You may have come across the quote: “Motivation gets you started, but discipline keeps you growing." By John C. Maxwell, the author and leadership mentor.

Motivation is an interesting concept. It’s often required to get things started, but if you only rely on your motivation to do something, particularly if that something is not easy or particularly enjoyable, it won’t keep you going.

This week, we’re looking at how to use motivation to develop the right habits that will keep you consistent.

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Script |423

Hello, and welcome to episode 423 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.

One of the consequences of writing a journal every morning is that you come up with a lot of ideas about how you would like to change your life or the way you work. And many of those ideas can motivate you to try something new.

That could mean reading a real book every evening instead of watching TV or scrolling through the news and social media. Or perhaps to go out for an evening stroll after work, or plan your day the evening before, so you can enjoy a more relaxing evening.

All seemingly easy to do.

And then you decide to do it. The first day is easy, the second a little less so and by the time you get to the end of the week, you’ve lost all motivation and picking up a book or going outside for a walk feels like the last thing you want to do after such a hard day. So you skip it.

It’s only one day, it can’t do any harm, can it? And then the next day you don’t do it, and the day after that and so on. Eventually, that great idea you had about changing a bad habit has ended up in the pit of tried-but-forgotten great ideas.

It happens to all of us. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you; all it means is that you’re relying on one of the most overrated ways to change something, motivation.

Motivation is fleeting; it never lasts, and it hates reality. It’s also affected by the quality of your sleep, how distracted you are, and your overall mood. It’s a very unreliable friend.

Great at encouraging you to get started, but terrible at keeping you going when things get difficult.

The good news is there is a more reliable way to make changes, but the bad news is you may need to initially feel uncomfortable. Yet it’s worth it.

So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.

This week’s question comes from Fran. Fran asks, Hi Carl, what do you do when you don’t have the motivation to do what you have planned to do?

Hi Fran, thank you for your question.

To answer your question directly, I don’t rely on motivation. I remember the days when I smoked, and almost every night, when I went to bed, I would motivate myself not to smoke the next day.

Thinking about that now, it’s funny, because as I was “motivating” myself, I was smoking my last cigarette of the day. “No, I won’t smoke tomorrow!”

Then, when I woke up in the morning, I would make my coffee, then go outside for my first cigarette of the day.

Where was my motivation when I needed it most? It wasn’t there.

In the end, I finally quit smoking by removing all temptation from the house and not carrying any money with me when I went out. Just my travel card and a lunchbox.

It was tough, but after a couple of weeks, the habit was disappearing, and by the end of the month, I could not imagine smoking again.

I’ve seen this time and time again with people. Those who motivate themselves to go out for an evening walk after dinner, for example. It’s easy to do that in the summer, when it’s likely still light outside and the weather’s warm and dry.

Then the temperatures cool, the light fades, and the rain comes down. “Ah, it’s cold and raining, I won’t go out tonight, I’m tired anyway, and I left my umbrella at the office.”

The one that still surprises me, though, is the daily planning.

Daily planning takes no more than five minutes and can be done just before you finish your work for the day or as the last thing in the evening, before you go to bed.

Five minutes, and after a while, it can be done in 2 or 3 minutes.

And yet, people still struggle. Why?

Because they are relying on motivation.

I remember when I first read Hyrum Smith’s Ten Natural Laws of Time and Life Management, and when I read the chapter on planning your day, I was incredibly motivated.

I was fortunate that as I was reading the book, I was setting up my Franklin Planner and one of the steps when using a Franklin Planner is to do the “planning and solitude” exercise every day.

It was suggested that you give yourself 15 minutes a day for this, and the first thing you wrote at the top of your Prioritised Daily Task list was “Planning and Solitude,” which would be given priority A1. It was the most important task of the day.

And that’s what I did every evening. I sat at the table with my planner and planned out the next day. Then, I checked off the Planning and Solitude task. This meant that by the next day, my first task was already complete.

And since then, which was the early 1990s, I haven’t missed some form of a daily planning ritual. I cannot imagine going to bed not knowing where I need to be and what needs to be done.

I doubt now I could get to sleep without knowing. I even do this when on holiday.

Just saying that now means I’ve consistently planned my day for over 30 years! WOW!

The people who succeed at staying consistent with their plans are the ones who start small.

Often, we will take a course or read a book, get motivated and try to change everything all at once.

That’s the hardest way to do it.

Recently, I’ve been watching documentaries on how great football managers turn teams around. I’ve now studied Pep Guardiola, Sir Alex Ferguson, Johan Cruif and Mikel Arteta.

And there’s a common thread between all of them.

When they took over a team, the team was not performing. Often, they were struggling at the bottom of their league.

Yet, the change didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, step-by-step process. In all cases, they first fired old players who may have been brilliant, but were unwilling to adopt a new philosophy or were a bad influence on new players.

They recruited professional players who were willing to adapt to the new style of play. And in almost all cases, their first season was not great.

Then things began to change: the team started climbing the league and eventually winning trophies.

These managers treated the necessary changes as a project. It wasn’t about “motivating” the players to play better; it was about having them buy into the new culture of doing things.

As Arsene Wenger, the legendary Arsenal manager, said in one interview when talking about his successor following his retirement:

“We need someone who understands that football is not just about winning. It’s about how you win. The philosophy has to come first. The results follow the philosophy, not the other way round. The philosophy is not a tactic. It’s a value”

In other words, when you decide something needs to change, knowing why it needs to change is important. What’s your reason, your philosophy and the value behind that change?

When you know the reason you want to change, “motivation” no longer comes into it.

One of my clients works for a company that was advised by a well-known consultancy to change its management methods to an “Agile” system.

There was then a flurry of activity by senior management, a great deal of money spent on training, and many employees were made redundant.

Ten years later, that company has slowly moved back to the way they managed things before they were force-fed Agile. What went wrong?

Well, the motivation was high at the start of the transformation. Senior managers were buying into the vision that the consultancy company was selling. The problem was that there was no clear reason to change.

Sales were great, the culture was one of the best in the industry, and people loved working for the company. The company’s sales team had strong relationships with their customers, and...