Pod Insights Change Wired 2-Pillar toolkit to consistently act when you don't feel like it. What most people don't understand about motivation. 2-Pillar toolkit to consistently act when you don't feel like it. What most people don't understand about motivation. Change Wired
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About this episode Waiting for motivation wastes the best hours of your day. We break down a simple, reliable system to create more motivation on demand. We dig into why discipline isn’t about loving hard work; it’s about doing the important thing when desire is missing. You’ll learn how behavioral activation flips your brain from rumination to action, why dopamine rises in response to movement, and how tiny, friction-free starts trigger the energy you thought you needed first. We then share 3 prompts that ...
Transcript 0:09 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Sharina, I'm your host, I'm your partner in change, personal and collective transformation, and someone who is really passionate about human potential, unlocking, using more of it and creating amazing world all around us, better things for us and other people, and just being astonished by all the extraordinary things we can create when you commit to development of self, of others, and unlocking more potential in everything. Today, guys, we're gonna talk, by the end of this podcast, you're gonna have a toolkit,
0:51 Speaker 00 a two module or pillar toolkit to boost, to raise, to calibrate your motivation at any point. So then you can consistently drive action, which is an essential step to consistently create results. Without action, there are no results. I want to start with a quote by Alex Hormozi. If you don't know who Alex Hormozi is, Google it or AI it, one of the most profound entrepreneurs in the, in a sense that he documented more of his journey, especially inner game, than anyone else out there, right?
1:34 Speaker 00 What I love about him is not that he achieved something extraordinary, he didn't actually, there are people who achieved a lot more, and there are a lot of people who achieved similar things. But what he did really well, and I think his greatest service is documentation of the process of his internal game, what's, what contributes to his success, not just with the actions in business arena that he takes, but what's happening internally with his self-growth and his work on his mindset, emotions, and ingenious self-management and self-regulation. So the quote from Alex Hormozi. That I'm loving these days. It isn't discipline if you like doing it. And what he meant there, it was from one of his podcasts, The Game,
2:20 Speaker 00 is if you are someone who likes exercise, like I myself, like exercise, it's not really a lot of discipline for me and exercise every day. Like I do it even when I have nothing else to do, I have no desire to do anything at all. I move and do exercise. That's just what I love doing for whichever reason. Since I was a kid, I love moving and I love learning exercise and doing all this fitness stuff. If I wasn't doing what I'm doing right now, I would be more in fitness and sports and athletics. And that's what I did a lot when I was in high school and then in college. So it's, it's not discipline for me. It is discipline for me to have balanced meal routines and to take all my supplements
3:04 Speaker 00 and, you know, saying no dessert and things like it's easier to eat whatever and never have to make harder choices around your nutrition or stopping at the right moment, right? But also business, it is discipline for me to show up even when things don't work and to talk to people I'm not that comfortable talking with, to talk to a bunch of strangers that I don't want to be talking about, to get out there and book myself for booking, which, you know, always makes me feel anxious. It's not something uncomfortable with and it does take discipline. So Alex Hermosy, also another thing, you know, he started 10 years ago
3:43 Speaker 00 with $1,000 in his bank account, that again, what he talked about, what he told us about his journey. So he started with 1,000 bucks in his bank account, sleeping on the gym floor that he was renting at that time. And recently, in August, he broke Guinness record, he actually brought the people who do the records, for selling the most non-fiction books in a day. And then the same weekend, he sold books and related stuff to money models, like a thing that he is working on and worked on for some time. So he's, he made about $6 million in that weekend.
4:29 Speaker 00 And he likes to say that anyone can do hard things when they feel like it. And I'm one hundred percent agree with him on it. That's not the skill, doing hard things when you like them, when you feel motivated. The skill is doing them consistently when you don't, when you don't feel like it. I have a client and she, she's struggling to build an exercise habit, but she understands how important it is for her, for what she wants to have and experience in her life. But she's struggling and she would often bring up this reason, well, I didn't feel like it. And what we're working on, what I'm trying to install in your mind is that
5:14 Speaker 00 some things you do need to do without feeling for it at all. But she's also, anyhow, not gonna get into details of my client's life.
5:26 Speaker 00 But a lot of things that we wanna achieve will require us to do things that we don't wanna do, that we don't feel like doing. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. If everyone would just do what they wanted to do, guess what? Our life wouldn't move that far. Even your birth, like the act of you being born, took a lot of freaking struggle that your mom probably didn't really like and wanted. But that was necessary to give you life.
6:01 Speaker 00 And funny enough, a lot of things are like that in life. Effort and sacrifice and pain often are required to make things happen. I've spent well over ten thousand hours, guys, studying self-development, reading books, research papers, going through coaching certifications, reading biographies, coaching people.
6:25 Speaker 00 Different domains and I came to the same conclusion. The ability to act without desire is the difference maker. Let me repeat it again. The ability to act without desire is the difference maker. It's what makes you human, I would argue. But like your cat, unless scared or hungry, wouldn't do shit. And you can and you will if you're really committed to delivering the impact that you say you're committed to. In achievement, in transformation, in change that actually lasts. This is the foundational skill, the ability to act without desire consistently. It is the difference maker.
7:08 Speaker 00 And that's what I helped, the skill I helped my clients to build and what I'm building also in different domains. We talked about on this podcast, how the same skill, we don't necessarily apply to every domain of our life. And one of the parts of self mastery is to learning how to apply your strengths in different domains. So you get more success where it matters to you. But here is the most interesting part that most people miss and don't internalize. And I internalize it because I worked with helping people to figure out their motivation. Been for, yeah, for eighteen years now.
7:50 Speaker 00 And I, I have actually another two books sitting on my virtual bookshelf to read about how motivation works. But what most people miss about motivation, because they never thought about it that deeply, never lived through it, never researched it that deeply. Motivation has two parts. Motive, I like to use the word motive because it's different from the word motivation. Motive is the reason to act. That's what Simon Sinek talks about, or talked a lot about. Motive, it's the understanding why certain things are important for you to do, whether that's for yourself, for the world, for other people.
8:30 Speaker 00 But motive, that, that very often with my clients, we need to build clarity about, like, what do you care about so much that you will consistently do the actions that you don't like doing? And then the second part, the motivation as a feeling, the inner drive, the up and go that you can physically feel, the one that coffee, that I'm gonna take a sip of.
8:59 Speaker 00 The one that coffee brings up, that physical sensation, the physical change, the physical, the set of physical processes that are actually happening in your body, in brain, in brain.
9:12 Speaker 00 That's the second part of motivation, which, both of them, you can control. They fuel each other. If you want to do hard things consistently, especially when it gets uncomfortable, you need access to both, your motive, the reason to act, and your motivation as a feeling, as a physical sensation. And there are different tools to use both of them.
9:39 Speaker 00 When the feeling is gone, lean on the reason, remember why you started. You know, there is the saying, when it gets hard, remember why you started? So that's what this phrase is talking about, the motive, your inner drive, understanding of why things are important. Ask yourself, when the feeling is gone, or like, physical sensation is not there, ask yourself to lean on to your motive. Why does this matter? What is this unlock in my life? Who or what do I care about enough to do this for?
10:14 Speaker 00 And when everything feels pointless or heavy and you know your mind just not in the right place, do the opposite. Rely on motivation as a feeling which you change by acting. So start acting and that that is a technique that's called behavioral activation, one of the most effective tools in cognitive behavioral therapy for treating depression and avoidance that works on a on the simple principle, action comes first, feelings follow. Now, sometimes feelings can also come and then action follows.
10:53 Speaker 00 But what you can influence is start acting and the action will produce feelings. One of the really profound notion, I believe, is the understanding that your dopamine, the molecule that actually creates this feeling of drive and also coffee brings the this molecules level up, either that through you making your neurons more sensitive or boosting your system to produce more of it. But you are more motivated because of dopamine and dopamine is produced in response to action. So when you start thinking about action or start acting, like when you start running
11:38 Speaker 00 or walking or or just doing taking some action towards your goal, your brain starts producing dopamine to release the energy, to change your whole biochemistry from blood flow to oxygenation of yourself, to accommodate, to make you capable of that process of movement, of action. In fact, when your dopamine system gets out of not so much balance, but doesn't work that well, you get Parkinson's, where people have hard times controlling and directing their movements.
12:12 Speaker 00 But the most important thing you want to understand here is action comes first, feelings follow. That is a more reliable way of producing feelings, which is again a whole technique, behavioral activation, that you can read about online or ask GPT about. One of the most effective tools in cognitive behavioral therapy. So you don't wait to feel motivated. You do things that create meaning or mastery, like that's why they say, you know, volunteer and your life will get more meaning. Yes, because action produces feelings. The part of self mastery is learning what kind of actions produce reliably,
12:56 Speaker 00 what kinds of feelings. So when you like that feeling and you need it, you do the action and the feeling follows.
13:05 Speaker 00 So you do the things that create meaning, sense of mastery and improvement, or give you small moments of joy, like a piece of chocolate in the morning gives me a sense of joy. Like the lip is good, things are worth working on. It's small, but joy matters. And motivation shows up after you begin acting. In fact, you have different neural networks in your nervous system, which cannot be active at the same time. One is dedicated towards rumination, thinking, anxiety, delaying action. And the other one is to accommodate action. And once you start using one, like the one for action,
13:48 Speaker 00 the other one switches off, the one where you have doubts and worries and anxiety. You can even check it out. When you have worries and anxieties, the moment you start taking actions, almost all of that disappears instantly because now your brain in the action mode, like your whole nervous system is switched. To different gear. So when you're stuck, ask yourself two simple questions. Do I lack a strong enough reason, your motive? There is even a book that Alex Hormozi recommends with that title. Or do I simply need to start? I haven't read that book, by the way. So not sure if it's about the same thing. But motive, when you don't feel like you're motivated, when you feel stuck,
14:31 Speaker 00 when it's hard for you to take action, ask yourself two simple questions to boost your motivation or someone else's motivation. Ask yourself two simple questions. Do I lack a strong enough reason? Do I have clarity about why it's important? Or do I simply need to start? And the feeling will follow. Motivation isn't a mystery that visits some people and then skips others completely. It's a system that you can master, you can fuel and recalibrate.
15:02 Speaker 00 Also, whose achievements inspire you? I speak a person, like whose achievements truly inspire you? I will bet everything on this without hesitation. They mastered this motivation skill, whether they are aware of it or not, but they mastered it. And that's why they achieved those things. You can get lucky and get some things. But if there is a long lasting achievement, you can't get lucky. You gotta manage and master the self. And mastering your motivation, your inner drive is one of those core skills. I would say the most important one, because then you will take action consistently and that will lead to everything else.
15:48 Speaker 00 So no luck, no talent, this. Over to you, dear listener. What's missing for you right now for you to give it, whatever that it is, your absolute best? Is it your motive? Or is it your up and go? And depending on the answer, you know what to do. Either dig deeper into figuring out why it's important. You know, the why that Simon Sinek talked a lot about. Or start acting.
16:20 Speaker 00 Start taking action that you know will produce the needed feeling, whether that's meaning or progress or growth. You know, your up and goal starts just like your engine with a turn of a key. And the turn is your action. Hope you guys enjoyed this podcast. Don't forget to rate, review or don't. But it would be really helpful to reach more amazing people who might need to learn about their inner drive to get out there, take more action and make more awesome things happen. It would make a world for me if you shared it with one person and maybe tag me on Instagram or on WhatsApp if we're connected there.
17:03 Speaker 00 I always love hearing from listeners how podcasts, blogs help them to figure something out or to realize something and ultimately take more action. So please share, review and let me know how we're doing. And till next time, guys, thank you for listening. Thank you for your attention. Master your inner drive. That's, I'd say, the foundational skill of getting anywhere in your life. And till next time, keep learning, keep figuring things out and keep growing.
Previous Effortless Consistency: mental models for abs for life. How my clients ditch willpower AND finally get their goals. Next 5 Pillars Of Infallible Follow-Through: driving consistency in yourself and high performance in people. Page updated November 10, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
