Most People Will Stay Trapped in Life

If you don't know who you want to be or who you want to become, well, no wonder you don't want to do anything. You're caged in expectations from other people. You are caged into old stories. And in that trapping you feel a sense that you can't become who you really are. You can't live your life. And in that place, it's a great level of frustration. And when you feel caged, it feels like you want to rattle the cage, but you're also scared to because you know that environment and leaving it is scary. You're not lazy. You have no ambition for who you want to become. Motivation, when we think about what does it mean? Motivation is really a mental process, conscious or unconscious. But let's just stick with the conscious side today, okay? It is a process in which we initiate. Motivation is how we initiate, direct and sustain specific mental energies to know what our cause of action is.

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And this is really important, right? Motivation is can I initiate myself, can I direct myself? And can I sustain that direction to keep going? And that is the long term sense of motivation. I'm a motivated person because I can initiate myself. I can activate myself. I'm a motivated person because I can direct myself. I'm a motivated person because I can sustain those two things. Okay, we're going to tag through the four A's.

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First, you have to understand that all of motivation comes from ambition. We're going to work through a couple different A's here, okay? Ambition is the first one. Ambition is what do I want? Who am I? What do I want to achieve? Who do I want to become? And this is going to be the first breakthrough I'm going to give you today. Motivation is not a feeling of enthusiasm. Motivation is not tied to your personality. Most of your motivation has nothing to do if you want to do the task. Motivation is not just a task orientation. Do I want the thing? If you are not motivated, it is because first and foremost you have not determined your role. Your role. You're caught up in the minute and in the moment and in the task. But you haven't decided what's my role in life? What's my role in this situation, right? I want you to think about it in terms of acting, right? If you're, if you're an actor in theater, right? When you start learning a character and you're working with the director, the director and you will talk about what is this character's motivation in this next scene, what are they trying to do? What are they trying to Achieve. But that starts with having chose the character. It's the role, right? Because this character is playing a role in the film. You are playing a role in life. And from the role you believe that you are playing and the role that you believe you are becoming, almost everything else flows from that. This is not just a concept, and this is important. This is not just a concept of fixed identity, like who am I? Role is more active. Let me give you an example. And roles change, right? Because your identity is made up a bunch of roles. And role is the root of identity. What role am I supposed to play here? I'd like to give the example. If you are helping your child with math and you're in the moment and the kid is frustrated, you're tired and you're trying to work through a problem together, and you just get really frustrated and really angry because the emotion comes up that way and you just act out. You probably didn't first check it with the motive of the character. The role. You didn't say, I'm in this situation. I'm in a scene with this child, helping them fall in love with learning. What is my role here? Oh, my role is to be an amazing mom and facilitate a love of learning and the completion of this task. I have a role to play here. Meaning once you determine a role, it's much easier to prevent yourself from getting caught into impulse. I feel a lot of impulses, but they don't drive me. My role drives me. And one of the reasons I have found in my career, actually working with people, this is not conceptual. It's like I have to produce change with people or they don't pay me. It's become very clear to me all of human behavior change really begins with ambition for a role. If you don't know who you want to be or who you want to become, well, no wonder you don't want to do anything. You're not lazy. You have no ambition for who you want to become. And I found if you want to really change someone's life, you have to up their ambition for who they could become, which is challenging, right? Because lots of people have self esteem issues. They see themselves smaller than they are actually capable of. They have, you know, taken upon a role that they didn't want in life. They felt obligated to be, or they were told to be because of the social dynamic they grew up in or they're currently in. They feel boxed in. They feel caged. If you've ever studied my work before, we call this the caged life. You're caged in expectations from other people. You're caged into old stories and in that trapping. And sometimes those trappings can be good, right? Good family, good job, good money. But you feel caged. You feel a sense that you can't become who you really are. You can't live your life. And in that place, it's a great level of frustration. And when you feel caged, it feels like you want to rattle the cage, but you're also scared to because you know that environment and leaving it is scary. And when you know an environment and it's scary to leave it, well, then don't be surprised. You're not motivated to try new things, to achieve new dreams. Ambition is a future orientation to have more, be more, experience more, where that is more depth, more intimacy, more joy, more success, more wealth, more well being. There is a more attached to this. We're in a culture that wants to vilify more. We're in a culture that doesn't even like the word ambition, which shocks me because, like, ambition is not a negative thing. People often just like we have these Instagram like thought leaders who are trying to dissect and separate discipline and motivation. They're also at the same time trying to persuade you that ambition and greed are the same things. Or ambition and narcissism are the same things. They're wholly mutually exclusive. They're completely separate concepts. Of course you have ambition for more. Of course you have ambition to achieve great things. Of course you have ambition to want to make a difference in the world. That is the divine impulse, not something wrong with you. And so we have come to the place like this is. We've come in a culture where they vilify successful people, because successful people, there must be something wrong with them, right? They're narcissists and greedy people. Most people like, literally Most, we're talking 90 plus percent of people are striving for a good life. They're actually wanting to do their best. They actually want more for their kids. They actually want. We've told ourselves that's not true, but we forget we actually are living in an abundant world. And it's hard to push against that. But you must, because your psychology, if your psychology is caught up in the other stuff I just described, no wonder you don't want more for yourself or your family or the world. Because becoming successful would make you bad. Become wealthy would make you one of those rich people who don't pay their taxes or there must be evil, right? So you start kind of like Rewiring your ambition to. Instead of desiring more, judging more, hating more, becoming more divisive, right? Those people over there who have that, they must be bad. So now you're stuck in a stagnant middle of low expectation and disconnection from possibility and divinity. This is my belief in my work. We have to increase your ambition, your vision. If you need another word for those who don't like. I don't like ambition. Yeah, take the word vision. Do you want it? Do you want something more? Is vision okay? Because where people have no vision, the people perish. Oh, okay. Vision. Maybe you can get down with that because you've been culturally indoctrinated that this word is bad. But once you accept ambition and vision and future forward thinking that things can be better in the future, that is ambition. And from that root of possibility, your motivation will rise. The more disconnected, the more stuck in the stagnant, non expectant, judgmental middle. The more lazy, the more disconnected, the more frustrated, the more sad our lives become. AIM Motivation comes from aim. Human beings are a goal directed species. Another way of saying this is that we have high task orientation. What does this mean? Well, if you want motivation, obviously it starts with you. Identity or role. I like the word role. We have an ambition of who we can become, right? This is a sense of becoming, of growing. Okay, great. That's self. Okay, that's self. Aim is goal, task that. I know what my aim is. Most people, when they lack motivation, it's because they have no task clarity. Well, first I need that role clarity. What am I about? Where am I going in life? Then I need task clarity. What am I supposed to do? What's the thing I'm after? See, when you start a business, often you're so motivated because you want ambition, you want more in life. But then when you go to start your business, you're like, oh my God, is it llc or is it C Corp? Is it S Corp? What are the taxes? Is the domain available? Oh, okay. And then how do I set up the payment thing and oh, how do you hire employees? And what am I supposed to do with the state and what do I do today? And the more confusion around task, usually the less drive and motivation. So we need a higher task clarity. This is why, literally one of the oldest and simplest and cheapest ways to get more motivation. Write down your goals and your task each day. Like force yourself to write it down and look about it and think about it. That daily AIM is why a lot of people lose their drive. That daily prioritization when you lose the organization or what we're talking about here now, your task orientation, that's the loss of focus. When I lose my attentional direction, I feel like I'm just wandering in the woods and I don't know where I'm supposed to go. I don't know. There's a path and there's the mountaintop and I'm supposed to get up there so I can take a picture of all the other mountaintops. I didn't know I was supposed to go up there. And so a lot of people, when they start a new endeavor, they're excited about the new endeavor's possibilities. But then when they get into it, I just don't know what I'm supposed to do. What is the outcome here? And so giving yourself task clarity every single day is the secret to longer term motivation. It's the skillset. Like, if you go in to build your muscles and you're doing reps, right? It's like you gotta do so many bicep reps, it's exhausting, it's boring. You have to do so many to develop that muscle in motivation. Your daily task orientation is what builds that muscle. It builds the skill. Motivation as an actual skillset is built everyday. Bicep control of task orientation. And listen, we live in a culture. They don't know what to do with themselves. And so here's what you do when you don't know what to do. You pick up your phone and you scroll, looking for something to do. And it's like you lost your task orientation. You didn't even write it down. Now, for those who are like, but no, no, no, no. Brenda, I actually, I have a to do list. I have my checklist. I just don't do it.

What?

Why? Well, number one, your ambition has faded. You've stopped thinking about the payoff and the future and the energy and the benefit of actually doing the thing. You divorced these two things, and that's why it's important to also talk about this one. Attention. Motivation comes from higher ambition, focused aim. But in the moment attention. What am I paying attention to? Literally within the day and the hour and the minute, right? Your level of mindfulness to what is going to control my level of motivation, right? If I give my mind to Instagram, I'm not going to have motivation. What I'm going to have is, is comparison, judgment, visual fatigue and mental fatigue. And the longer I scroll, the more the research says those things go up when you're scrolling. You're taking dopamine. Good energy, good focus up here neurobiologically, but also spiritually. And you're just going, whoop, whoop, whoop. It's like taking your money. You have a stack of money, and you're just, like, pushing the money out into the world, and anyone else can have it. That's all you're doing. Your mental money, you are just pushing it out. That's what most people are doing with attention. And then they're wondering, how come I can't focus on my goals? Cause you gave it all over here. See, there is a thing called mental fatigue. There is a thing in motivation that motivation itself, or willpower itself is diminished. That the more things that we have, the more things that we're paying attention to, the more our attention is divided, the more fatigued, literally, our mind, body, spirit and brain become.

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It's like measurable. The research is very clear. Increased judgment.

Why?

Because I got to judge. Is this worth me paying attention to? Is this worth my judgment to relevance is happening with every scroll. My comparison, am I like that or not? Like that Diminishes self esteem. My visual acuity, literally, my eyeballs get tired. Scrolling right. Visual fatigue. Remember, your eyeballs, your eyes are literally the forward, outermost part of your brain.

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This is your brain. This thing is directly tied to your brain. Like, right into it. Same thing. And so it was like, oh, man, I'm fatiguing my eyes. You're fatiguing your brain. And then all of that stuff that you end up seeing that they put in there because it's good for the swipe. Either it's high novelty. High novelty. It's new, it's fresh. I've never seen anything like that. Wow, look at that. Things going viral, Right? High novelty. Novelty is a trigger for dopamine in your brain. Not like our brain likes novelty, but we can only take so much. So either what you're scrolling, that they're stopping you at, it's novelty, or please listen, it's division and conflict. If it bleeds, it leads. So they show you that too. So now my brain, I've cashed out my novelty and my dopamine, and now I'm bought in to division and conflict, and I'm upset in both cases, I've dysregulated my mind in both cases. Whether you're obsessed with novelty or you're obsessed with conflict and division, both of them dysregulate any sense of my internal compass. They have taken out my ambition for the future. They've taken out My aim for the day and I gave it to this thing. Now obviously I'm using social media as just a convenient example because you all are guilty of that, so am I. Every person understands exactly what I'm talking about. Including like teenagers now, right? Everybody gets this. It's like a struggle for people and that their attention is being taken in different directions. But I want you to understand, if you don't get your attention back, you do not develop the skill of motivation. Let me say it again, if you don't get your attention back, you do not develop the skill of motivation or discipline. It will not happen for you, period, at all. You cannot hope for better motivation tomorrow and keep giving your attention away today. You must determine that you are a person. I am a person. I am a person that focuses on my dreams, my tasks and priorities before I ever give my attention to, towards slop. I am not going to take my money that is hard earned my mental money and resources and spit it out to people and to things that dysregulate me and cause me lack. And once you decide, I'm a person who does not do that. Instead, I'm a person of vision, of goals, of dream, of ambition. And I'm a person who each day focuses on the things that are most important to my priority, my family's priority, the future that I want to build. That's what gets my attention each day. The future that I want to build, the life I want to experience today. See, most of us are giving away the time that we could develop competency, which as you're going to learn is tied to self efficacy, which is tied to self esteem, self confidence and progress. Well, I give that away to things that literally don't matter. You will not have longer term motivation discipline in your life if you keep giving away your attention to things that do not matter. Last piece is we have to manage our affect. This is our emotion and the sense of our emotion. So let me finish the attention one. This one, your attention was all about focus here. The thing I forgot here though, it's about focus and reward. So when I was sharing that I'm a person that wants that joy, that confidence, that happiness. That's where my tension goes. So as you heard, one of the big gateways for more motivation in life is to have like a gratitude practice. Why you turn your attention to the good. You turn your attention to the reward of the task, completion of the life experience. Meaning you're focusing on the good things of life and the rewards of good behavior more than you are giving it out. So attention is what am I focused on in terms of my task, like my in the moment mindfulness, but also is my attention towards the positive orientation, the good things and the rewards that come from that.

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And a lot of people, they've never focused on the reward of life. They're focused on the problems every day. Problem, problem, problem, problem, problem, problem. And they can't sense the fullness of life, the joy of life, the connection of life, the spirit, the energy, the consciousness of life, whatever you want to call it. To me, it's the gift of life. And so if my attention is on today's a blessed day, do you think I find more motivation? Well, of course. And from that sense also takes my affect, and I'm going to use a word here, a positive spectrum. In psychology, I call that like a Spain square, which is like your spectrum of positive and negative emotionality.

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Because there's a spectrum, right? And hopefully we're not living too much in the negative, but our energy, our emotion, our feeling, our state, our mood, we're tilting and moving and guiding and working toward a positive frame, an optimistic frame, a sense of the emotions that we all want to experience. Joy, confidence, love, fulfillment, connection, engagement. Like those emotions that we feel are like peaceful and positive in some way. So as we said, motivation is a skill and so is or affect. Your mood is not an accident. Your immediate state is not super random. That so much of what you feel right now is literally measurable. Based on your last 72 hours, your mood and your current state of energy, we can measure in the last 72 hours, how much did you move, sit or work out? What did you eat? Did it give you the macros and the nutrients that you actually need to to biologically care for yourself? How did you sleep? Just one night of bad sleep can affect those things dramatically, let alone three in a row. As an example, who did you talk to? Were they positive? Were they negative? Were they supportive? Were they believing? Did they like you? Did they not like you? Did they judge you? Did they accept you? Did they love you? Was there intimacy and trust and connection or not like that's measurable. All of those things are extremely measurable. So if you feel like, I don't know, my moods are all over the place. I'm like, they're not. This is one of our cultural problems in the world. You know, when you go back and you read in history about more of the personal development world, whether it was called that or not doesn't matter. It was like, you can Go back as far as you want. You know, you can go back, you know, into Sanskrit, you can go back into trying to study the Stoics, you can go back into your favorite religion or spirituality. All of the older foundational writings and texts about human behavior and psychology was an assumption that these are things that you are controlling. There are inputs and there are outputs and that we can manage them today in a therapy first culture. And I'm not bemoaning therapy, therapy itself as real psychoanalysis is great, right? It's a very specific thing. And it's a very specific thing oriented towards understanding your emotions and your patterns and the effects of those and where they came from. Specifically older parts of your life that would cause disorder now and the inability to have happiness, functionality and fulfillment now.

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So that's very specific. But most of mental health disorder is less than 3% of the population at any given time. And so it's like, wait a minute, our orientation just became that everything is anxiety and everything is depression and everybody's a narcissist when those things are like single digit truths. Most people have an incredible amount of mental and personal power. And I really think that's important now seeing a therapist and learning that language or learning that self control or learning to, to deal with drama and trauma and conflict, especially those that developed a pattern of the past, that's very important. And I've turned millions of people towards therapy. So please hear me when I say therapy culture. What I mean is people have taken words that are really tied to disorder and applied it to everybody when that's actually not that big of the population. And those disorders are actually acute and, and very specific. I mean, what I mean by that is acute. You're feeling it right now, but very specific. What we need to understand is when we start using these words like, you know, I'm having anxiety, I'm like, that's normal discomfort in a new situation. Normal discomfort is very different thing than anxiety as an example. But we live in a culture in which we've thrown our emotions out to the world and placed ourselves in a victim mentality of the past, of the system, of the world, of their judgment, of the label of what people told you you're supposed to be. And so all these patterns and past orientations have made us believe that moods strike us out of nowhere, emotions strike you out of nowhere. Emotions are automatic, impulsive and physicalized. Like they just happen. Like it's true, like a storm can just wipe right over you. That's like an emotion of anger. Or frustration or impatience can hit you. So can a feeling of peace, of joy, of connection, of love, of beauty, of thankfulness. These things like an emotion can just happen. A feeling is a meaning in which you are going to give to that emotion and you're going to hang on to a little bit longer, right? You're going to give attention to that emotion. You're going to take meaning from it. And it's a feeling. It's an ongoing feeling, right? An ongoing feeling requires what? Attention, thought. An ongoing feeling is you're thinking or ruminating or ascribing meaning towards a certain sense or emotion. And it's being perpetuated, right? It's being perpetuated. Like I can create an ongoing feeling of, you know, tenseness. Very simple. Like, the tenseness might come up in my stomach, like at one point, like, ooh, I feel really tense. But if three hours I'm still feeling, like, tense, that tensity is probably because for three hours I'm going, what else could go wrong? What's the problem here? And I'm using my mind to keep spinning up the physical sensation. Now, I'm speaking in generalities. And of course, anytime I talk about this, people attack me. You don't understand this or you don't understand this drama or trauma or you need to read the DSM again to find 1500 other causes. I got you. But at the end of the day, we need to understand and take a little bit of the lightness of life back, in that we aren't victim to all these labels and all these things, but rather often it's, how do we manage our last 72 hours? Because discipline is about organization of self and regulation of self. And if I could have regulated you better the last 72 hours, isn't it true you could feel better, like, right now? So, see, we are not victim to our emotion. We are not victim to past circumstances. We have a tremendous amount of control about how we feel, literally now as well as yesterday and the day before and the day before. And that's more of an ongoing mood. Like we are determining the color of our emotional sky, as they used to say, by our actual practices. This is why I say motivation is a skill, right? If you're losing motivation to emotion over and over and over and over again, we need to develop the greater skill set of managing our own affect. And that does come from learning that we can orientate ourselves towards a greater positive experience in life by taking care of some of the basics, like the biology factors. I've talked about the Social factors I talked about, right? Sleep better, eat better, move better, talk to more friends and people that you like. Okay, now we're starting. Breathe better and move more. Okay, great. Get some basic electrolytes or amino acids in you. Oh, I start to feel a little better.

Okay.

Like some of these things are so easy. But I bring these all up because in no other area of this current common world do people consider themselves victim to how they feel. That like their feeling is just something that takes over them. And I'm like, not exactly. You have way more control about this. And when we used to talk about stoicism or the ability to control our thought, or we talk about mindfulness or meditation, it's to remind ourselves that a lot of your emotions are lame or non important, that don't need to be validated. Stewed upon, ruminated upon. They're passing rando emotions just like you have passing rando thoughts. Not every thought you feel or think do you need to believe or act towards. You're not a victim in that it came up. If you choose to grab onto it, hang onto it and ride it. Well, that's choice, that's conscious choice. Same thing. Thoughts and emotions. Consciously we have to choose. Do I want to grab onto the ones that just come up or do I want to generate a more positive affect and sense of life each day? And so if we can turn you into a generative person in terms of your thoughts, feelings and emotions and moods, over time, I promise your motivation will come back. However, the more victim you feel towards your thoughts, your emotions and your moods, the more you feel. It's like it just happens to. Of course, in a victim mentality, I'm not going to have high agency. And so for those who don't like any of the language I like or I just discussed, or you're like super into like more of the academic things you'll like that last part at least I capped it with something that's academically validated. The higher the sense of victim mentality, the less personal agency and motivation in the world. That's the research. However, I got that research. Whether you agree or not, I'm trying to give you structure here to understand the stack, the stack here. Do you have clear ambition, vision, dream for who you are, who you can become and the role you need to play today and in your life and in your chapter. Now, do you have aim, task orientation each day?

Right.

Do you give your attention to good things, the things that matter to you and do you have a sense of attention towards those good things paying off rewards and do you manage your affect the emotional world that you experience in some way and orient towards positive. If we can do all that, this starts to quote, unquote, happen. Why? Because we skill stacked it. We just kept doing it. We just kept developing this. You develop all of this as a skill, right? Your attention, where you give it, that's a skill. It's not natural. Your natural attention is to pay attention to anything that moves. Well, anything that moves is not the same thing as where you want to move. So this is skill set development.