reassess, to recalibrate. And the problem is most of us don't listen to that feedback. We just assume that we need to try harder. We need to push through it. We need to force it. And that only makes it worse.

And so if it's not laziness then, what is it? And why haven't you been able to change it? Well, here's where I'm going down, gonna get a little bit direct with you. Because there are four misdiagnosis that I see all the time. There's basically four stories that you're telling yourself that are keeping you stuck. You could identify with any one of these, maybe multiple of them.

But you have to be able to see these. And until you see these for what they are, nothing is going to shift. So misdiagnosis number one is I'm just lazy. And this really is the big one. And I need you to hear me out on this. Lazy people don't feel ashamed for not doing things. Exhausted women do. If you were truly lazy, you wouldn't care. You'd be fine with things being left undone. You'd shrug it off, and you'd move on with your day, and all of it would be fine. But that's not happening, is it?

You care and you care deeply. You want to do better. You're frustrated with yourself. You feel guilty when you don't follow through. You're ashamed that you can't seem to get it together. That's not laziness. That's exhaustion. And exhaustion needs rest and strategy, not shame and force. misdiagnosis number one is I'm just lazy. Misdiagnosis number two is I have no discipline. Here's the truth.

Discipline is impossible without clarity. You can't follow through with something if you don't have a clear target, and you can't execute a plan if the plan keeps shifting every time life gets loud. Expecting yourself to follow through without clarity is like asking your phone to run apps at 1 % battery. It's not gonna happen, and it's not because there's anything wrong with the phone. It's not because the phone is broken.

but because it doesn't have the resources that it needs to function. And the same is true for you. If you don't have clarity about what actually matters, what you're working toward and what you can realistically do given your current capacity and resources and limitations and season, well, discipline won't save you. You'll just exhaust yourself chasing the wrong things over and over and over again. So misdiagnosis number two is I have no discipline.

Misdiagnosis number three is I should be able to handle this or worse. I should be able to handle more. This one is sneaky because on some level, you were likely handling more. You were keeping all of the plates spinning. You were getting it done. But here's what no one tells you. You were handling it, yes, but it was at a cost. Your life has changed. Your responsibilities have grown. Your emotional load

has increased, your capacity has shifted, but your systems and your strategies and your expectations of yourself, those haven't changed. And here's, that's really what that, that's that gap and it's swallowing you up. You're trying to run the same playbook that you ran five years ago. The game has changed. And instead of updating the strategy, you're just assuming that you're the problem, but you're not the problem. Your systems are the problem.

Your systems are outdated and outdated systems don't hold up under increased pressure. So misdiagnosis number three is I should be able to handle this or even worse, I should be able to handle more. Misdiagnosis number four, I just need to try harder. No, no you don't. Trying harder is punishment when what you need is a strategy. Effort without direction leads to burnout, not progress. And here's the truth.

If you've been trying harder for months or years and you're still stuck, the problem isn't your effort. It's the approach. You don't need to work harder. You need to think differently. You need a smaller starting point. You need a clearer target. You need a better order of operations. You need to stop treating your overwhelm like a motivation problem and start treating it like a system problem. Because here's what I know. When women finally stop trying to force themselves

through willpower and building and white knuckling, they can finally start building structure that actually supports their life, their real life, when everything has changed. And this doesn't happen overnight, but steadily they start to change things in a sustainable way, in a way that actually holds. And that's the shift that I'm gonna walk you through now. So.

This really is what I consider to be the shift that can change everything. So if trying harder isn't the answer, what is the answer? Well, this is where I introduce you to a framework that changed everything for me and for the hundreds of women that I have been helping with this over the years with this exact same kind of struggle. I call it the four pillar reset path and it's built on this one simple truth. You can't act on what you can't see.

So let me break it down for you. Pillar number one is clarity. You aren't able, you aren't capable, you can't act on what you can't see. Much of the time when you feel stuck, it's not because you're incapable, it's because you're trying to move forward without a clear picture of where you're actually going. You've got a vague sense of, need to get my life together, or I should be doing more, or I need to do this better, but that's not clarity, that's just muddy pressure.

and pressure without direction just creates more overwhelm in the spiral spins. Clarity means knowing what actually matters and that not everything can matter. Not everything should matter, but what actually matters right now in this season given your real life capacity. So when you're able to get clear, then you can stop spinning and you stop second guessing and you start moving forward.

with intention instead of just reacting to whatever's loudest. So that's pillar one, clarity. Pillar two is focus. So here's the thing, trying to do everything creates failure. Doing the right thing creates momentum. Let me say that again. Trying to do everything creates failure. Why? Because it's not possible. But doing the right thing creates momentum.

When you're overloaded, your instinct is to catch up on all of it, to fix all the things, to handle all the responsibilities, but that doesn't work because all that does is spread you even thinner. Focus means choosing one meaningful action and doing that well instead of doing 10 things poorly. It means saying, this is what I'm working on today and the rest can wait.

That doesn't mean that you're being lazy. It doesn't mean that you are ignoring things. It's actually a strategy. It's a strategic move. And it's the only way to build forward momentum when you're already at capacity. So pillar two is focus. Pillar three is rhythm. This essentially means routines that fit your real life, not your ideal life, not your old life, but the kind that actually stabilize your days.

I can't tell you how many women come to me with these elaborate morning routines or schedules or planning systems that look amazing on paper, but they fall apart the second that life gets noisy. And they blame themselves. They think, I just can't do anything. I can't stick to anything and I can't do anything right. And then they stay stuck there. But the problem isn't you. The problem isn't them. It's the system. If the system doesn't flex and bend,

with real life. If it doesn't allow for the fluidity of life, it's not going to work. Rhythm is about building small, sustainable habits that stabilize your entire day, even when there's plenty of chaos woven throughout it. It's not about perfection. It's about consistency in the things that actually matter and not worrying about the rest. So pillar number three is

rhythm. It's about establishing your flexible rhythms. And pillar number four is sustain. So this really is the final piece. When life gets loud again, and it will, you need to know how to adjust instead of collapse. Because here's the truth. You're never going to arrive at a season where everything is calm, quiet, and under control. That time is never going to happen. Life is loud. Responsibilities shift. Unpredicted

unexpected and unpredicted things happen. This is just the way of life. And if your only strategy is hold it together until things calm down, well, you're gonna be stuck in survival mode, drowning for forever. So, sustain means building the skill of recalibration. It means learning how to adjust your plan without abandoning it. It means trusting yourself to start again without shame.

because starting again isn't failure, it's wisdom. So here's what I want you to take away from this. You don't need a full reset. You don't need to blow up everything and start from scratch. You need a smaller starting point and a better order. And so it's clarity first, and then it's focus, then it's rhythm, then it's sustained. That's the path, and it works. Not because it's magic, but because it respects your real life and meets you where you actually are.

So let me tell you about one of my clients. I'm gonna call her Sarah. This is not her real name, but her story is real, and I'm sharing it because I think you're gonna see yourself in it. So when Sarah came to me, she was convinced that she'd lost herself. She used to be the woman who could handle things. She managed her home, her kids, her marriage, her work, all of it. And she was the go-to person. She was the capable one. She was the one who everyone could rely on. She was the problem solver. She was the doer.

But somewhere along the way, everything started to shift. Her kids hit the teenage years and suddenly they didn't need her in the same way. And her work responsibilities, they shifted. She had a new manager and that changed things. And then there was the emotional load of these things and the emotional load felt like it was crushing her. Her marriage, it felt distant and she found herself in the middle of her life feeling disoriented.

She felt like she wasn't present in any of it. And she told me, I don't even know who I am anymore. I feel like I'm just going through the motions. I'm not present. I'm not here. I'm not engaged. I'm just tired. And I'm just barely existing all the time. And then she said the one thing that I hear over and over and over again. She said, I think I'm just lazy because I know what I should be doing, but I just can't make myself do it. Does this sound familiar?

Here's what I saw, Sarah wasn't lazy. She was operating at 150 % capacity, and she had been for years. Her brain was so overloaded with all of these invisible responsibilities, all of the emotional labor, and all of the decision fatigue that it had started shutting down. She wasn't failing. She wasn't slipping. Her system was actually protecting her. And so here's what we did.

We didn't start by adding more to her plate and we didn't create an elaborate morning routine or a color coded planner. We started by separating noise from needs. And so I asked her one question, what actually matters right now? Not what should matter, but what actually does? And that question, just that one question, it started to kind of crack something open a little bit. And she realized that she'd been trying to do everything equally well.

She was trying to be the perfect mom, the perfect wife, the perfect daughter, the perfect friend, the perfect employee. she was, and in trying to do it all, she was doing none of it well. And that made her feel like a failure. And so we gave her one clear starting point, not 10, but one. And for her, was this, 10 minutes a day, just 10 minutes, where she did something just for herself, no agenda, no productivity, just space to breathe. That was it, that was her starting point.

And at first she resisted, she said, that feels selfish and I don't have time for that. And I said, I know, but what if the reason you feel like you're failing at everything is because you're never giving yourself a chance to reset? What if 10 minutes of space and breathing room is actually the thing that is going to bring you your confidence, your calm and your capability back to you. And so she tried it, she was willing to try it. And within two weeks, two weeks already, something shifted.

She wasn't suddenly doing everything perfectly, but she was thinking more clearly. She was making decisions faster and ones that she didn't second guess herself on. She was showing up to be more present with her family, not because she was trying harder, but because she wasn't running on fumes anymore. And then we built from there. We were able to remove a bunch of the mental static that she'd been carrying, things she thought she had to do, but didn't.

Expectations she was holding onto that no one else even cared about. Choosing what I call bare minimum wins. And we chose these constantly throughout the day for her. We gave her a tiny rhythm to stabilize her day. Just three things. It was a morning anchor. It was an afternoon pause and reset. And then an evening reflection. Nothing elaborate, just small touch points that kept her grounded. And here's what happened. Her capability, it came back to her.

shockingly fast. And again, it wasn't because she changed, it was because her strategy changed. She didn't need motivation. Turns out she just needed a direction to go in that she could actually believe in. She needed someone to help her see what actually mattered and give her permission to let go of all the other stuff. And that's what I want you to hear today too. You're not broken and you don't need to become someone new.

You just need a strategy that actually fits your real life. And when you have that, everything starts to shift. So here's where I want to give you something that you can use right now, today, this week. Something small that will prove to you that you are not broken and that you can still take action. I call this the three question reset and it is only going to take about 90 seconds. Here's how it works. Every morning or whenever you're feeling that fog rolling in, pause and ask yourself,

these three questions. Question number one, what actually matters today? Or what actually matters in this moment? Not what's on your to-do list, not what you think you should be doing, but what actually matters? Maybe it's showing up to be present for one conversation. Maybe it's completing one work task. Maybe it's just getting through the day without snapping at your kids. Whatever it is, name it, get specific because you can't act on what you can't see.

So what is one thing that matters today or in this moment? Question number two, what's meaningful action I can take that aligns, right? That aligns with what you just said mattered. Notice I said one thing, not five, not 10, but one. What's one thing that you can do today that moves you towards what actually matters? Maybe it's sending that email, maybe it's taking a 10 minute walk, maybe it's saying no to something that doesn't serve you anymore.

One action, that's it. Question number three, what can I let go of guilt free? And I think this is the most important question because most of the time you're not just carrying what actually needs to be done, you're carrying guilt and expectations and invisible should do's that no one else is even thinking about, but they are suffocating you. And so ask yourself, what can I let go of today? What can I release without guilt? And then actually let it go.

even if it feels uncomfortable, even if your brain tells you that you should be doing it, let it go. And here's why this works. You restore capability through clarity, not force. And when you take 90 seconds to get clear on what actually matters, choose one meaningful action, and then release the guilt around what doesn't, you're giving your brain exactly what it needs to function again. You're not overriding your exhaustion, you're working with it.

And that small reset, it proves to you that you can still think, that you can still make decisions, that you can still act, you can still follow through. You're not broken, you just need a moment to clear the noise. So try it today, this week, and notice what shifts because I promise you it will. Now, I wanna talk for a minute about why this approach resonates so deeply with certain women and maybe you're one of them.

Some women want motivation. They want someone to hype them up, to cheer them on, to tell them they've got this. Some women want checklists. They want step-by-step plans and organized systems and clear instructions. Some women, and those things do have their place. Let me say that. Some women do have those, some women do need those things and they can help. I actually give women both of these things at times. But there is a third group of women.

And these are the ones who resonate most deeply with what I do, especially when they're in their bones sort of tired. These are the women who don't just want to be told what to do. They want someone who can think with them, someone who can help them see what they can't see on their own, someone who can help them untangle the mess in their head and create a strategy that actually makes sense.

These women don't need a cheerleader. They need someone who can give them strategy. They don't need a checklist. They need clarity. And they don't need someone to tell them to try harder either. They need someone to help them think differently. And if that's you, if you're nodding your head right now and thinking, yes, that's exactly what I need, then you are in the right place. Because that is exactly what I do. I don't just...

hand out tips and hope that they stick. I help you see what's actually happening underneath the overwhelm. I help you build a strategy that fits your real life. And I walk with you until your clarity comes back to you. And when it does, everything changes. And it's not because you're someone new, but because you finally had the support and structure that you needed to be yourself again.

Well, all right, friend, we've covered a lot today, and I want to leave you with this. You're not lazy, you're not failing, and you haven't lost yourself either. You're overloaded, and your brain is doing exactly what it's designed to do when it's overloaded. It's shutting down to protect you and keep just the most important systems functioning. But here's the good news. Your capability can be on the road to coming back. You just need to give yourself permission to reset.

to think differently, to stop trying to force your way through and start building a strategy that actually works. And so here's what I want you to do this week. Try the three question reset just once and see what happens. Notice how your thinking shifts. When you get clear on what actually matters, notice what shifts. Choose one small meaningful action and then let go of the guilt with all of the rest. And if you wanna share what surprised you,

Leave a comment right here. I'd love to hear from you. Because here's the truth, this is just the beginning. What's coming next is going to help you rebuild the confidence, the clarity, and the follow through that you thought you lost. That's where we're going next. The truth is you didn't lose any of these things. It's still there. You just need someone to help you find your way back to it. And I'm here for that. So thanks for being here today. Let's keep going. We'll talk again soon.