Episode #23: How Are You Not Motivated?

Couple the pain you're having right now in your life and the energy that gives you with the energy, the pleasure you want to move towards in your life right now. Put these two together, you will create an unstoppable drive for you to go out there and hit your goals.

Welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast with your host, Oliver Denier. Learn the practical steps you need to take to build a business you can can run on your own terms. Escape the 9 to 5 and work from anywhere in the world.

Hey, what's up? It's Ollie here. I wanted to make a quick video about something that's really, really important and it's the topic of motivation. Now, quite often I'll get messages from people, it's happened in the past, people who joined my courses saying, I really, really want to build an Amazon business. I know it would change everything in my life, have a positive impact on me, but I just don't know how you get the motivation to take consistent action, to learn the new skills and to actually build the business and get things moving. Question that I actually have for people who say this to me is how are you not motivated? How are you not motivated to get this stuff moving? Let me explain for a little bit about why this is my response and why I'm so shocked as to why people aren't motivated. I'll let you in on a little secret, and this might come across as tough love, but really, if you think that you're happy with your life right now, the truth is that you're lying to yourself. If you're not motivated, it's not a question of do you have enough energy or are you the right type of person who has drive to do things. It's a question of are you really being honest with yourself? So let me explain exactly what I mean when I talk about this. And this might be a bit of a controversial topic. And to be honest with you, I think that's a good thing. I think people need to hear this and some people need to get offended by it. Right? That has to happen to help them break through. So let me, let me explain what I mean here. So there's two things that create drive and create energy in people that actually get them to move forward and get crazy amounts of success or results or whatever it is that you, that you're aiming for right now. There's two things. Let me explain what they are. The first one is pain. No matter where you are right now in your life, if you're being 100% honest and you actually Stop lying to yourself. You'll realize that you are suffering from quite a lot of pain because bad things happen, right? Life isn't all roses and, you know, amazing experiences. It's not like a theme park of positivity. Everybody throughout their life, in all various areas of their life experience a ton of pain. This can create a hell of a lot of energy to actually move you forward. The other thing that creates a hell of a lot of energy and drive is the will to move towards pleasure. So what I want you to do, to begin the process of stopping lying to yourself and actually being honest, I want you to create a list, right? Create a list of all the things in your life that suck. What are all the things in your life that are causing you pain? Are your finances out of whack and you never have enough money to pay bills? That must be causing you pain? Is your health in a bit of a bad way? Like, are you overweight, underweight, not really getting enough nutrients in your diet that must be causing you pain? Do you have a job that you just hate and you hate your boss and you feel unfulfilled and you know you don't really belong there? That must cause you some pain. Are you surrounded by people who are uninspiring and always get you down? And you know that you should be surrounded by cooler people who lift you up? That must cause you some pain. So my first piece of advice is write a list of all the things in your life that suck. What you'll start to realize once you've put together this list is that pain gives you energy, right? Looking at this list of stuff and meditating on it and thinking about this stuff that sucks actually starts to create drive in you and starts to fire you up. Now, what most people do with this energy created by pain is they take it and they divert it to doing unproductive stuff. Just have a look at the post above me on Facebook right now or go to any YouTube video. It could be about a cat jumping off a piano. There will be people in the YouTube comments using the energy they have from pain in their life and diverting it into something completely unproductive. Whether it's an argument about some random thing that happened in politics, something completely unrelated to anything. Go have a look at negative reviews on Amazon. I bet you tons of those are customers who are just in pain looking for a way to release it. So pain creates energies. Most people just don't divert that energy into a productive thing. So what I want you to do is take a look at this list Understand you're experiencing a ton of pain in your life, but use that energy for something productive. In the very early stages of my Amazon business, in the first year as I was moving things through, I had no money to get moving. I had no resources, had no experience. I didn't know what I was doing or how to even build an Amazon business. I experienced a lot of pain and previously before that, I experienced a lot of pain in the life I had before I started a business. So I created a folder on my desktop called Alternative in capital letters and anytime I started to feel unmotivated, like the day was going to have too many tasks or I was lacking energy, instead of buying into the lie that I'm happy enough and I don't need to build a business to get to the next level of happiness or achievement, instead of lying about that, I'd double click on the folder and in there would be photos of all the stuff that would happen if I don't make the business work. Had pictures of the old job I used to work at, right? Crummy job, minimum wage pay. I had pictures of anything related to consequences I could not deal with because they were too painful, health consequences, lifestyle consequences, type of people. I didn't want to be around anything that caused me pain. I put it inside this folder that created energy for me to direct into my business and actually use to get away from that pain. I cannot stress how much this is unbelievably powerful resource you can use to create drive. Now, once you're doing this exercise, I want you to remember your life could be much worse, right? Two thirds of the planet live on $2 a day. So no matter how much pain you're suffering right now, actually you're doing all right. You are privileged if you live in the west and therefore you shouldn't start feeling sorry for yourself at this point. You should have enough pain to drive you to move forward, but it should never be enough to stop you in your tracks and give you an excuse not to get things done. Then once you're more honest with yourself, you understand, yes, there is pain in your life you can leverage. Next, we want to look at how you can leverage pleasure. What are the things that you want? What are the things you want to move towards? Having less stress in your life, Having no unfulfilling, boring job. Having more financial freedom. Being able to have more adventures in your life, Being able to have more fun. What is it for you if you can couple the pain you're having right now in your life and the energy that gives you with with the energy, the pleasure you want to move towards in your life right now. Put these two together, you will create an unstoppable drive for you to go out there and hit your goals. Then all of a sudden learning a new skill will seem effortless compared to the pain that you could suffer if you don't do it and you just keep slacking off and procrastinating. Learning this new skill all of a sudden seems actually pretty easy when you weigh it up with the reality and you stop lying to yourself. Also, if you compare learning that new skill to the pleasure you're going to get if you do that again, it'll seem like an easy no brainer in comparison. Taking consistent action every day, putting in an hour a day into your business minimum will seem effortless. Everything else will fall into place once you start to get clear what it is you don't want, what it is you want and you use that stuff as leverage to move forward. So next time you feel unmotivated, I welcome you to do these exercises. Stop lying to yourself. Get as clear as you possibly can and what's really going on inside your mind, inside your emotions. Get it out there and leverage that to help you move forward. Thanks a lot for watching this video. Let me know if it helped you, share, like comment, et cetera. That would be really awesome and I'll catch you very soon.