The Women Who Win Don’t Wait to Feel Motivated

In this episode, we’re talking about why it’s naive to believe that one day motivation will magically show up, you’ll finally take action, and then you’ll never fall off again. The truth is, wanting to “be healthy” is not always deep enough to keep you committed when life gets busy, your feelings change, or the process gets uncomfortable. I’m breaking down why your coach’s job is not to constantly motivate you, but to guide you, challenge you, and hold you accountable while you learn how to create motivation from within. Because the women who actually succeed are not the ones who always feel motivated, they are the ones who know exactly why they are doing this and choose to keep showing up anyway.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Motivation is the lamest excuse for not following through on the things that you said that you were going to do that exist point blank. Period. End of sentence. End of story. The end. Honestly, let's just call the podcast right there. Just kidding. Welcome back to the embodiment lab. My name is Addy, and today we're talking about my least favorite topic known to mankind probably ever. Just kidding. That's a bit dramatic. But to be honest, I think motivation is just so juvenile, is really the only word that's coming to my brain. So we're gonna unpack all of the things around motivation. Listen, the cold hard truth about motivation is that it is fleeting. It is very unreliable. And it's gonna come and go. It's gonna feel real good when it's here, and you're gonna feel on fire, and you're gonna feel like, yeah, let me do all of these things. Let's go to the gym, let's do this, let's get our steps, let's eat super healthy. And then you give it a couple weeks if you're lucky, and motivation leaves you. And you're left flat on your ass because you're like, what the hell? I wanted this so bad a couple weeks ago. And now I don't anymore. The last thing that I want to do is go to the gym. The last thing I want to do is cook a healthy meal. But you know what you do, anyways? You keep freaking going. Right? If you don't have motivation, you need to go deeper as to why the heck you want this in the first place. It has to be deeper than I'm just doing this to be healthy, I want to look fit. It needs to be deeper than that. Your why behind why you do this in the first place needs to be so deep that you 50 years from now are still doing the things because your why still matters. Meaning it needs to have longevity. It can't be something that's like, oh, I just I wanna be active, I wanna be fit, I wanna be healthy. It needs to be so much deeper. It needs to be like I want to be able to still run around and be an active 80-year-old. Like I think about my grandpa constantly. Oh, we're gonna go off on a side tangent. Bear with me. My grandpa, we called him Papadie. He was my dad's stepdad. So he actually married my grandma. They were 20 years apart. Unfortunately, my grandma passed away from cancer several years ago, and then Papa Dye lived, gosh, I want to say 10, 12 years longer after she passed. So he lived and passed away until about a week out from turning 96. So old man, but he lived through World War II. Super cool hearing all the stories from him. That's not even relevant. I just like sharing the fact that he was in World War II. Anyways, so he was the most active old man that I know to this day. And my mom always says that my grandma kept him young because she was 20 years younger. But like he would be out mowing grass, taking care of chickens, up, running around, doing a bunch of stuff at like 90. He literally, for his 90th birthday, jumped out of an airplane. He went skydiving. Like this man was insane. So when I think about living a long, healthy lifestyle, I think about Papadie. Not to say that he was the healthiest, but like he kept moving, he kept going, he kept doing things, he kept pursuing things, and it kept him young all the way up until probably like his last two years. That's when he really liked started going downhill. But, anyways, that's what I think of, right? So I have this image of Pappadai growing up, and that is my idea of what it looks like to be a healthy and agile old person. And then I want to say it was Mother's Day of last year. I was with my mother. We went to brunch in downtown, and we were walking around, going through like these antique shops, and it was kind of busy because it was brunch time on Mother's Day, and so everybody else, everybody and their mother literally were out walking around downtown. And I remember watching this, it was a middle-aged mom, and she was helping her mom, who was probably, I don't know, 70s, 80s, in my head. That's pretty young considering that my grandpa lived to 96. But, anyways, she was literally helping her step on a curb, step up onto a curb. And it just made me think, wow, if you know, strength training is something that's it's not new, but it is becoming something that is more relevant and more people are doing it these days, more so than even 10 years ago. But it's like if you would keep moving and keep making healthy choices with your food, you would not need your daughter to help you step up on a curb that's literally four inches high, right? You wouldn't need help sitting down on a toilet. You wouldn't need help getting up off the couch. Because I've said this before, I'll say it again 10,000 times. What you don't use, you lose, right? So if you are not using your muscles, guess what? Your body is gonna decide, hey, we don't need these anymore. And it's gonna start breaking it down. That and the fact that especially as women, as we go through menopause, we are more likely to experience osteoporosis. And so our bones are weaker. So then we have less muscle tissue, less bone density, and then we're weak. And then on top of that, as a society, we're not eating enough food as women. We're restricting a lot, and so we're not fueling our bodies. And so all of these things are compounding to having weaker, older generations, which is so unfortunate. I hear so many people talk about how, oh, this just happens when you get older and you're like in your 30s, in your 40s. And I'm like, what are you doing? That is literally so young. Something about me is that I have always wanted to go against the grain. I just feel it so strongly in my soul that I just want to go against the grain. And so when I hear things like, oh, that's just what happens, my brain automatically goes, but why? Why does it have to be that way? Because if you just kind of let it happen without doing something to better yourself or to prevent it from happening, then like, yeah, of course it's gonna happen. But to be honest, I'm in my younger 20s, in my early 20s. I don't want to just accept the fact that when I'm 30, that my body just starts breaking down and slowing down. No, I want to be a kick-ass 30-year-old. I want to be a kick-ass 40-year-old. I want to be a hot mom. I want to look good. I want to feel good in my body. I want to feel good as I age gracefully. That's what I want. That's one of the things that I want. And so when you think deeper into why you're wanting this in the first place, that will carry you so much further. To be honest, that was a side tangent that I did not plan on going down, but hey, I'm glad we had the conversation. What actually struck this thought in my head? A few different things. One, the women that are in my DMs telling me that, oh, they just need motivation. They just want to be motivated. And I'm like, do you really think that's the answer to all of your problems? Do you really think that if you were just more motivated, that you would go to the gym, you would make better choices with your food, you would do the thing. Because I'll tell you right now, that's not the only answer that you need. You don't need to feel motivated. In fact, I cannot tell you how many workouts that I have showed up for, even like right before the workout, even literally after completing a couple sets that I have thought, man, I do not want to be here. I do not want to go to the gym. This is the last place that I want. I cannot tell you how many times that that has happened. And so it is so naive to think that your only problem is motivation. So naive. It is very naive to think that as avid gym goers, that we are always motivated. It's it's naive to think that you will just start showing up for yourself once you feel motivated and you will never not feel motivated again. That is naive. It is not possible to not ever experience feeling unmotivated again. You need to accept the fact that you will feel unmotivated. You're going to feel discouraged, you're going to feel doubt. You're going to feel these painful feelings. And you show up and you do the damn thing, anyways, because it's the women who win. Those women show up no matter what. The second thing that triggered this conversation in my brain is yesterday I was at the gym. Shocker with my boyfriend. Actually, sorry, I keep doing this with my fiance. I was with my fiance. We were training shoulders yesterday at the gym, and he saw somebody in the gym that reminded him of a conversation he overheard, I don't even know, several weeks ago, months ago, doesn't even matter. But he was like, Man, this conversation made me want to go film a reel. And my fiance is not on social media like that. He consumes it, but he does not create content the way that I do. So this is very different for him. But he overheard this one particular person in the gym talking to another person in the gym, and they were talking about bodybuilding and competing and whatever. And this person sounds like he has a coach and he follows protocols, I guess. But the sentence, the phrase that got my fiance was him saying, Oh, well, let's just see if my coach motivates me to do a show. What? Let's see if your coach motivates you? What does that even mean? The thing that got Zach was this person was saying, like, oh yeah, it'd be easy for me to get in shape, it'd be easier for me to do blah blah blah blah. And Zach's over here, like, bro, why don't you just fucking do it? If it's so easy for you to do that, why don't you just fucking do it? Right? You can be all this talk. You can say, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna do that. But if you don't have the actions to actually back that up, shut your mouth. That's what got him. What got me was why do people think that it is your coach's job to motivate you? It is not. It is very surface level to think that our only job is to be your cheerleader and to say, you got this. I believe in you, you can freaking do it. No, our job goes so much deeper than that. So much deeper. It is not our job to be like, okay, let's go to the gym. You can do it. I believe it. No. I don't have time for that. I've got clients that I've got to serve, I've got check-ins I've got to do, I've got programs I've got to make. I don't have time to hold your hand and tell you to go to the gym. You need to have that intrinsic motivation on your own. Because when a client comes to me and they are so fired up and so motivated and they have initiative and they have accountability, I know that client is about to see insane results because they can go so far. I can provide the plan, the details, the protocol, all of these things. I can give them guidance and I know they will show up and do it. Because it's the clients who show up and they move fast that get fast results. The clients who I need to remind to do their workouts or to do their check-ins or to long their food, that takes longer because I have to look and see, hey, you haven't done this in three days. You haven't done this in four days, whatever. And then I have to message them. And then however long it takes for them to read it, and then however long it takes for them to take action, that prolongs how long it's going to take for that client to see progress. Which means you're not going to get fast results at all. Right? So you have to move without feeling motivated. You need to be the action taker, the go-getter, the person with so much initiative and accountability. You need to move anyways. You don't wait for me to motivate you. Because that's not my job. So that was a crazy statement that I heard. That actually like made me so mad. I'm like, what do you, what do you mean? Come on, dude. Really? Something that I want you to learn, ingrain this in your brain, never forget it, is you don't get motivation from just existing, right? Hoping that it's gonna come, crossing your fingers and hoping it hits you in the face, and all of a sudden you feel motivated for the rest of your life. That's not where you get motivation from. Motivation is created from motion. It's from doing something. You get motivation after you take the action, after you go to the gym, after you've had a full day of really nourishing whole natural foods, eating really good, feeling really good. The motivation comes after the action. It compounds once you've built up evidence that you can do the thing, that you're starting to see progress. That motivation comes from compounding effort after you've taken the action. That is it for today's episode. I hope that that was a nice little kick in the butt. Sometimes after I record these, I'm like, whoa, that's gonna hurt some feelings. But you know what? Some of these things need to be said. Sometimes you need a little bit of tough love. And I do have a little bit of a blunt take on things, but hey, we aren't dancing around these things over here. If you actually want to make progress, you actually have to do the damn thing. And that requires just showing up and doing it, right? Thinking about it, wishing for it, waiting to feel motivated. That doesn't actually do the thing. It requires action. And you gotta be an action taker, you gotta be a go-getter. But, anyways, hopefully you enjoyed this episode. If you did, let me know on Instagram and I will chat with you next week. Bye.