Does being productive often feel tense, tight, urgent, and stressful for you?
Then you might be trying to motivate yourself into action using “dirty motivation.”
You’ll know that this is you if you often end up white-knuckling your way through tasks, ignoring your emotions, and resorting to giving yourself unhelpful tough love.
You’ll hear yourself use phrases like “I have to do it” and “I just need to push through” often.
This dirty motivation feels shitty in the moment and is unsustainable long-term.
I couldn’t have said it better than my client who just finished my 8-week program, Half-Finished to Done, LIVE:
“One of the biggest wins for me was learning that the way I motivate myself and try to inspire myself through tough love is not sustainable.
It leads to impending burnout, time and time again…
[Now] it’s a totally different process.
It’s actually more motivating. It’s like clean and bright motivation, vs heavy, dark, forceful motivation.”
Doesn’t that sound so.much.better?
While dirty motivation tends to come from people pleasing, perfectionism, resentment, and self-criticism, clean motivation is about:
- Making intentional decisions about how to spend your time, and then owning those decisions
- Remembering why you’re working on what you’re working on (connecting each and every task back to the bigger vision you have for your life)
- Noticing your patterns of self-sabotage and gently guiding yourself out of them
- Reminding yourself who you want to be and what qualities you want to embody in your life and business
P.S. I’m hosting a free, virtual anti-procrastination challenge from November 1-12, 2021. During the challenge, we’ll work on separating out dirty motivation from clean motivation.