Momentum over Motivation

Hi, everyone. I'm Katie McManus, business strategist and leadership coach. Happy Friday. We've made it. And actually, I'm doing this. I got my first moderna shot yesterday, and. Oh, my God, does my arm hurt? Totally worth it. I recommend everyone get vaccinated, but I wish I had known that beforehand that it would hurt this much. Anyway, today I want to talk about. One of my core beliefs is that motivation is crap. Motivation just does not work. Motivational speakers, so nice for, like, the five minutes after the talk and the presentation or whatever, but it doesn't last. Motivation doesn't last. Okay. I like to think of motivation as like a matchstick. You light it and it blows out and it extinguishes or it burns through really fast. If you wait for motivation to do the things that matter in your business and in your life. I'm talking how to get new clients becoming visible so that you're marketing your service and your business. Like, what I'm doing right now. Fitness goals. Eating healthy, spending quality time with friends and family. I know that sounds like a crazy thing to have motivation or momentum around, but for those of us who are workaholics, we actually have to build that time in. If we wait for motivation to strike so that we do all these things consistently, guess what happens? We start them. Occasionally, maybe we make, like, a really intense plan. Like, let me show you, like, a really intense workout plan right here. You know, six weeks of workouts, we make plans like that, and then we don't really do them because we kind of wait for motivation to strike, and it doesn't strike, you know, so we'll just, like, go along with what we've been doing all day. So motivation doesn't work. You can't wait for motivation to strike. And. Hi, whoever's watching, welcome. Hi, James Bogey. Socializing is hard work. I know. Well, socializing is extra hard work right now. And I get. I'm an extrovert. So normally socializing is the easiest part of my day. But I get it for you introverts, if you're an introvert, if I'm reading that correctly. So anyway, so motivation doesn't work. Momentum. Momentum works. What is momentum? Momentum is plugging into something that is challenging or hard or outside of your comfort zone every single day. And even when you don't feel like it, still showing up and doing it and having metrics for success in there. Last last spring, when the pandemic hit, I went into a very dark place. Like a lot of you, there were days where I didn't get out my pajamas. It was just. I was a little depressed. I was really scared for my business. And a friend of mine through Instagram and I decided that we were going to do 10 days of Peloton writing a day, or I'm sorry, 10 day. A 10 day streak of peloton writing. So we were writing it every day and it turned into 10 days and then 20 and then 30, and then we decided to go for 100. And let me tell you, I had to adjust my metric for success to get to that hundred, because for one, peloton doesn't give you credit beyond 60 days, which I think is completely asinine. Excuse me, I just wrote my peloton 100 times. 100 days in a row. Give me credit for that. But also, you know, there were some days, like one day I was under the weather, so I needed to adjust my metric for success, like on the bike for like five minutes. And I let that count. Okay. But I didn't want to not get on the bike because that mean I would. That meant that I would have been ruining my streak. I'm trying to be consciously slow down my voice because I know I have an audience that. That watches from around the world. And, you know, English is not always someone's first language. James Bogey. I'm an introvert. Working from home is fantastic, but keeps me isolated. Oh, man. You know, I wish. I actually wish I were an introvert right now. I think my life would be a lot easier and I'd be a lot happier. I miss my humans. I miss being out in the world. So thank you for showing me that there is a side of humanity that can enjoy this. James, I really appreciate that. But yeah, socializing right now is an extra effort, especially if you're an introvert and it's not your first inclination. So anyway, how do. So I want to talk about how I leverage this in my business and how I leverage this with my clients. You cannot have more than three things at any given time that you're building momentum around. Okay. You just can't do it. Your brain. And actually, like, if one of them is new, you can only do one at a time. If you're adding new things to build momentum around, you have to do one at a time. One of the things that I talk about with my clients when they sign on with me is there are three non negotiables I need for them to commit to that they have to do every single day. The very first one is they need to fill Their cup on their mind, their mind and their soul or their spirit or their heart or what. However you want to say that. What that means is there's a practice there of maybe filling that cup means that they're calling a friend and connecting with them and having some socialization. Maybe it means that they're reading a book. Reading a book and just filling up on the knowledge cup. Maybe it means they're doing some kind of meditation, you know, so they're really filling up that, that calm reserve in their minds. I don't care what it is. And it can be different every single day, but there has to be something there, okay? Because we cannot continue our businesses successfully and sustainably if we are going crazy, if we're not filling up our cups as we go along, if we're not building in self care, okay? So self care for your mind and your soul is so important. That is non negotiable. Number one, for me, this changes every day. Sometimes the walk by myself, sometimes it's a walk with my dog, sometimes it's listening to a podcast or a book on tape, or sometimes it's meditation, okay? It changes depending on what my needs are. But this is a non negotiable. We have to take care of that part of ourselves. It's the part that often gets run over. We just completely jump over it, don't pay attention to it. Okay? So that's number one. Number two is building momentum around taking care of your body. Okay, again, moving your body, feeding it healthy food, keeping it hydrated. This is so critical. If you're starting a business, guess what, you are the owner, you're the operator, you are the service provider of that business. If something happens to you physically, you get sick. If you have like a massive illness that happens, like a heart attack or cancer, if you're just not taking good care of yourself so you're not sleeping well and your energy's low and you're not fueling your body properly, guess what? Your business is not sustainable, okay? You're not going to be able to count on that income because guess what, you can't count on your own body showing up to do the work. You have to do a non negotiable around taking care of your body, okay? That's the only way to ensure that your business is going to be sustainable. So that is another non negotiable that I build into my life and I have my clients build into my life and I'm sorry, into their lives. And number three, of course, this is the obvious thing. When you're building a business. Oh, sorry. Paul Nunn. Hi. This is probably the hardest part for most business owners. Why do you think that is? You know, I think it. I think it's because taking care of our bodies has been like that back burner kind of thing. We kind of just put it off. And it seems like a luxury to go to the gym. And obviously going to the gym right now is extra difficult because of COVID But, you know, it's a luxury to take time out to take care of your body, especially if you have work and you're starting a business and you have a family. It also just takes extra care. You know, when you're busy, it is so easy to just go and grab anything for lunch. And honestly, when you're stressed and you're really playing into that stress, your body actually craves carbs and it craves fats and it craves proteins. The protein is wonderful. And obviously you need a good balanced meal of all those things. But when you're stressed out. I know about myself, when I'm stressed out, I do not crave broccoli. I do not crave, like apple slices. I crave french fries and potato chips. And I've been known to take down a whole loaf of bread. Just no butter, nothing, just gnawing on it. I know I have a video of that somewhere. I might have to post it. And also, you know, when you're stressed out, like, how has. How have everyone online been dealing with their stress during COVID drinking? You know, having a glass of wine or a beer at the end of the day or a little earlier, if TikTok can be trusted. You know, that doesn't encourage your body. That's basically you're introducing sugar into your system. And when you have sugar in your system, it actually speeds up your metabolism, so you want more food and so you crave. And I don't know, I don't know about you guys, but when I have alcohol in my system, I crave not healthy food. I'm not craving a salad after I have a glass of wine. Paul, you can tell me if that's true for you or not. And then James projects crowd out exercise too often for me. Yeah, yeah. The crazy thing here is that when we exercise, when we get that buildup of lactic acid in our muscles, it actually does something to our brains that makes us better able to focus and to get stuff done. When we exercise, when we move our bodies, we are actually far more able to do work faster. I'm just going to Let that sink in. When we move our bodies and exercise, we also get creative ideas. We're amazing problem solvers when we're not focusing on the problem. Paul Nunn, Ice cream is my sin. Oh, I'm with you. I'm a big ice cream fan. Anything that's frozen custard, you know, that whole family, I'm all about it. And, like, not even frozen. Like, a good creme brulee. Oh, my God. Like, that's one of the things that I can't wait to get to, like, be able to go to a restaurant and have a really well done creme brulee brulee again. Oh, my God. There's. I don't know if anyone lives in California who's watching or has been to California. In Sonoma, there's this restaurant right on the square in downtown Sonoma. It's called the Girl and the Fig. And they have the best creme brulee. It's lavender and it sounds weird, but. Oh, my God, that creme brulee will change your life. Sorry, making myself hungry. I need to. I need to have a snack before dinner, I think. But anyway, so once. Once Covid ends and you can travel, I recommend going to the Girl in the Fig in Sonoma Square, have some of those creme brulee. You're gonna have to have a salad to even it out, but it is so worth it. It's so amazing. But yeah, so it seems like something like, I don't have time to work out. I don't have time to tend to my body. A. When you work out and you give time to take care of your body, you actually are far more effective in the work you need to do. Okay, so what would normally take you 10 hours to do? If you work out and you get your brain flushed with that lactic acid and you give yourself that creative time away from the work, you could probably get that work done in about seven hours. Okay, so I know it sounds counterintuitive, but that's that right there. Also, if you don't make time to take care of your body, guess what? Your body is going to set yourself up. So you have to make time, meaning it's going to get really sick. It's going to have a massive heart attack. It's going to have cells replicate and not be good about it and have weird, you know, things happen there like cancer, tumors, whatever. Your immune system, and it doesn't even have to be that serious. Your immune system is just going to run down. Your immune system is going to run down and you're just going to be susceptible to every freaking cold and flu and coronavirus. As you know, the variants come out like you're just going to be a walking fly trap for all those viruses and they're going to stick and you are going to be taken down. Imagine trying to get all those projects done then. So your body care is so critical. I didn't realize I'd be going on this much of a tangent on this. The third thing, okay, so mind, body, the three non negotiables. The next one is visibility. Okay? The last thing anyone who's starting a business wants to do is get into the boom and bust cycle that happens to artists so often. Okay? The boom and bust cycle of the artist is this. They spend all this time developing all these paintings and all these works of art and all their product, but they're not spending any time selling it, so they're broke, right? And then they think, okay, well I have all this inventory now, I have to go sell it. So then they do a gallery show here and a gallery show there and you know, they, they sell all their work, but they're not working on developing anything new. So they sell all their work and then all of a sudden they're out of inventory. Shit. But they have a lot of money. So then they get to go and they get to, you know, use their money to create new inventory and they live off their savings for a little bit, but they're not selling again. So they're just producing, producing, producing. And then they're broke again because that's the boom and bust. And then they have to go and sell and on and on ad nauseam. Okay? This happens in other service providing industries as well. Okay? A coach or consultant will get a ton of clients, a ton of clients, and then be so busy that they can't go out and build awareness for what they're doing. They can't do any marketing for who they are and what they're about and who they work with. And so while they're so busy with these clients, you know, they're working through them. And then clients start dropping off, you know, as clients do. Clients don't work with you forever. These projects wrap up, but there's nothing waiting in the wings at that point. You haven't been maintaining your marketing throughout all that time. You haven't been building awareness throughout all that time. So now you're starting from scratch again and you have to go out and you have to start building awareness. But now, because you don't you're like worried because you see that the monthly income is dropping down because you're, you know, wrapping up with all these projects. There's a sense of like anxiety and fear and oh my God, like I'm going to be, I'm going to be completely broke. I'm not going to be able to pay my mortgage. So then with all that energy, you're showing up on sales calls or enrollment calls and you're being super needy because you need this client. You need this client. You are already, you're on that call with them and you are counting the money in their wallet before you even listen to what their problem is and how you could potentially help them. So you're not coming to that call with your amazing service providing self. You're coming to it as this needy, I need your money gremlin almost. And the person can sense that. They can sense that when they, when you, they've just become a dollar bill to you, you know, or a euro or a pound or whatever, whatever currency you're working in. And it doesn't feel great. It doesn't feel great to you as well because it's just, it's wrapped in fear and disappointment and all that junk, okay? So those three non negotiables are critical to build momentum in your business, you know, because to build momentum, you have to have a solid foundation, okay? You have to have a sound mind that knows how to handle anxiety and stress and has an influx of new ideas. Your body needs to be reliably healthy and taken care of and you need to just be building awareness for your business. Everything else takes care of it. It takes care of itself. If you do those three things, I swear to God, it's just, it's critical to do those things. And here's the thing about momentum is you can have it be a commitment. Like you have to do these things every single day. The weight that commitment has is that if you drop the ball, you have that sense of failure just looming over your head. We are very failure and bad feeling adverse as humans, we don't like that feeling. If you have a bad relationship with failure and if you have trained yourself that you fail a lot and you can't stick to commitments, then I actually don't want you to have a commitment. I want you to have an intention. Okay? So for instance, I am this way. If I commit to doing something for 30 days and I drop the ball on day 13, I have a really hard time going back to it because day 14 just doesn't matter in My mind, because I already failed. I already failed. It's no longer a 30 day streak. And I said it was going to be a 30 day streak. This is why a lot of New Year's resolutions fail. Because we commit to something that is just not actually feasible within our day to day lives. And then when we do drop off, fall off the wagon, if you will, that commitment is then wrapped in failure. It doesn't matter if we go back to it. It just, it's. It's already a failure to us. So why would we just remind ourselves that we failed? Well, no. So if that's your relationship with failure and commitments and like you have that cycle going, then don't have it be a commitment. I want you to change it. It is an intention, okay? It is an intention to do something for 30 days in a row or to do choose. I like to choose the month model every single day in December. My intention was to go live, okay? That was my intention. And there were a couple days I took off. There's one day where I was just like not feeling. It wasn't. My energy wasn't great. I was kind of like grumpy about something. So I took that off. And then a couple other days I decided I needed to get out of town. And it just wasn't. I wasn't set up to do it well, you know, wherever I was. And then I also didn't go on Christmas because, you know, I wanted to spend time with my family. But the intention has a little lighter energy around it. I didn't feel like I had failed because I had taken off those few days, but the momentum got to be carried through. I still went live, I think. What is that, 27 days out of December? That's a lot of lives, okay? And I also gave myself a flexible metric for success. My dogs are about to go crazy if you can hear them in the background. I gave myself a flexible metric for success, which means that I let myself go live either on Streamyard to LinkedIn or just on the Facebooks or go live on Instagram. So these, these, these non negotiables, you get to decide what your metric for success in them is, okay? But momentum, you have to commit to them or have an intention around them and you have to plug into them every single day. You cannot wait. For momentum. I'm sorry. For motivation to strike. Motivation will not get you anywhere. It just will not. Because even though, even if you find something that motivates you pretty consistently, if you plug into it too much, it's going to lose its pizazz for you. And I'm so excited. I just got to find a use for the word pizzazz today. It's gonna lose the umph. It's gonna lose that fire. You know, it's just like listening to a song too many times. It just. It becomes old after a while and it's not reliable. Something that gets you motivated one day may not motivate you to get it complete. Like, if you're motivated to start, you may not complete it. But if you have momentum, whereas you've been plugging in to this one challenging thing every single day and you're afraid to drop the ball because you've been so good for the past five days, you're less likely to not do it, okay? So you're far more likely to do it on that six day just because you don't want to ruin your streak. Okay? It's like momentum begets motivation in that sense anyway. This is honestly how I run my life. I run my life trying to figure out how can I create momentum for myself. And honestly, momentum can't go forever. You can't say, I'm going to commit to doing this every day for the rest of my life. No. The people of AA Alcoholics Anonymous, they have figured this out, okay? They have figured out you're not quitting alcohol for the rest of your life. You're quitting it for today, you're quitting it for today, and then tomorrow, you're going to quit it for tomorrow, and then the day after that, you're going to quit it for the day after that. Momentum works really well if you do it in short bursts of time. So you have a goal for this week, and you're building momentum around it this week, and then for next week or for this month, don't do it longer than six weeks. I can tell you that if you do it for longer than six weeks, it just becomes too big, too much. And if you fail, the failure just becomes too much for you. Anyway, that is all I wanted to talk about today. I hope this was useful to you. If there's something you're trying to build momentum around in your business, please message me. I would love to hear what it is and if I can offer some support. One of the things that I do in my being brave call every single Friday is offer, here's the one thing that you need to be doing over the next month, over the next week, just the next step ahead of you. So if you're looking for some feedback as to what that can be for you. I have that call every single Friday. The link is actually in my LinkedIn. So if you're watching this on LinkedIn, you can go. It's a featured post and you can just register for it there. But other than that, I hope you have a wonderful. James, thank you. You say he's helpful. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining me, everyone who's been watching. I'm wrapping up for this week. I went live every single day, Monday through Friday. Go me taking the weekend off. I will be back at it next week. Thank you for joining and I hope to see you on the flip side. Have a great weekend.