E16 - Why Your Money Feels Stretched No Matter How Motivated You Are

Every January, motivation shows up again.

New goals.
New promises.
New discipline.

And yet, for so many families, money still feels tight, stretched, and frustratingly stuck — even when they’re doing “everything right.”

In this episode of Before the Returns, Jaden breaks down why motivation keeps coming back year after year — and why that’s not a failure. It’s a signal.

This isn’t a conversation about working harder, budgeting better, or finding more discipline. It’s about understanding the hidden conflict inside most financial lives — where one dollar is asked to do too many jobs at the same time.

You’ll learn:

• Why motivation keeps showing up (and what it’s actually trying to fix)
• The real reason money feels stretched even at decent income levels
• Why trying harder often increases financial tension instead of relieving it
• How financial conflict creates stress, guilt, and decision fatigue
• What families who feel calm and in control with money do differently

This episode is about clarity, not shame.
 And it sets the stage for building a financial system that doesn’t rely on constant motivation to survive.

Key Takeaways

• Motivation is not the problem — it’s a signal
• Most families aren’t broke; they’re financially conflicted
• When money is pulled in too many directions, progress feels impossible
• Effort increases pressure when the underlying setup doesn’t change
• Financial peace comes from removing conflict, not adding discipline

Learn more at www.jadenzubal.com | Follow @jadenzubal | Join the *Before the Returns Weekly* newsletter

📩 Questions or ideas? Email: jadenzubal.wealth@gmail.com

⚖️ Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. It is not financial, tax, or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making financial decisions.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Every January, motivation shows up again. New goals, new promises, and new discipline. Or so we think. But if motivation actually worked, your money would feel different by now. So why does it always feel like you're trying harder but getting nowhere? If you stay with me, I'm going to explain why motivation keeps failing you and what it's actually trying to fix. Hello and welcome to another episode of Before the Returns. I'm your host, Jaden Zuball, and today I want to talk about motivation, January, what happens every year in January, and what we can do to solve this problem of big buildup and falling off the cliff again, right? Things in January are typically very different than what we see in December. And I want to help you solve that problem a little bit. Let's talk about why motivation keeps coming back first. Okay. So it's not that motivation is a problem. It's not a bad thing. But in today's episode, there's going to be some moments where we might even frame it as if it is a bad thing. But in reality, motivation is just a signal. It's a signal that uh something's off, right? It's a signal that we are falling behind somewhere. We have problems in our bank account. We have bills that need to be paid, problems that that exist, or progress doesn't feel like it's really happening. And so motivation is just there to tell us, hey, there's a problem and it's time to solve it. So we don't just randomly get motivated. We get motivated because we want to solve that problem, because we want to find solutions. It's how we're hardwired. So if motivation is what shows up when something underneath isn't working, then the question is how do we take that motivation and turn it into something that becomes more stable and more long-term? Something other than this brief fleeting moment of feeling really empowered and ready to go. Because again, motivation is not a bad thing. But if we run solely off of motivation, I can almost guarantee you what you will see in your life is this, right? You're gonna see the roller coasters because motivation will never last. Something I was thinking about as I was preparing for this episode is that in my career, in the businesses that I've worked with and the few hundred clients that I have, some of the most successful, successful people that I know today, some of the people that are doing the very best, and in in fact, one of those would be my own business partner, are ex-military. And now there's this isn't because military specifically is what created this type of individual, but it highlights a very specific personality trait, and it's that there is uh almost an extreme level of discipline with some of these guys. In fact, there's a there's a book over here, you can't see it on the video, but over on my shelf, off to the side, called Extreme Ownership, that is from an ex-Navy SEAL. They wrote that book. And really what I find with a lot of these guys is that they have an extreme level of discipline. So they don't really operate very much off of motivation. They still get motivated at times for specific things, and it does help push towards goals, but the extreme level of discipline is what has created success for these guys that is unparalleled. Just across the board, I've seen significantly more success for them than I have for those who struggle with the discipline factor. So one of the big things we have to come to grips with is if you really want to generate financial security and financial success, there's no way around it. You have to create discipline. A lot of you have probably heard the phrase that how you do one thing is how you do everything. And I think we can apply that to this lesson today. How you show up for yourself, how you show up for your family, how you show up for your clients and your friends. It's how you show up in everything, right? If you wake up in the morning and you take two or three hours to get moving and it's tough, which I've done at times, quickly that starts to snowball into the rest of your life. It snowballs into how you're showing up for everything. So it doesn't lead us to a very high level of success, because again, typically when you're in those patterns, you're just following motivation patterns. It means you're not very motivated right now, and so you just slow down. But if you create discipline, if you create systems for yourself, which we've talked a lot about systems on this podcast, and typically from a financial aspect, but before you can even get to that, you really got to hit this, right? And I figured this is a great time of year to focus on get away from just the January motivation. One of the things that I always think about is how there's a statistic. I just read about this today because I wanted to reconfirm it, but statistically, those who there's a huge surge of people, typically 30% more that sign up for gym memberships and go to the gym in the month of January. However, by say mid-March, almost 80% of that surge has already stopped going. That is exactly what I'm talking about with motivation versus discipline. You can be motivated on January 1st and you can tell yourself, here are all the resolutions, here are all the things that we're going to do this year for my personal life and my company and my family and all these things. But by January 15th, that motivation might already start to fade and your roller coaster effect is coming into play, right? Because you have to turn motivation into discipline. You have to write those goals down and you have to create discipline. You have to remind yourself that motivation will not last. There will come a day that you're going to wake up and say, you know what? I don't feel like it today. And if you have a choice at that moment, you can either get up and do it, or you can give in to the motivation roller coaster and lay back down, right? And what you choose right there will determine the outcome of both your life and your financial life. So it's really important that we get away from just this typical motivation factor. So part of the way to do that is one, we've got to we've got to understand that when we lose motivation, it doesn't mean that we're irresponsible or it doesn't even mean we're lazy. It just means that we haven't either been given the tools, we don't have an understanding yet, or we don't fully grasp what we need to do to get away from the idea of motivation. Okay, so shifting gears for a second here, there's another thought around motivation, which is that sometimes when we try harder, we actually make it worse. It's this big buildup of January 1st, we're gonna go all in on whatever this new thing is when we're going to be really aggressive about it, put all of our time and energy and thoughts and resources towards this thing, and we get this massive buildup, and then you know what happens? You get burned out. You get you experience burnout, and you just are done, and you can't do it. And the motivation cuts out and we fall off. Because motivation adds a lot of effort, effort adds a lot of pressure, and pressure increases conflict, that internal conflict of oh no, I'm burning out, can't keep up, can't do it, right? Some examples of this might be let's say we are setting a goal to be able to buy a house. I'm gonna buy a house in a year. So this year we're gonna spend all of our time focusing on that goal, we're gonna cut way back on our spending and just go head on into this thing. It's not that it's a bad thing to do that, and that's a great goal to have, but if you go too hard too fast and you just cut way back on your spending and you no longer enjoy your daily life because now you don't go out to eat or you don't do whatever that thing is you like to do every Friday or every Saturday, and you basically just give up on life until you reach the goal. Sure, there are some people that are gonna pull that off, but most people are going to lose that motivation and then you're gonna make a hard turn the other direction, right? And instead of working towards our goal now, we're gonna turn hard the other direction because we get so frustrated from not living life anymore that we say, you know what, forget it. It's impossible, I can't do it anymore. And that's what we have to avoid. So we've got to create some discipline, and part of creating discipline is maybe it's time to create some systems. Okay, so we need to have a little bit of structure and say, you know what, instead of cutting everything out, what we'll do is change from going out to eat three days a week to we're gonna go once a week, or from five days a week to three days, or whatever it is, or we'll eat at a different restaurant this time. And you can still live your life, but you have some discipline and some systems around how you make choices. So you can still make the choices to do things that you enjoy, but you have you're being conscious around those choices and the impact that they're going to have on your future planning. Okay, so motivation, think of it essentially as a warning light. It is our warning light on the dash, right? You're driving down the road, you see it pop on. All of a sudden, if you're driving down the road in your car and you see a check engine light come on, you're probably motivated at that point to get your car checked out. Same thing in your normal life. Going through life, doing things, there's going to be a light that comes on and says, okay, all of a sudden I am motivated to do this thing. Not a bad thing. But motivation isn't meant to carry you through life, it's meant to get the engine started and say, okay, now there's something that needs attention. Now there's something that I need to jump on. So how do we apply this to our financial life, right? Because that's why most of you are here. We're on this podcast to talk about our financial lives. Some families design money so conflict is removed. Because money is one of those things that it's really easy to get motivated about for a short period of time. And then it's also really easy to lose that motivation and just it's like we're on a hamster wheel, right? Heard people talk about the rat race before. The rat race often happens because we either just never get any motivation or discipline, or we get some and we lose it and we just keep cycling. So the goal should never be to stay motivated forever, because it's very unlikely that's going to happen. I don't personally know anybody that has happened to, but the goal is to use that motivation to build systems and discipline so that you no longer require the motivation. Okay. So build the discipline now, while you have the motivation, so that one month, two months, three months down the road, when you lose the motivation, you've created habits and discipline and systems that say, okay, now we can keep going. Now we can keep doing it. So families who build wealth, it's not that they push harder every year. They don't all of a sudden have more new motivation that's always coming up, but they stop asking motivation to do a systems job. They had the motivation initially, and they use that motivation to snowball into something bigger. Okay, so it's not that you're failing when you lose motivation. Again, you're not lazy, you're you're not failing, you're not losing at the game of life. What you're doing is you're responding to a bad setup. You're responding to a bad system. Your body says, okay, motivation's gone, it's going away. I don't have any systems or any habits or anything to rely on now. So I'm gonna go back to my normal state. So if this episode helped add value for you, please consider liking, sharing, subscribing. It helps us grow the channel, and we'll look forward to talking to you next week.