Hal Elrod: All right. I got a question for you. You ever struggle with motivation? That’s what we’re talking about today. How do you stay motivated when you don’t feel motivated? How do you get yourself to do what you need to do when you don’t feel like it? And I want to start with just being vulnerable. Like, I struggle with motivation, too. I know that sometimes you listen to a podcast or, I do this too, where I see somebody on stage, I’m like, “Oh man, they’ve got such confidence and conviction. They must have it all figured out.” Nope. I am human. Every human is human. And staying motivated is something that all of us have to figure out for ourselves, and that’s what I want to break down today, is how do you get yourself to stay motivated consistently so that you can achieve your goals, do what you need to do in every area of your life, your health goals, your fitness goals, your relationship goals.

Because very often, I don’t know about you, but life’s exhausting. It’s tiring. You’re like, “I just don’t want to do it. I’m so tired.” Life is so tiring. Two real examples for me right now are writing my first Substack article. I’ve started it a dozen times at least. In fact, I have, I think, four, five, six different Substack articles. Perfectionism kills it every time. And it’s like this is my first Substack article. It has to be perfect. So, raise your hand if perfectionism is something that you also struggle with. I would guess so. And the other one for me is speaking engagements. I don’t know what to do, meaning I am a professional speaker, but all of my speeches have always come in where folks are reading The Miracle Morning, and it’s a CEO or an executive, and then they say, “Oh my gosh, this is changing my life. I want to bring The Miracle Morning into my organization.”

And so, that’s how I get all of my speaking engagements. I don’t actually pursue them. In fact, I’m in Dallas right now. I’m speaking at an event this afternoon. I’m recording this from my hotel room for you. But the bottom line that you can relate to is, like, how do you get motivated when you don’t know where to start? I’ve never booked speaking engagements. I’ve never reached out proactively. So, what do you do when you don’t know where to start? So, that’s where motivation can often lag. So, it’s either fear of the unknown, something you’ve never done before that’s out of your comfort zone, or perfectionism. Those are two main causes that cause us to choose the opposite of motivation, which is, in a lot of ways, it’s procrastination, or at least that manifests as procrastination.

So, I’m not speaking from a pedestal here. I’m speaking from somebody that is in the trenches consistently working on staying motivated. However, I’ve been teaching motivation, and I’ve been implementing it for 26 years, so I do have that place of experience to draw from. So, here we go. Today I’m going to share with you four keys. I call these the four cornerstones of motivation that you can use in your life right now, something that’s totally concrete that you can immediately start applying. And before I dive in, I just want to say the biggest myth is that waiting for motivation to arrive before acting doesn’t work. Motivation doesn’t precede action. In fact, you’ve heard me say this when I’m talking about discipline or getting yourself to do what you need to do.

I usually reference one of the philosophies that I learned, I don’t know, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, from John Maxwell in his book Failing Forward, and it was the idea that most of us are sitting around waiting for the feelings that we think we need. “Oh, if only I felt motivated, if only I had more energy.” When the reality is those things must be generated by us. That’s what these four cornerstones I’m going to share with you today, that’s what they do. They will help you generate motivation. And the principle I learned in John Maxwell’s book was you have to act your way into feeling, right?

You can’t feel your way into action. You can’t wait for the feelings that you think you need. You have to actually take the first step. And I always use the example of if you go to the gym and if you’re like, “I don’t feel like exercising,” well, grab your gym bag, get in the car, head to the gym. “Oh, I’m just not motivated.” Well, when you, A, first of all, just driving to the gym, you’re now leaning into the activity that you need to do that you don’t feel motivated to do. You’re acting your way into feeling. And then when you get out of the car with your gym bag, you walk into the gym, and the music’s pumping and people are on the treadmill and literal human energy is infused in that room, you will feel significantly more motivated than you did when you were sitting at home on the couch thinking about not feeling motivated, right? So, you have to act your way into feeling.

All right. So, here we go. These are the four cornerstones of motivation. This is how you generate it consistently, whether you feel like it or not. Number one is clarity. Know what you want, know why it matters, know what your next steps are. This isn’t like vision board clarity, right? I’m talking about emotionally charged clarity that makes your goal feel non-negotiable rather than aspirational. So, there are three components of clarity. It’s the what, the why, and the how. And again, this is on you. You have to sit down, whether you feel like it or not, grab your pen, start writing or typing. And what is it that you want?

You’ve got to get clear on exactly what you want because a vague goal is really easy to not follow through with when you don’t feel like it. But when you have a crystal-clear goal, an emotionally charged goal, that will carry you through the slow periods. So, if you read The Miracle Morning and you know the affirmations formula, it happens to line up perfectly with these three components of clarity: the what, the why, and the how. Step one of the affirmations formula: affirm what you’re committed to. That is the what. This is the what that I am committed to: losing weight, making more money. Of course, get as specific as you can. Losing 20 pounds by the end of the year, exercising five days a week before this month, increasing my income by 20% this year. So, get really clear on the what.

The second component of clarity is the why. Why is it a must for you? That’s the second step in the affirmations formula: affirming why it’s a must for you. And the third step is the how. How are you going to do it? You’ve got to affirm which actions are you going to take and when. And in the beginning, sometimes you don’t know the action. You’re like, “Well, I don’t know.” Like for me and the speaking thing, I didn’t know what I needed to do to get started, so I started talking to other speakers and asking them, “Hey, here’s my situation.” So, whether you are talking to human beings in your life and asking them, “Hey, where can I get started? What’s the first step?” talking to folks that have gone before you that have done what you’re trying to do, that’s what I did, and now I’m making this progress on this goal in my life.

Or if you need to, ask ChatGPT or AI. Like, “Hey, here’s what I’m trying to do. What do you recommend?” For whatever is needed, get clarity on which action steps you need to take next. And so, I always say, if you don’t know initially, you’re like, “I don’t know,” well, then the action that you need to do is to schedule time to figure that out. So, whether that’s googling it or asking AI or talking to people that you know, or reaching out to a mentor, getting clear on those three components: clarity on the what, what you want, what you’re committed to; the why, why it’s a must for you; and then the how, which actions you will take and when. That is the first cornerstone of generating motivation. Clarity is the foundation, and everything else builds on top of it.

All right. Number two, commitment. Commitment is a decision where you’re cutting off all other possibilities. It’s the decision you make, ideally on a good day, that carries you through the bad ones, right? Meaning, like you go to an event and you’re all motivated, or you listen to this podcast, you’re all excited. Make a commitment but put it in writing. That’s why the first step in the affirmations formula, the Miracle Morning affirmations formula, is, “I am committed to ____ no matter what. There is no other option.” And one of my close friends, well, used to be a friend, haven’t talked to him in a long time, but Romacio Fulcher, he’s very successful, and when you called his voicemail, he would always end it by saying, “Remember, there’s always a way when you’re committed.” Then he would repeat it, “There’s always a way when you’re committed.”

And that’s the reality. Like, commitment is a very black-and-white thing. Either you are committed, or you aren’t committed. And if you are committed, you will find a way. You will do what is necessary because you’ve made a commitment that trumps your short-term exhaustion or emotions or lack of motivation, right? The commitment is the rock-solid, “I made a decision, I’m going to do whatever it takes.” And most people are re-deciding every morning whether they’re all in or not, like they’re negotiating with themselves. And on the slow days, on the days where they’re tired or where they’re not getting the results as fast as they want, that decision, it’s very vulnerable to making the one that doesn’t move you forward.

But real commitment, again, it means the decision is already made. Today’s job is to simply live in alignment with your integrity and do the thing that you committed to doing, right? So, like, my personal example that I gave earlier was Substack. Like Substack, the delay isn’t a writing problem, it’s a conditional commitment problem. Waiting for it to be good enough or waiting to feel ready, no. Conditional commitments don’t survive the days when motivation is lacking. You have to follow through with that commitment whether or not you feel like it, because real commitment is unconditional regardless of how you feel, regardless of whether it’s perfect, and regardless of your short-term results.

Write it down. And that’s why the affirmations need to be read every day. Because every day when you read your affirmations, and you are reciting, “I am committed to _____,” whatever the goal is or the activity or the habit, “I am committed to _____ no matter what. There is no other option.” And what you affirm repeatedly becomes your reality. So, on day one, when you commit to something that maybe you’re afraid of, or you haven’t done in the past, or it’s out of your comfort zone, day one, when you commit and affirm, “I am committed,” you might feel fear. You might feel doubt. Like, “Ah, I know I’m saying that, but I don’t feel committed. I’ve let myself down in the past.”

And what you affirm repeatedly becomes your reality. So, what happens is you affirm that commitment day after day after day after day, and on day one it might be laced with fear and uncertainty, but by day 10, it’s a lot more solidified within your consciousness. You’re acclimating to the commitment. You are becoming committed day by day by day. Now, of course, reciting and affirming the commitment is only the first half. The other half is you’ve got to do the things you’re committing to. And that’s where, of course, you build trust in yourself, confidence in yourself, right? It’s like, “Okay, I committed, and then I followed through. I did the thing, and now I’m reinforcing the belief in myself, the commitment, et cetera.”

And that’s where we get into the third key here, the third cornerstone of motivation, is discipline. That is the follow-through. It’s following through whether you feel like it or not. So, commitment is the decision, right? And discipline is the action. It is the follow-through. And it’s not forcing yourself to do things that you hate. It’s acting in alignment with your commitments regardless of how you feel in the moment, knowing that, as I said earlier, that strategy, that philosophy from John Maxwell, act your way into feeling. So, discipline is taking that first step. It’s packing your gym bag. When I was in sales, I would set an alarm to get on the phone at a certain time in the morning. And then when it went off, I had, like, a rule where I had to shut my brain down.

I wasn’t allowed to think myself out of it and go, “Well, I could make my calls later,” or, “I’ll just start in 30 minutes,” or, “I’ll do them tomorrow,” whatever. No. When the alarm went off, I would shut it off without thinking. I would grab the phone. I would open my referral notebook. Usually, I already had it open. And then I would start dialing the first number, and then I would build my wings on the way down, right? Like, it’d be like, “I don’t even know what I’m doing. Who am I calling? Okay, where are you?” And then I would just figure it out. It was taking the action before I talked myself out of it. That is discipline. That is discipline. Same thing when I was writing The Miracle Morning. There were some days I didn’t want to write, so I would open my laptop, and I would just start typing.

And sometimes I’d start with, “I don’t know what I’m going to write today. I’m feeling writer’s block. How am I going to overcome this?” Like, I would literally just type. They call that free writing. I would just flow whatever came through me, including the doubt and the fear and the uncertainty. And then eventually, like, that action generated the motivation, and it generated the clarity that I needed. And all of a sudden, maybe it was five minutes into writing or two minutes or 10 minutes, but I would go, “Oh, wait a minute. Ooh, I know.” And then I would get clarity, and then I would keep writing, and then something brilliant would come out. And the reality is that I think I said this in The Miracle Morning book, or maybe it was my previous book, it was that, “Those who only do what they feel like don’t do very much.”

Those who only do what they feel like don’t do very much because feelings are unreliable indicators of what you should do. Both motivated and unmotivated feelings come to pass. And more often it’s unmotivated feelings because the reality is human beings were not designed to act unless we had to, and our society has changed. What I mean by that is there was no leaderboard a thousand years ago, right? Like, human beings are wired to do the minimum that we need to do to survive, not to thrive. Because you go back in prehistoric times, you got motivated when you’re like, “Ah, we’re out of buffalo meat. We need to go hunt.” And it was like the threat of not surviving was the motivation, right?

It wasn’t like there was a leaderboard and you’re like, “Oh, Joe, he’s killed three buffalo, and I’ve only got one for the month. I got to get more buffalo done.” Or, “Oh, my friend is so much more successful than I am.” Human beings evolved for thousands upon thousands of years without the need to create motivation on a daily basis. And so, it’s not your fault if you don’t naturally feel motivated. Human nature is to take the path of least resistance and do the minimum that is needed, as I just said, to survive. So, you cannot rely on your feelings. You have to generate motivation. You have to take ownership and the actions that are required, right? Lean into it. Act your way into it. Take that first baby step.

So, again, it’s those days when I write when I don’t feel like it that are the days that I make progress. It’s the days when I wait for inspiration or wait for motivation. Those are the days that nothing happens, and I just… Nothing happens. I move on, I do something else, I check emails, and I don’t get any writing done. Same thing with the exercise. I walk into my home gym. I have a little tiny home gym behind my office. I walk in, and I just start exercising at the time that I committed to. I don’t wait until I feel like it. I don’t care if I’m motivated. I just move into the space, into the environment that I need to be in, and I do the thing I need to do, right? That is discipline. It’s doing what you need to do whether you feel like it or not. Don’t think yourself out of it. Act first, feel motivated second. That is how it actually works.

And then the fourth and final cornerstone of motivation… Well, let me review the first three. Number one is clarity, knowing what you want, knowing why you want it, and knowing what you need to do generally to follow through. And I like to put it in my schedule so that the clarity is manifested in an appointment on my calendar. Number two is the commitment, deciding what you’re going to do, whether you feel like it or not. The third cornerstone is discipline, following through whether you feel like it. It’s actually doing the thing, right? Commitment is the decision to do it. Discipline is the follow-through. And then the fourth key is faith.

And if you’ve read my book The Miracle Equation, the first component of The Miracle Equation, the first decision of the two decisions that move your biggest goals from impossible to improbable, the first decision is unwavering faith, that you will maintain unwavering faith, which simply means that you are trusting the process even when you can’t see it, right? This isn’t religious faith necessarily. It’s unwavering belief that your consistent actions are accumulating toward an outcome that you can’t see. I’ll say that again, because that’s one of my favorite definitions of faith. The unwavering belief that your consistent actions, which you’ve generated through clarity, commitment, and discipline, the belief that your consistent actions are accumulating toward an outcome that you can’t yet see.

And if you think about it, every meaningful goal has a lag time between effort and evidence, and that invisible period is where most people quit, or they don’t even start, not because they stop believing in the goal, but because they stop believing their actions are moving them toward it, like they’re not seeing progress. So, faith also, you think about this, faith and fear are essentially two sides of the same coin, meaning they’re both fantasies. Like, things could go wrong. That’s fear. Things could go right. That’s faith. And where you put your energy is a decision, right? A glass-is-half-full person is maintaining faith that things are going to work out. And they don’t always work out, but the person with faith keeps moving forward because they know, “Oh, this is just an obstacle on the path.”

And I think about Miracle Morning and trying to sell a million copies and change a million lives. I’m just using examples from my own life. Like, I set a goal to do that in one year, and maybe you know the story. I was 987,000 copies short of the goal, right? Out of the million that I was giving everything I had and maintaining unwavering faith. I sold 13,000 copies, and I was 987,000 copies short. Did my faith waver? Yeah. I was like, “Oh my gosh.” You know, I did the math. I’m like, it’s going to take me 77 years, I think, at 13,000 copies a year, to reach the goal, at which time I’ll be 110 years old. That’s a little bit discouraging, right? But the unwavering faith is I know I have this belief that my consistent actions over an extended period of time will accumulate toward an outcome that I am working towards, which was that million lives changed, changing one million lives one morning at a time, and it took six years.

It took six years. So, often it will take you longer, but the person that gives up faith longer than you intended, but the person that gives up faith, they never get there, right? They’re feeding their fear of what could go wrong and not only is it preventing them from getting to their destination, to their goal, but it’s causing them to live in a state of fear, of emotional turmoil, to miss out on the joy of the journey of life because they’re living in a state of fear. And when faith wavers, I encourage you to return to past evidence, meaning every goal you’ve achieved went through ups and downs, through slow periods where it looked like it might not work. And then if you stuck with it, eventually it did.

If I would’ve given up on my goal to change one million lives in year one or two or three or four or five, I would’ve never gotten there, right? But I committed for as long as it took. And so, your past, consider that, you’ve probably heard this before, right? We all have a 100% track record of surviving every challenge that we’ve ever faced, like we’re still here. Even though some of us are fight or flight primitive nature as a human might have told us like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t make it through this. I can’t handle this. I’ve never done this before.” But you handled it, you did, and you’re still here. You can handle anything and everything that comes your way in the future.

And if you maintain unwavering faith, and then you put forth extraordinary effort, which is really that third component of discipline, right, doing what you need to do. Extraordinary effort doesn’t mean that you work 60 hours a week. It means that you do something every day consistently that moves you in the direction of your predetermined goal. That’s what extraordinary… And the reason it’s called extraordinary effort is because ordinary effort is just not following through. It’s not maintaining discipline. It’s not staying committed. It’s not even establishing clarity in the beginning. The average person doesn’t do these things. And no judgment, again, they’re just being human. Human nature is to not do any of this stuff.

But we live in a society, right? Unless your only ambition, and if it is, I actually love this, but if your only ambition is, “I just need to get food for my family to eat,” and that’s it. And then as long a roof over my head, food to eat, like, doing the minimum that we need to get by, that is not… I don’t judge that at all. In fact, in a lot of ways, I would argue for that. I would argue for simplicity. I would argue that when is enough, enough? Like, for me, actually, my life has shifted ever since I went through my cancer journey. It shifted from, like, trying to go as big as I could and help as many people as I could, and I had the epiphany that, “Oh, I’ve been valuing the quantity of my results and the quantity of my impact in terms of helping lots of people over the quality of my results at home, and the quality of the impact that I can make with the three people, being my wife and our two kids, at home.

So, I’m actually a big believer that more is not better, bigger is not better. Like, what matters is better, getting clear on what matters in your life. And these four cornerstones of motivation, the first one is that, clarity. What matters most to you? What do you want? Why do you want it? How are you going to ensure that you’re going to move in the direction and eventually create the results and the outcomes that you want in your health, in your fitness, in your finances, in your marriage, and as a parent, and the impact you’re making in the world, the contribution? It all starts with clarity, and that’s something that typically we can set goals for the year, but, like, clarity is something. Reflection is the cousin of clarity.

I’m reflecting every morning through prayer and meditation and journaling. Like, the S in SAVERS, the silence in SAVERS, I’m consistently generating new clarity. And very often, it is through receiving clarity. This morning is a great example. I was praying this morning, and I’m like, I run a weekly call for one of the companies that I speak for, and I run a call for their sales team. And I was like, this morning, I was like, “I don’t know what I’m going to talk about today. I don’t know what…” I just was like, I had to call it writer’s block. I guess you’d call it speaker’s block. I couldn’t think of what I was going to talk about. And so, I pray for guidance and clarity. What should I do? And immediately, within like 30 seconds, as I sat there in silence and waited for the answer to my prayer, if you will, it came to me.

And I pulled out my journal, and I wrote it down, and I got total clarity, and I ran one of the best calls that I’ve ever run this morning for this group. And that came from me establishing clarity, and through that process of silence. So, the first cornerstone is clarity. Got to know what you want. Got to know why. Got to know what you need to do. The second is commitment. You’ve got to decide. The third is discipline. You’ve got to do the thing you decided you were going to do, the thing you committed to, whether you feel like it or not. And in doing so, you’ll reinforce your confidence, your belief in yourself. And the fourth cornerstone is that faith, right? Trusting the process, believing that your consistent actions are accumulating toward an outcome that you can’t yet see. But if you maintain faith in it and you continue to put forth effort and generate these four cornerstones on an ongoing basis, put forth the extraordinary effort consistently over an extended period of time, you cannot fail.

All right. Let’s wrap up and bring it all together. Motivation is a system. It’s not a feeling. It is a system built from four components: clarity, commitment, discipline, and faith, and each feeds the other. So, your assignment, if you’re willing to accept it, is write those four components down and then write your affirmation to follow through with the three clarity aspects, right? To affirm what you’re committed to, affirm why it’s a must for you, and affirm which actions you will take and when. And then if you’re up for it, share this. Think of someone in your life who’s in a slow period right now and who needs to hear this, who needs motivation. Send them this episode. And that one share might be exactly what they needed to keep going.

All right. So, motivation is your responsibility. That’s what I’ll end with. It’s your responsibility. It’s not a feeling. It is a system built from these four components. I love y’all so much, and I will talk to you next week.