Why waiting to feel motivated could be the very thing stopping you from making progress.
Have you ever come away from a meeting, seminar, book or conversation feeling really inspired?
You’ve got a great idea. You can see exactly what needs to change. You’re excited about the possibilities, and you can’t wait to get started.
You might even spend the journey home thinking about how different things are going to be.
Then Monday morning arrives.
The phone rings. Someone’s off sick. A customer has a problem. There’s something urgent that needs sorting out.
And that brilliant idea you were so excited about suddenly isn’t quite as exciting as dealing with what’s immediately in front of you.
A week later, nothing’s changed.
Sound familiar?
I think one of the biggest mistakes people make, particularly when they’re trying to improve their businesses, is confusing inspiration with motivation.
And there’s an important difference.
Inspiration is wanting the result
Inspiration is that moment when you see something you want to achieve.
Perhaps you’ve met another business owner who’s managed to build a company that runs without them.
Perhaps you’ve seen a better way of managing people.
Or maybe you’ve simply reached the point where you’ve had enough of working sixty hours a week and want something different.
You can see the possibility.
You want the outcome.
And for a while, you’re full of enthusiasm.
But inspiration is relatively easy.
It’s exciting to imagine what your business could look like.
It’s much harder to do the things necessary to make it happen.
And that’s where discipline comes in.
Discipline is doing it when you don’t feel like it
Let’s say you’ve decided you need to spend more time working on your business rather than constantly working in it.
You know it’s important.
You understand that if you want the business to run without you, you’ve got to develop your managers, improve your systems and stop getting involved in everything.
So you decide to spend two hours every Friday morning working on those things.
The first Friday arrives.
And guess what?
There’s a problem with a customer.
Someone needs a decision.
You’ve got forty-seven emails waiting.
And there’s a voice in your head telling you that you can always do the business development work next week.
That’s the point where inspiration has to become discipline.
Discipline is making yourself do something because you’ve decided it’s important, even when you don’t particularly feel like doing it.
It’s protecting those two hours.
It’s having the difficult conversation with your manager.
It’s reviewing the numbers.
It’s following up on the things you said you were going to do.
It’s making the changes you’ve been putting off.
And it’s doing those things consistently, even when something more interesting or immediately rewarding comes along.
Because if you only do the important things when you feel inspired, you’ll spend an awful lot of your life waiting to feel inspired.
Discipline creates the conditions for motivation
Here’s where I think things get interesting.
People often assume that motivation comes first.
They think they need to feel motivated before they’ll take action.
But in my experience, it often works the other way around.
You take action because you’ve decided to.
You keep doing it because you’ve got the discipline to follow through.
And then something happens.
You start seeing results.
Your managers begin taking more responsibility.
The number of problems landing on your desk starts reducing.
You find yourself finishing work earlier.
You realise that something you’ve been struggling with for years is actually beginning to improve.
And suddenly, you want to do more of it.
That’s motivation.
You’re no longer just doing something because you know you should.
You’re doing it because you can see the benefit and you want to keep making progress.
The discipline that got you started has helped create the motivation to continue.
Of course, motivation isn’t always guaranteed to appear, and there will still be days when you need discipline to keep going.
But making progress is a powerful reason to continue.
Motivation repeated becomes habit
Now imagine you’ve been doing this for six months.
Every Friday morning, you spend time working on improving your business.
You review what you’ve achieved, identify what needs doing next and make decisions about how you’re going to move forward.
It’s become part of your week.
You no longer spend Thursday evening debating whether you’re going to do it.
You just do it.
In fact, if something prevents you from doing it, you feel as though something’s missing.
That’s when you’ve developed a habit.
What originally required conscious effort has become part of how you operate.
And that’s enormously valuable.
Because the things you do consistently have a far greater impact on your business than the things you occasionally feel inspired to do.
One brilliant day of planning won’t transform your business.
One difficult conversation won’t create a great management team.
One afternoon improving your processes won’t suddenly make everything run smoothly.
But doing those things repeatedly, over months and years, can make a remarkable difference.
The real change happens when improvement becomes something you habitually do, rather than something you occasionally think about doing.
The problem with waiting until you’re ready
I’ve spoken to plenty of business owners who know exactly what they want to change.
They want better managers.
They want more time.
They want their businesses to be more profitable.
They want to stop being involved in every decision.
And they genuinely intend to do something about it.
But they’re waiting.
Waiting until things calm down.
Waiting until they’ve recruited someone.
Waiting until the next big customer project is finished.
Waiting until they’ve got a bit more time.
The trouble is, there’s always going to be something happening.
Running a business is like that.
And if you’re waiting for the perfect circumstances before you start making improvements, you could be waiting an extremely long time.
Sometimes you’ve simply got to decide that something matters enough to make time for it.
And then have the discipline to protect that time.
There’s another problem: doing it on your own
Of course, knowing what you need to do and consistently doing it are two different things.
And that’s where having someone alongside you can make a significant difference.
Not because they’re going to do the work for you.
And not because you lack the ability to make the changes yourself.
But because having someone challenge your thinking, ask what you’ve actually done and hold you accountable can make it considerably easier to maintain the discipline required.
It’s easy to tell yourself you’ll get around to something next week.
It’s rather different when you’ve agreed to do it and someone you respect is going to ask you about it.
Sometimes the most valuable question I ask a client is simply:
“You told me you were going to do that. Have you done it?”
And if the answer is no, the next question is usually:
“Why not?”
Not to give them a telling-off.
But to understand what’s stopping them.
Because sometimes there’s a genuine obstacle.
Sometimes priorities have changed.
And sometimes they’ve just allowed the day-to-day demands of the business to take over again.
Having that conversation helps them recognise what’s happening and decide what to do differently.
That’s how progress becomes consistent.
What have you been meaning to do?
Here’s something I’d like you to think about.
What’s the one thing you’ve been intending to change in your business for the last six months?
Perhaps it’s delegating more.
Perhaps it’s developing your management team.
Perhaps it’s improving profitability.
Perhaps it’s putting proper systems in place.
Or perhaps it’s simply making time to think about where you want the business to go.
You already know it’s important.
You may have felt inspired to do it several times.
But if nothing’s changed, inspiration clearly hasn’t been enough.
So rather than waiting for another burst of enthusiasm, decide what action you’re going to take and when you’re going to take it.
Then do it.
And do it again.
And keep doing it until you start seeing the results.
Because those results can create the motivation to continue, and repetition can turn that motivation into a habit.
Inspiration. Discipline. Motivation. Habit.
That’s the progression I want you to think about.
Inspiration gives you a reason to start.
Discipline gets you taking action, whether you feel like it or not.
Motivation grows as you see the benefits and want to keep going.
Habit makes those actions a normal part of what you do.
And once the right behaviours become habits, improving your business becomes a lot less dependent on finding the time, energy or enthusiasm to get started all over again.
So here’s my final question.
What would be different about your business today if you’d consistently done the thing you first felt inspired to do twelve months ago?
And perhaps more importantly, what could be different twelve months from now if you started doing it today?
Andy Walter
I help business owners build businesses that are easier to run, with less pressure and less stress.
Join us at the next Your Mastermind Group networking session.
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