How to Get & Stay Motivated | Natalie Jill

The number one question I get consistently is how do I get and stay motivated? Now, the reason so many of you are asking me this question is because you're trying to lose weight and achieve that lasting fat loss. So here's the deal. For those of you who know me, I dive deep into things that I'm learning, and I have so much great information to share with you about this topic. I couldn't contain myself to one video, so I created four free videos for you. But don't worry, they're organized and simple for you to understand. In today's video, though, I'm going to teach you how to get and stay motivated and why this is connected to your fat loss. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Natalie Jill. I'm a licensed master sports nutritionist and functional fitness trainer. And through my programs, I've helped hundreds of thousands of people just like you lose the fat and keep it off by simplifying their fitness and nutrition. But today isn't about those people. It's about you. But what I need you to do first is to get a piece of paper. And across the top, I want you to write your name and then a dash sign, and then I want you to write my fat loss motivators. Got that? Okay. Pause the video if you need to, but you gotta get a piece of paper and do this part. And then below that, I want you to draw a vertical line down the middle of the page. You come down about an inch or so from the top of your vertical line, and. And I want you to draw a line across. So basically, like you're making a lowercase T on your page. Now, on the upper part of the T, I want you to write in all caps, the letters S, P, A N. And in the upper right part, I want you to write in all caps, I, P, A P. You see, there are two parts to motivation. One part is very powerful, but only in the short term. The other part is even more powerful, but only in the long term. In the short term, stopping pain is usually the most powerful motivator. For example, when you touch a hot stove, what motivates you to move your hand? Well, I'll tell you. With me, if I touch a stove, it's, holy crap, it's hot, I move my hand. That whole action of moving your hand is motivated by stopping immediate pain. Now, let's talk about long term. So let's say you want to become a doctor. You need to go to college for eight years and schooling and residency and all of those late nights and long hours to become a doctor or really to learn any skill. That takes time to develop, but people do that for the increased pleasure at some future point in time. In fact, a lot of those things might actually increase short term discomfort and involve a lot of work and the anticipation of longer term payoff. Do you really think doctors enjoy putting in all that work? Initially, I for sure would not. But they're playing the long game. So basically, as humans, we're motivated by stopping pain and, and increasing pleasure. In this exercise, I'm going to walk you through a process where we're going to identify your short term motivators, basically the pain that you want to stop, as well as the long term motivators, the things that you want to experience in your life, you know, your bigger goals. Now, I know this can be hard, so I'm going to walk you through this using examples from my own life and from other people that I've helped. So to do this, I have a simple process that starts with you listening to a series of questions. Now, the purpose of doing this is to help jog your memory about things you're probably experiencing, but are so used to feeling them that you don't even know that they're a problem anymore. I want you to make a note of all the things that resonate with you and I want you to write them down. Now you can add whatever you want, whatever you're feeling or experiencing in your life that's causing you pain. It can be physical pain, it can be emotional pain. But I want you to write it down and add it. And don't worry, there's no right or wrong answers here and nobody's going to judge you. In fact, no one's even going to see this paper but you. However, getting this out of your head and onto paper is going to be a really big eye opening experience for you. Are you ready? All right, let's do this. Do you feel like you're stuck in a rut? Like no matter how much you do or how hard you work, you don't feel yourself making any progress? Really think about this. Think about all the areas in your life, your physical health, your emotional health, your family, your friendships, your finances, your career, even your home. Are you truly happy and satisfied with all these aspects of your life? Are the hopes and the dreams that you have for yourself, are they becoming reality? Do you feel like you're working so hard to see a change, but instead of seeing that change, you feel like you're just stuck in mud, unable to get out, where might you be stuck and dissatisfied? How painful is it to be stuck there? I want you to write it down. Do you have a hard time falling asleep at night? Or even worse, do you wake up several times in the middle of the night with your brain moving 100 miles an hour? Then do you wake up in the morning feeling tired and unmotivated? And when you do finally get up because that alarm goes off, do you find yourself hitting that snooze button over and over and over again? And are you super low on energy, feeling tired and lazy all the time? Has this become your new norm? If any of this describes you, write down how painful it feels when you're not rested and you're tired. And how does that interfere with what you want to accomplish each day? And then when you do get on with your day, do you find that you have several dips in your energy throughout the day, making it hard to focus and stay engaged in whatever you're doing, like in that afternoon time? And then are you constantly reaching for anything to pick up and give you energy? Any quick fix, like caffeine or sugar? Do you find yourself doing that? If so, I want you to write it down. And then do you feel energized and satiated after a meal? Or do you feel gross and stuffed and maybe like you need to unbutton those jeans you're wearing? If you feel that discomfort after a meal, I want you to write it down. And do you ever feel like you really need to get yourself to that workout, to the gym, but you just feel embarrassed by the way you look and you think that people are going to be looking at you and you think, I don't want people judging me or looking at me, so you just don't go, are you feeling the pain of this shame? Write it down. Do you feel like you don't have the time to take care of yourself, eat well and prepare your food? Maybe. Maybe because you're just too busy taking care of others, like maybe your spouse, your kids, an elderly parent, a sick friend. Is the pain of putting yourself last affecting your health or your happiness? Write it down. So those are just some of the things to help jog your memory. Did any of this resonate with you? Take the time now to list down anything you are feeling that's painful to you right now. If you have to pause this video if you need more time. And don't worry, I'm going to still be here when you get back. So this is a really important part of this exercise, okay? You might be surprised to hear this, but one point or another, I could have answered yes to every single question or statement I just made. I'm 100% human, and I've ran into many of these same obstacles, and I've gone through the entire range of emotions. But by going through all of that and coming out on the other side, this is how I know what to do to overcome those emotions and obstacles that hold us all back from being truly happy in our lives. Before we can continue on with this exercise, though, I want to take a minute and give you a quick overview of my life and where I had to overcome a lot of my pain and negativity in my life. You see, a few years back, this was me. Now, anyone that would have seen me would have thought, oh, just a happy, pregnant, happy person. They wouldn't have noticed anything strange. And that's where the pain was coming in for me, because I was feeling like a fake person. Because I knew on the outside I looked like. Like I was happy having a baby. I was married, lived in this nice neighborhood, had the great job, and I knew on the outside everyone would have thought, she has a perfect life. But what they didn't know was that my life was falling apart. The one good thing in my life was I was having a baby. Something I was super excited about. But my best friend, who I'd been married to, and I. It wasn't gonna work out. And this is at the time when the stock market had crashed and the housing market had crashed, and. And all of a sudden, I couldn't afford the house I was living in, and I had nobody to talk to about this. And I turned to food as comfort now, not just healthy food. I mean, the junk food. I mean, I remember going through McDonald's drive through pretty much every day as comfort. I wanted the sugar and the carbs and the things I knew I shouldn't have just to comfort me. And the more bad foods I ate, the more weight I gained and the worse I felt about myself. And the problem didn't just go away when I had my daughter. In fact, things got worse. Because, you see, I'm only 5 2, and I was 60 pounds heavier than I am now. And that's a lot of weight on somebody that's five two. And it wasn't just pregnancy weight. In fact, I remember my daughter being born and me asking the doctor when they told me that she wasn't even 7 pounds if the placenta weighed another 50. I had all of this excess weight, and then I had Depression on top of it and that they go hand in hand. You're depressed and now you're eating and now you're overweight and that's contributing to the depression. And I felt like I had the weight of the world on me. Where am I gonna live? How am I gonna pay my bills? How am I gonna get through this? My marriage ended in a divorce. I became a single mom. And I fell into all of those excuses. I knew I needed to make a change. And I remember researching how to lose weight and feel better, and I just ran into complete information overload. Now all that negativity could have taken over my life. And honestly, it almost did. I had a lot of reasons, a long list of excuses to be and stay depressed, overweight, frustrated, even angry. But I didn't stay in that place because I decided I didn't want those circumstances to define my future. I know I made that sound easy. So how did I do that? Well, that's where we come to this next part of this exercise. On that side of that paper that has that IPAP written, I want you to make a list of the good things you want, the pleasure and positivity that you want. What is that? And I'm going to start. I had one massively huge thing that drove me, my daughter. I didn't want my negativity, my excuses, and my short term pain to define my future and more importantly, the future of my daughter. See how powerful that is? I mean, she's the single most important person in my life. Another example of this is someone, maybe a parent, who just is wanting to be alive to see them graduate college, to get married, or even become a grandparent. These are the big, powerful things that don't provide immediate stoppage of pain, but they drive us to make those right decisions that will pay off down the road. So what are the big things that you want in life? What do you want to accomplish in the future? Do you want to be a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, a paid speaker? Do you want to retire early, travel the world, or maybe stay home and take care of your kids? Take a minute and think about the big things you want out of your life. If you need to pause this video again for a minute, please do that now. Okay, let's keep going. That part of the exercise right there is how I found the lasting motivation to make the positive changes needed to get my life moving in the right direction. I had to find out the things that were really important to me, as that was the only way to get out of the Mindset of feeling so sorry for myself and depressed. Now I want you to look at your list. You probably have more things listed on that Spanish stop pain and negativity side of things. These are the things you want to change quickly and will provide you with some short term motivation. Now the purpose of the short term motivation is simply to get some momentum going and get some wins under your belt. This builds confidence and will allow you to shift your focus on your iPad, increase pleasure and positivity as you get going. You'll be checking off and removing things under the stop pain side of things. They will have served their short term purpose and getting you going as you will have transitioned to focusing on the long term positive goals. Now I want you to look at that list of things you wrote under the IPAP side. I want you to choose the most important one. Now here's the catch. I said only one. You can only choose one. Now I'm going to call this the dcm, the Driving Core Motivator. What's the Driving Core Motivator? It's the real reason, the real reason behind everything and becomes your core driver and motivator when it is identified and understood and when it's aligned correctly with your intentions, you become unstable, unstoppable towards your goal. My daughter was my dcm. I was motivated to be the best mom I possibly could be by providing for her, protecting her and being the person she could be proud of. I wanted her to grow up in a positive, loving and supportive environment. I wanted to have a home where she felt safe and I wanted her to see me living a healthy lifestyle, feeling good about myself. I wanted her to see me eating well and being active so she would do the same and want the same for her. I wanted to come home from a long day of work and have the energy to actually play and really engage with her. I wanted to be present and I wanted her to see me happy. But I was tired, I was overweight, I was broke. I definitely wasn't happy in my job and I was not at that time the mom that she deserved. I had to change. I used the pain of being tired and overweight as motivation to change things in the short term. But as I got going, I knew why I had to change and why I had to do the right things every day moving forward. My DCM was my focus. It truly was my driving core motivator. So yes, I did lose the fat and guess what? I did increase my energy. And those two things led to two more things and then two more things and before I knew it, I was in a full momentum. Focusing on that driving core motivator is what allowed me to keep going. And for me it has kept me going for nine years and counting. Now today I have a completely different life. But it all started because I found my motivation and got the momentum going. And that has lasted for years now. So there are moments when the momentum slows down a bit, but if you do this right, it will never stop. When the momentum stops is when you run into problems. You see, deciding to make that first change of losing the fat, the fat that was weighing me down, that had the effect to increase my energy and then increase my happiness. It also increased my self esteem, my confidence. I had a new passion that and that new passion brought me clarity about a change I wanted in my career. And hey, it led me to build a business where I could help people like you. That's why I'm standing here today. A business that allowed me to be flexible, to spend more time with my daughter, to take her to school and pick her up, to be at all of her activities and to be present and to be happy. And now I love my life, I love how I feel and I love that I can help so many of you get out of this. Ruth, you see, my DCM is still my daughter. It always will be. She is the long term driver that keeps me going. Do you see how powerful that is? So here's what I want you to do. On the back of that piece of paper, I want you to draw a triangle in the middle of the page. Go ahead. Make it a decent size. In fact, you can use color if you want. Of course, if you know me, you would know mine's going to be pink. And at the very top I want you to write DCM and I want you to put a dash and I want you to write it down exactly what yours is now. On the bottom two corners of that triangle, I want you to write your top two pains that you want to stop. I'm assuming fat loss is going to be one of them. Now you have two short term pains to drive motivation now and one big pleasure to look forward to. That should keep you focused. You can always go back to your entire list on the other side of this page. But I found that focus is the key for gaining momentum. And momentum is what is cracking critical for your success. Now here's what I want you to do. Commit that triangle to memory and use it as a filter for all of your decisions. Take a screenshot of it and put it on your phone if you need to. It should be a filter for all of your decisions. Okay, now that you have your driving core motivator and you've got your triangle memorized, I'm not going to let you off the hook quite yet. First of all, I would love for you to share what your driving core motivator is with me or ask me any questions you have about it. If, if you comment below, I promise I'm going to see all of those comments and I'm looking forward to reading yours. And I'm also wanting to know if you found this exercise helpful. Now that you have these things, the next step is going to be taking action. And you're not going to want to miss the next video because I cannot wait to share with you what I'm going to teach you about nutrition. This is something that I have not dove deep into before with you, but it is something that a lot of us are doing in our diets that is really contributing to to fat gain and getting in the way of our fat loss. Remember earlier I mentioned I was creating a four part video series for you. This second one is where you're going to get all that information. So make sure you're on the lookout for that. You'll see it within the next 48 hours.