When you're not motivated to do the hard work.

Motivation is a really tricky word for me. This is something I've battled with for many years, finding motivation in a healthy way. And I want to start with that, because when you're building, you know, creative things, when you're doing things for yourself, it's really easy to be motivated in most instances because there's not a lot of repercussions. You know, you make the thing, you enjoy it, you had a good time, you can be motivated to do that again. But when you're trying to build, like, a creative business, do the work that's harder, where you can get rejected more. You may be putting yourself out there, your neck out there more, and people are rejecting you, or who knows what's happening, you know, or you're just feeling rejected internally because the wheels aren't spinning quick enough. It's really hard to be motivated there. And I want to give some points today that have really helped me, and I'm cautious of doing this teachy, teachy thing today, but this feels right because I've found some motivation recently. That man, it's been helpful. And I want to start with this idea of what are your motivators? So all the time, I'll have clients that are like, you know, Lennon, I'm trying to build my audience. And so I'm like, cool, what's your goal? Well, I'd like to hit a thousand followers or a thousand subscribers or whatever, or I'd like to make X amount of dollars or, you know, and that's great. But here's what I'll say to that. Because I got caught in this trap so bad, if you notice, this channel went completely dead for about five months and then kind of came back intermittently. And it was for this exact reason. All of my motivators were external. All of my motivators were outside of my control, right? And so external motivators, they don't work, not for the long term. They can work for the short term. But when they're outside of our control, what do we do when things aren't moving as fast as we like, how do we respond whenever, you know, we're not hitting the marks that we hoped to. As Creatives, we often retract and tuck in our shell and feel like we're not good enough, and we go into, like, a paralysis analysis mode, like, hey, this just isn't working. And we may not even go long enough to collect any real data to see why it's not working. Or we may just not do the thing that actually needs to be done, because we're afraid. So the motivation is coming from an external factor that we really have no control over. So I want you to consider. What is the internal motivator? What is the internal motivator? The thing that I did here is I thought about, why do I want this? Okay, I knew that for me, I wanted to grow this YouTube channel. And so then I just asked why a bunch of times. Well, why do. Lennon. This is me talking to me. So, Lennon, why do you want to grow this YouTube channel? Well, Lennon, because I. I really want to help people. Okay, you and everybody else. So why do you want to help people? Well, I want to help people.

Honestly, because I had nobody there to help me. Okay, so why is that important to you? Well, it's important to me because I think creatives as a whole don't see the value that they have. Oh, okay. Now we're getting somewhere, right? So then it comes to this place of. I boiled it down to. And I knew this in my heart. Like, I knew that that's what my motivator was, but I hadn't, like, made that the target. And now the target is because I want to help change the way that creative people see their worth. And so now that's the motivator. The money, the followers, the building of the business is a byproduct of that. Because the more I go after that bullseye, the more likely I am then to say, okay, this thing I'm charging for is worth it, because I am changing the way this person sees their worth. That's measurable. That's in my control. I have people in front of me, albeit maybe one to five at a time. You have people in front of you, maybe one to five at a time. Right. And so what is it that you want from that? And that motivator is so much more powerful. It's got legs, man. I can run with that for a while because I know that the other stuff, while it's outside of my control in this moment, these are things that I can tweak. If I'm not hitting that mark, I can actually look at that and say, why? I can go deeper on that. And what happens if we don't have those sort of internal rewards is we start to feel obligated. We hear people say it all the time. So if you want to be big on social media, you want to do whatever you want to, like, have an audience, you want to make more money, you got to get more followers, and you got to show up, you got to be consistent, you got to do it, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta. Got it right. So it's so frustrating because then this obligation starts to seep into our internal sphere, right? And I was working with my coach on this because I'm like, I really want to grow my business and I really want to show up for my audience, but, you know, I just don't feel motivated to do it. And so we worked through it, and what we came down to is that I felt obligated to do it. I wasn't anymore doing it because of the passion. I was doing it out of obligation. And what she said to me is, obligation is a breeding ground for resentment. Obligation is a breeding ground for resentment. That was such a big moment for me. So I had to come to the conclusion that I had to step so far away from it that I no longer was obligated to do it that I reminded myself that I had control of all the aspects that I have control of. I have the opportunity to step away and take a breath and. And like, take the weekend off when I want to. Nobody else gets to tell me that that's right or wrong. I have that control. And when I had that control, when I realized it again. And this is a process, guys. Like, I don't want you to feel like I got this done because I don't like this is stuff I am working with on the Daily. Right? But that was a big, big hit for me. And I heard somebody say that we become disempowered because this is a big part of it is that this obligation creates resentment. And that resentment, like, disempowers us. It takes our power away. And we become disempowered when we're relying on external circumstances to bring a feeling of completion, right? So we become disempowered when we're relying on external circumstances to bring a feeling of completion. Things that are outside of our control. So subscriber counts, right? All these vanity metrics, how much money you're making. Yeah. Have those goals. They are great. You need those goals. But you have. The motivation has to come from the why not from the external thing? I actually see this all the time where at my job, I'll work with creators that have a million plus subscribers on their YouTube channel. And they're not.

They still are feeling that, like, obligation now even more so the obligation is even stronger for them because now it's like, what's the next thing? What's the next thing? Right? So we have to come from that internal place for us. So the three things that the Three takeaways here are. Number one, know why you want this? Have an internal dialogue with yourself and say, why do I want this goal? Why do I want this thing? Why do I want to build this creative business? Why do I want to be this kind of a freelancer? Why do I want to sell my art in this way? Right. You know, and a lot of times it's the why has a lot to do with how you want to serve someone else. When you get clear with that, with how you're serving somebody, that's a great motivator. Because then you get a little bit of a cookie when somebody's like, man, this really helped me. I needed that. And that connection is so deep. That's so much deeper than like, oh my subscribers went up 150 today. Right. So no why? And then take action on what you can control based on that. Why? So for me, if it's, you know, to help creatives change the way they see their worth, I'm taking action on that every day. So how can I show up and try to do that? Well, it starts with things like this, like making content and doing videos that hopefully motivate and inspire you as a viewer to feel like you have it in you to make this thing happen. Because I believe it, you know, and I know that you may not yet, but that's part of like my thing then is just to show up and do that. And so I can control that kind of showing up. I can control that process. So that's a big motivator for me. And number three, the biggest thing that I'm still terrible at is rewarding your actions. And I'm not talking about rewarding, rewarding the goals that you hit, reward those too, but reward the actions that you set before you. So if my action is to, you know, make a YouTube video in the day or, you know, a few, few actions that I need to take, what's a reward that I tie against that doesn't need to be big, but I have things like go and grab a burrito because I freaking love burritos, or go spend time in the hot tub, you know, at our complex here, or like go out and take a 30 minute drive. You know, I do enough things and I give myself the opportunity to take a full day off and just like be, you know, just enjoy that time. So setting those things, three things are going to happen. You're going to be driven from an internal place. You're going to see yourself start to take action and then you're going to reward those actions. And when you reward those actions, the motivations start to become a healthier place. You're like, the. This feels good. This feels like I'm not only doing this thing and then, like, not really getting anything from it, but I'm doing this thing, and then I get this thing from it that I really love on top of that. And I'm doing things for people that serve people that go further and further up, and it just, like, continues to climb, and it feels so much better. It feels so much better. So I want to encourage you guys to test this to start with. Why? Work on the things that you can control, take action on those, and then reward those actions after they're done. And I want you to let me know. Let me know. Let me know how that goes for you guys. Please hang out, watch this video. I wish I knew what it was, but I think it's going to be great because it talks about a lot of similar things. So I'll see you guys in that one. Send you tons of love.