Last week I had an interesting conversation with an awesome client of mine. Before we started the work couple weeks ago we clarified what vision he is after.
It included playing at least 133 spin&go games a day, improving his game, eating healthy and working out, dating great women, and enjoying life.
So we set out to make this vision a reality. We started first by focusing only on having the 133 games/day down, and not stressing about the other areas. It’s much better to just focus on one area first, implement the right systems there, and be easy about the other areas, instead of putting expectations on yourself.
When we want to make drastic changes in many areas of our lives that usually leads to chaos and overwhelm after a couple days.
He got poker down really well, averaging more than 150 games/day. And slowly other areas of his vision started to happen as well, like healthy eating, and dating.
It was really inspiring to see him making progress with his vision over the weeks.
On our last session, he showed up saying he doesn’t feel that burning motivation now which he felt when he came up with his vision. This has lead us into a deep exploration on the nature of motivation and creating results.
Motivation is a feeling. It’s not a prerequisite for making things happen.
When we think that we should feel a certain way before performing an action that is what creates the resistance.
Read that one again.
Usually that’s where procrastination comes from.
Procrastination is an attempted solution to resolve the inner resistance.
Resistance is not coming from the task at hand (i.e. poker session), but from our thinking in the moment.
100% of our feeling is coming from our thinking in the moment.
When we think we are making progress, we feel motivated. When we think we are stuck, and nothing is working, the poker god is against us, then probably we won’t feel that motivated.
Our feelings don’t give us a clue about the situation, but our thinking about the situation. The two is very different. And when we see that poker and situations are inherently neutral, that takes a whole lot of resistance off our chest.
Losing a hand or a session is just as neutral as the sun coming up and going down, or the changes in weather. But what we think about these is what gives meaning to events, and hence where our feeling is coming from.
Here are two of my favorite quotes pointing at this truth:
“Nothing has meaning except the meaning we give to it.” – Tony Robbins
“It’s not the facts that bother us, but our opinions about them.” – Epictetus
Our thinking ebbs and flows, and so our emotions as well. We won’t always feel motivated, just as we won’t always feel happy, sad, frustrated, angry, joyful either. It’s a roller coaster ride of emotional experience. It’s called the human condition, and we all share it.
So instead of focusing on feeling motivated, confident, or certain before taking action towards making our vision a reality, we can just show up and do the thing. In the case of poker, show up at the tables and focus on playing. Or show up at a hand-review session and just do it.
You don’t have to like it, enjoy it, feel motivated. It’s just enough to show up and see what happens. Do it consistently enough and you give a great chance for your goal to come into fruition.
It is surprisingly easy for us humans to get into the flow when we are not lost in our thinking and being in resistance about things, but just plunge into doing the thing and put our attention there. We can find that in 10-20 mins after starting the thing we might totally find ourselves in the moment and performing the task which we resisted before.
Feeling a certain way (motivated/confident) before taking action is only a prerequisite if we think we need to feel a certain way before doing the thing.
We can make breakfast feeling confident, or we can make our breakfast feeling frustrated. We can take a shower feeling confident or being in a low mood.
You might be thinking, yeah but poker is different, it requires my cognitive skills.
Well poker is a task as well. It’s not the feeling state which is the problem, but if we resist that. Just as I said above if we are not lost in the feeling state / thinking, and know that my feeling has nothing to do with poker (which is neutral), only my thinking about poker, then my feelings won’t be as solid but become more fluid. In other words, resistance will naturally ease up.
When we see how our inner emotional experience is created from the inside out, that changes our whole life. No matter who I work with, that’s one of my main underlying goals in our working together for the person.
With this particular client after a deep exploration on motivation and how our mind works, his thinking could settle down, and see that the frustration wasn’t coming from not feeling motivated. It was coming from thinking that it’s a problem, and he should feel a certain way.
Our mind is pretty tricky, it always tries to find things to stress out, even if things are going awesome, like for him. Less thinking is always the answer.
When we have less thinking, we naturally get back to clarity of mind. That’s our default nature. It’s a deeper feeling of well-being, connectedness, joy, and peace. Then we are more connected with our innate wisdom / intuition, and are able to navigate our lives better, achieve higher levels of performance, and be in the flow of creating our vision.
Sit with this article for 5 minutes before moving on, and see what insights you got from it, and how it applies to your life. Feel free to share it in the comments down below.
Until next time!
Tamas