Motivation in the Winter - How to STOP "Shoulding" Yourself

If you're like me, motivation can be TOUGH sometimes and ESPECIALLY heading into the cold winter season. In today's episode, I'm breaking down how we can use CONFIRMATION BIAS to our advantage so we stop "shoulding" ourselves and start getting sh*t done. 

As always, thank you for listening and please continue sharing! Love you!

Personal Growth | Motivation | Mindset | Personal Development | Self Improvement | Mental Reframe | Empower | Evolve | Rise and Energize

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Transcript

0:40

Hello. Hello. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm so happy you're here. If you're like me and. You struggle in the winter months to stay motivated, then this episode is for you. I'm assuming if you clicked on this title that you need a little boost and maybe a mental reframe, and that's exactly what I'm hoping to give you today. So I am going to dive into this concept about stopping should yourselves. Okay, let me say that again. I love to say stop shooting yourself. I think that someone said it a long time ago when I was early on in kind of my reworking my health journey. They were like, stop shooting yourself. Just do it. You know, change should into will or can or. And I love that, but I actually wanna do a little bit of a different mental reframe for whenever we're saying, oh, I really should blah, blah, blah, and get into that here in a minute. So if you struggle in the winter with motivation, or you just struggle in general with motivation, or you're really trying to do something and you've had a really tough. Time starting or beginning something new. Then this is the episode for you. I am so happy you're here and I hope that whenever you finish this episode, you go and do the thing that you need to do. Whether that's as small as just, you know, cleaning your house, like getting some laundry, go, going, something like that. Step forward in the right direction there. Or it's something major having to do with your career or a relationship or. Could be anything. So hopefully you enjoy this episode. If you do, I would love if you share it with a friend and make sure that you subscribe on any platform that you listen or watch podcasts on. If you're watching on YouTube right now, you can see that I'm already kind of in the winter mindset. It's the first really cold week, I feel like, of the year here in Kansas City where I live. And I have a, you can see I have a blanket on me, and my dog, ed slash cohost is camped out next to me on the futon. And he loves the winter, but he also hates it because he gets shorter walks. So. Let's get into it. So first I wanna talk about this idea of confirmation bias because you may have heard this before, but something that we need to understand before we get into the actual application of mentally reframing. The word should in our mind is that our brains are wired to. Confirm the things that we already believe to be true. So you may have heard this before, but a great, like a really easy example is say that you hear some from someone. Oh, you know what? The market for Toyota Rav fours, that's what me and my husband drive. But Toyota Rav fours are being sold like crazy right now. There's Toyota Rav fours. Everywhere on the streets, like it's in a crazy surge. Everybody's buying these cars. Well then when you go out on the streets, well, when you drive on the highway or wherever you are, you're gonna start noticing Toyota Rav fours because. Someone told you that this is the case, you probably believed it without really looking into it, and now you're like, oh my God, they're right. Rav fours are everywhere. I know that for me, whenever I started driving our Toyota RAV4, I started spotting Rav fours everywhere. My husband would start going Rav gang and. He would just be, he would notice and point out Rav fours, so it's something that we notice, but even if, let's say Kias or Fords or trucks or Teslas or whatever, even if another brand was actually out more frequently or more often than Rav fours. You're gonna notice the RAV fours more often. I feel like after this episode, because I just said RAV4 like 30 times, you're gonna go out on the streets and you're gonna recognize, you're gonna be like, oh my God, she's right. There's Rav fours everywhere. Not really, but it is something that your brain already believed to be true, and so it continued to confirm that bias. Another really easy example of this is, so another like kind of inside joke that my husband, Jared and I have is that he, he never puts the salt away. I, and I do believe that to be true. I guess I could work on reframing this in my mind, but when I believe the statement. Jared never puts the salt away after he's done cooking or baking or whatever it is that he's doing with the salt. Then I start noticing every time that the salt is on the counter. And there was a really funny time that we actually, it was like the first time that we talked about this.'cause it's not something that actually bothers me very much. I actually kind of like tidying little things like that. It'd be different if he was leaving stuff out all the time, but I would always put the salt away after he was done. And one time he, he goes up to the counter and he's like, oh, you left out the salt. And I was like, you have to be joking, right? Because I was like, think about me. And when I cook. Do I ever use that salt? No. Uh, we have like a specific shaker that I use and he uses the actual like canister that you buy from the store. And I was like, I always use the shaker. If you think about this in your head, like, think about me making anything. I always use the shaker. He was like, oh. I guess that's true. I guess you wouldn't have left this salt out. That must've been me. But it's just a funny thing now that whenever he goes up to the counter and he sees that he, clearly it's him that left out the salt on the counter, he leaves the salt on the counter and he goes, oh, you left out the salt again. And it's kind of just a funny thing. Now it's just a little inside joke that we have. But all that to say that in my brain, I. I have this belief that Jared always leaves out the salt. So what do I notice whenever the salt is out, I notice that he left it out. Do I notice the times that he puts it away? Honestly, no. I don't like, I don't really pay attention to the fact that when he's done cooking something or when he's done baking something or just seasoning whatever the food is that he is making, that I don't notice if he puts it away, because I really only notice. What I already believe to be true, which is that he always leaves the salt out. And if you are in a relationship, you probably have statements like that with your husband or wife or partner or whomever it is. You probably have statements like that in your brain that you believe to be true. And some of them are not all, are not as light and fun and silly as this one. And so that's kind of one of the things that I wanna work on today. When you believe something to be true about someone. Your are going, your brain is going to find evidence to support that. That belief is true. It's going to confirm it because our brains confirm things that we already believe to be true. It's just an easier neural network or whatever for our brains to believe. So it's going to impact our relationships, it's gonna impact our health, it's gonna impact our careers. It's gonna impact a ton of things. The last thing, the last example I'll give of this kind of confirmation bias scenario is if you don't know me. Or maybe you do know me and you just truthfully didn't realize this is what I do for work. But if you don't know me, I work at the Community Blood Center, which is the local blood bank in Kansas City, Missouri, and my primary job is to book blood drives in the territory that I manage. Make sure that they're successful. And what that means is actually making sure that donors show up and that the amount of donors we expected to show up do show up and are able to donate blood. So that's in a nutshell what I do for work. Now, it's really easy during the holiday season, it's really tough holiday season. It's really easy to go into the season with the belief. That the holidays are just a really bad time to host a blood drive. Nobody wants to host a blood drive'cause they're focused on traveling to see family. They're focused on buying presents. They don't have extra time because their time is spent elsewhere. If I believe that to be true, it's going to directly impact the way I think about this because as soon as somebody tells me no to hosting a blood drive, I'm gonna go, yep, knew it. Confirmed bad time to host a blood drive. Then I'm going to act on that and I'm gonna make fewer calls or fewer outreaches to actually go book blood drives. During this time, I'm gonna not try as hard, whenever I'm trying to recruit donors to come to blood drives, because I'm gonna think, yeah, it's just a bad time to donate blood. Versus if I flip that on its head and instead I go into the season thinking the holiday season has actually a great time to host blood drives. Here's why. Because when people are going through the holidays or during these winter months, when the winter weather is bad, this is an indoor activity and people are doing fewer outdoor activities. You know, during the summer there's all sorts of lake vacations and pool days, and so many reasons for people not to donate blood. But in the winter months, everybody's inside kind of crabby, kind of cranky. Going out and giving blood is. Gift giving opportunity and something that could really bring up someone's spirits. Just seeing another person when we don't normally see each other as often because we're indoors so much during the winter, that could really lift someone's spirits, that could really make them enjoy that and wanna come back again during a winter month. Another thing is that. A lot of people at the end of the year, I know that a lot of my coworkers are experiencing this. A lot of people need to use their PTO before the end of the year, like their rollover expires or whatever. If you're with, you know what I mean when I'm talking about that, right? You have a certain amount of PTO and it expires at the end of the. Well, there's probably a lot of people out there that have that as the case. So if we host a blood drive on like a Monday or a Friday when lots of people are taking PTO and we're hosting at their local church or their local commun community center or something like that, those people probably have nothing else to do. You know, they're gonna take that time to go and donate blood. So when I go into the holiday season. Or when we go into the holiday season believing that actually this is the best time to host a blood drive. You know what that's gonna do? It's go. I'm going to, it's gonna make my brain look for evidence to support that belief, because that's a belief that I already have belief to be true, right? If I keep saying that to myself, oh my gosh, the holidays are the best time to host a blood drive. I'm going to find evidence to support that. And as soon as somebody says yes to hosting a blood drive during the holidays. I'm gonna be like, oh my God. Wow. That's awesome. That confirms what I already believe to be true. And then it's gonna gimme momentum to continue seeking that evidence by finding people who are gonna host blood drives. Right? So instead of going into it thinking, as soon as I get a no thinking Yep. New it, it's like as soon as I get a yes, I, I go, yep. Knew it. People love hosting blood drives during this time of year, so. Those are just a few examples of confirmation bias. I do wanna, I screenshotted something earlier with like the AI overview on Google. I did double check that this is accurate because I know AI overview isn't always, but I wanted to read this to you just to further support what I'm saying about confirmation bias and our brains finding evidence to support the beliefs that we already have in our brains. So this said, the brain is wired to confirm existing beliefs through a phenomenon called confirmation bias. That's what I've been talking about, which is the tendency to seek, interpret, and recall information that supports what we already. This happens because the brain prioritizes efficiency and it feels easier and more rewarding to fit new information into existing mental stories rather than to create new ones. This is actually something, if you didn't listen to last week's episode about changing your mind. This is something that I mentioned on there, that the brain looks for patterns and it looks for consistencies because it's trying to be efficient with What it is believing. So if you didn't listen to that episode, go back and listen to that episode, but. Moving on with, there's just one more sentence on this little description that I wanna read. This bias can be reinforced through neural pathways and the way the brain processes information leading us to subconsciously filter out or downplay evidence that contradicts our views, right? So the important part of confirmation bias, I would argue, maybe the most important thing to realize is that not only does it confirm the beliefs you already. Believe to be true. It also negates all of the other beliefs. So whenever Jared goes into kitchen and I believe, oh, he never puts the salt away, if I, even if I see him put the salt away, my brain kind of just erases that. My brain just kind of says, it doesn't even notice that. It's like when you're on the car and you are in the car and you see a bunch of Teslas driving around, but then there's the one RAV4, and you know that RAV4 is. Are being sold like crazy right now. It kind of just ignores the other evidence. It ignores the Teslas or the trucks or all of that other, all of those other things. So that's why this is so valuable and why I feel like we can use it to our advantage going into these winter months when we're so demotivated. We're cold, we don't wanna do the things that we know we should do. And that's what I'm gonna talk about. So. How many of you are going through the winter months, or really, this can apply to any month, whenever, especially if you're trying to start a new habit or routine or something. But I find myself saying to myself throughout the day, whenever it gets colder and I'm inside more, man, I really should work out. Or man, I really should walk the dog. Or Man, I really should fold the laundry. Or I really should make that phone call today, or I really should. Edit the podcast today. And these are all things that when we say that to ourself, our brain. Our brain confirms the idea, okay, I really should be doing this. But then whenever you don't do that thing, your brain tells you, oh, you didn't do the thing that you should have done. And so that makes you lazy, or it makes you inconsistent, or it makes you unmotivated, or whatever that thing is. So I really wanna reframe this going into the winter. So for me, this is something I've been working on recently. I wanna say that I first saw this on some social media platform. I wish I could give them credit, but I can't remember who it was. But they were reframing I should into, I want. Okay, let me give you an example of this. So first, the first thing that I thought of was, I really should work out today. Instead of thinking, instead of telling yourself or telling your partner or your roommate, or whoever's around you, yeah, I really should work out today. Tell yourself I want to work out today. I know this seems simple and it seems trivial, but we just talked about the fact that when we believe something to be true, our brain confirms that thing. So when we say to ourself enough times, I want to work out. I want to work out. I want to move my body, I want to exercise. Your brain starts to believe that to be true and starts to confirm those beliefs. So whenever you say I should work out, quick switch, say I want to work out, and then you if that, if you don't believe that to be true quite yet, tell your expand on that. Right. So I want to work out because I wanna feel good in my body. I want to work out because I really want the endorphin rush that I get afterward. I want to work out because. I wanna feel good in my genes. I want to work out because I want to get stronger. So whatever the thing is that you value the most, and honestly it might be kind of an aesthetic thing, or it might be kind of a vanity thing for now. That's okay. Just as long as it gets you to the action that you want to do it is helpful. So as you go throughout the day or as you, I, for me, I'm a morning workout person. If I wake up and I go, uh, I don't wanna out, but I really should. I am trying to rework that into, I don't really feel like working out right now, but I want to because I know I'll feel better after I do it. I don't know if you could hear that, but Eder just did a really big yawn. But, that's an example with working out. Here's another example. So I should take my dog on a walk. I, I'm only thinking of this because Eder just yawned and he reminded me of that, but my dog ed is here with me. I really should take my dog on a walk. He's looking at me like, yeah, you should. So in the winter months, again, it gets a lot more difficult to want to go on a walk. And so I'm going there. Ugh. We really should take him. We really should take him, but I don't really want to. Instead, let's reframe that. I want to take my dog on a walk. Here's why. It's the best part of his day. I wanna take him on a walk because he's so cute. When he sniffs stuff up, I wanna take him on a walk because when he looks at me, I just, on our walks, when he looks at me, he just. He has puppy dog eyes, and it just makes me so happy and makes me feel so good that I'm doing something good for him. I wanna go on a walk because once I get outside, I'm probably gonna feel better. I wanna go on a walk because it's the easiest way to get me off of my butt, and when I get home, I'll actually be. Motivated to maybe do something else. I, so these are ways that we can reframe. I should into, I want, okay. Edward's leaving now. He's like, I made my point. Let's go. And another one. So I was talking about the blood drives that I host or that I put on for my work. Another one could be in your work. So maybe you go into work and at the very beginning of the day you're like, Ugh, I really should. Look through my email or I really should make that phone call today instead of saying, I should reframe this into, I want to. So for me, it would be like I want to call my tentative blood drives to confirm because it's gonna be way harder to do that once we get further into the holiday season. Or I want to do this because it'll make my life easier down the stretch. Maybe this is not as relatable for you'cause you don't have this type of job, but like if you have a sales job or you have a. Job where you need to make connections, you need to text people or call people or email people or something, then this is something where you can go, I want to reach out to these people because the quicker I reach out, the quicker I'm gonna get a response. You reframe that into a I want instead of an I should. I really think this is a game changer you guys. Another one that's really relatable for me is I should edit the podcast today. So maybe you have a hobby like or you have, or it's just chores around the house, or you have a side hustle or a side business or something, and there's something that you've really been putting off or you really need to do and you keep going, Ugh, I really should do that today. This is your chance to say, I want, so for me, whenever I say I really should edit the podcast today, really what I'm saying is I want to edit the podcast today. Here's why I want to be a consistent podcaster. I want my listeners to have fresh, consistent content every Monday morning whenever they wake up. I want people to know me as a reliable content producer, right? So there are things that. I can put into the I want category that might not come up as easily. If we say I should, I really believe you guys that if you start saying, I want instead of I should. If you just replace Should with want. Of course they have to be things that you actually want to do. Things that are actually pushing you in the direction of the life that you wanna live and that you're obsessed about and the version of yourself that you want to be. Then I feel like replacing should with want is really a game changer and it really does lift your motivation. I've been doing it for the last couple weeks, kind of testing it out for you because I don't wanna come on here and say something that I don't think is true. But I really think that whenever we say I should. We're kind of shooting ourselves, right? We need to say, I want to, and I actually feel like this is a little bit more powerful than I will, or I can, or I am, just because it. Re, it reinforces the idea in your brain that this is something that you actually desire. This is, this isn't just something that you're hoping that you can do. This is something that you desire and that you want at your core. So that's telling your brain that I want this. I'm gonna go after it, and that's gonna spark the motivation to do it. So. Hopefully this helps you. I really appreciate you listening in. Please drop me a comment on YouTube or leave me a review. Apple Podcasts in particular, is a great place to leave a review even if you don't listen on Apple Podcasts. If you have an iPhone and you have that app and you listen regularly on Spotify, apple Podcasts, whenever you leave a review. It makes your podcast way more searchable and pop up more often for other people. So that would be a really valuable way to help out if you are loving these episodes and are enjoying the Rise in Energized podcast that I just recently revamped. So thanks again.