Lisa Hopkins: Our Limitless Capacity to Thrive

Let’s face it. Feeling unmotivated feels crappy. Especially in a world that places such high value on go-getters. But if you are feeling unmotivated right now, I promise you there’s nothing wrong with you, you aren’t broken or weak. 

Transcript

Our Limitless Capacity to Thrive

If you have been feeling unmotivated these days you are definitely not alone. It’s no surprise really, with most of us being in some version of waiting for things to get better, and living in coping or managing mode for the past two years. It can be exhausting!

Let’s face it. Feeling unmotivated feels crappy. Especially in a world that places such high value on go-getters. But if you are feeling unmotivated right now, I promise you there’s nothing wrong with you, you aren’t broken or weak. 

Lack of motivation usually signals a conditional reason for doing something that has changed in value for you. Whether it’s money, praise, success, recognition, control or power, when something that once motivated us stops being an incentive, it’s an opportunity to think again about why we do what we do. A chance to connect, reconnect or maybe even disconnect from what doesn’t light us up anymore.

Maybe you’ve simply grown tired of chasing after something, and decided to settle for where you are now. Or maybe when you’ve been motivated enough to go where you wanted to go, when you got there it didn’t make you feel the way you thought it would. And how many of us have been motivated by fear, the mother of all motivators? When fear is driving us, we’re so focused where we don’t want to be, that we can’t even consider where we actually want to go.

The key here is to understand whether you’re being motivated externally which is limited or internally which is limitless. Unconditional, intrinsic motivation feels connected and doesn’t require an outcome to inspire us.

The distinction between “wants” and “needs” is vital to understanding our level of engagement & motivation - or lack thereof- in everything we do.

Needs are things you require to get by - we’ve had a lot of experience with those- and “wants” are the things that you can live without but would prefer not to. It is the difference between necessity and desire. 

As scary and vulnerable as it is to feel uninspired, I invite you to listen deeply to what it’s really telling you. Take this moment to slow down and untether your identity from what you do and connect to who you want to be.

We can all get by with just taking care of our basic needs but in the absence of desire, we are disconnected from our limitless capacity to thrive.