The ONE Thing Predicting Your Success More Than “Motivation” Ever Will…
The Unbreakable Success Podcast – Episode 24.
Click to Subscribe on >> iTunes, Stitcher Radio or Tunein.
Most people, especially us entrepreneurs, are convinced that they need to master motivation in order to succeed. With the absolute best intentions, they often spend a lot of time and money trying to ‘get motivated', ‘stay motivated, or ‘find their motivation'.
Unfortunately, the treadmill of motivation-chasing is a flawed strategy that can result in in massive frustration instead of massive success.
I do love the feeling of motivation, but today, we're going to discuss the ONE thing that is predicting our success more than motivation ever will.
Full Transcript:
Welcome to episode 24 of the Unbreakable Success Podcast: Your virtual Mastermind for Success in Business and Life.
In this episode, we're going to be discussing the one thing that is predicting your success more than motivation ever will.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome to the very first episode of the Unbreakable Success Podcast. Yes, to address the elephant in the room, this is still Aaron Keith Hawkins, but we have changed the name of the show. There's a very specific reason that I chose to do that.
In Best Life of Your Life, we were definitely addressing a lot of life issues and really trying to give you skills and interviews to help you create the best life of your life, but I think one of the best things all of us can have in our life is some clarity. I had to make that decision about the show, to rename it and rebrand it, so even a casual onlooker can see at a glance what this show is supposed to be about. I really want the interviews that we have on the show and the discussions that you and I have together to really be about collaborating and masterminding to help us achieve an identity of someone who is successful, because when you have chosen an identity, it's literally unbreakable. Nobody can change your identity without your consent. That is completely under your control.
That's part of the reason I chose the name Unbreakable Success Podcast is because I really wanted to attract people that are looking not to just try to be successful at something or give it a shot at starting a business or give it a shot at being a better husband, wife, or person. I want somebody who's really going … I want to attract people who really have that deep down desire to commit to success as a lifestyle. Yes, that includes money, but that also includes the person that you're being. The impact that you're having in your business, in your social circles, in your family life at home, and, yes, even in your health and your fitness.
Success can be a way of life, if you choose it as an identity.
That's really the reason and was the motivation behind changing the name of the show and adding the subtitle to make it really clear that this is about establishing a forum, a virtual mastermind, where we can collab and get together and just discuss vulnerably not only the wins that we have as we're achieving things and as our guests that we're going to have on the show are achieving things in their business and life, but also the struggles and the peaks and the valleys, all of the things that all of us deal with, but, for some reason, we seem to think no one else is.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for being patient for me to come back and pop out another episode and keep this train going. I hope you enjoy the show. I sincerely appreciate you for sharing it. Let's get into today's episode.
Today, we're going to discuss the one thing, the singular one thing that determines our success more than motivation ever will, more than motivation ever could. I want to preface this conversation by saying this: I absolutely love the feeling of being motivated. One of my favorite books of all time is The Motivation Manifesto, by Brendon Burchard. I can pick up that book, flip to pretty much any page in it and just start reading and I just get fired up. There's something about the way he wrote that book that just really gets me, it gets me going. We all need that, and we need to experience that, if we're going to be successful. We need some juice. We need some fire behind us. There are times when we need to feel that spark, but the truth is, we're not always going to feel that all the time.
Motivation is a great boost to either get you started or to keep you going or to help you finish out at the end of something that's difficult, or that can be there to really help you push through some of our biggest challenges, but motivation is not determining your success.
The one thing that is determining your success, more than anything else, is your identity, because our sense of self-concept, in any given context, is going to control 95% of our actions.
More importantly, it's going to control those actions in the moments when we're under pressure or we're under stress or we're under some emotional turmoil or when things are just really, really hard, because so many people out there are chasing these motivational quotes and, on social media, liking and sharing and retweeting and re-pinning all these motivational quotes, and they are great. I post them all the time. I retweet them all the time, but having moments of motivational juice and hearing some really cool quote about hustling and grinding is not going to determine how successful you are.
I remember, a couple years ago, I was running a half marathon in Philadelphia. It was really a great time. I mean, the City came out, and they showed up by the tens of thousands and were cheering on all the runners. It was a great day. The weather was great. It was a little bit cool, but that's probably a good thing when you're running 13.5 miles. I got to run it with a really good friend of mine. Things were great. To be honest, for the first eight miles, it just felt like a fun jog through the park. We're talking. We're waving at people as they're cheering. It was just a really fun environment.
Then something happened. We wound up hitting the eight-mile marker. We hit I think it was 34th Street, and we turned the corner, and, all of a sudden, right in front of us, was this massive–and I mean massive–steep uphill. All we saw were just hundreds of runners dragging butt up the hill. I would say probably 70 to 80% of the marathoners were no longer running. They were just struggling to walk up this steep hill. I looked at my buddy, Adrian, and he looked back at me, and we didn't even say anything, but I remember thinking to myself, “Oh, my gosh, what the heck did I get myself into?”
I tell you what. When I started the half marathon, I felt motivated. I felt juiced. There was a huge crowd and the National Anthem, and that energy got me going and it kept me going for a bunch of miles, but the one thing about motivation is it doesn't always inherently last, and it especially doesn't always inherently last when things get really tough and unpleasant. As we started dragging up that hill, it was not fun, and I didn't make it up that hill because I felt motivated. There was a decision, a conscious decision, that I had to make to get up that hill.
The decision was that I decided, I had already decided previously, that I self-identified as a runner. I had been training and preparing for months. I mean, I'm not some little guy that runs marathons all the time. I'm six-four, 240 pounds, so to move this mass around takes work and training. I could have very easily decided that getting up that hill and finishing out this half marathon … I could have just decided it wasn't for me. “You know what? I'm not a runner. I can't do this.”
I probably could have explained it away and had a really good excuse for not making it to the end. Of course, we got up that hill, and we finished that half marathon, and I can tell you one thing. It wasn't because of motivation. There was no juice pumping through me. There was no great quote I was thinking of as I finished out the last few miles. What kept me going, and I know what kept most of those runners going, was having complete clarity about the person we had chosen to be in that context. We were runners, and runners finish. Runners keep going. Runners don't stop.
The identity you choose in any context will determine what you accomplish. Click To Tweet
At the University of Southern California, there's a researcher named Dr. Daphna Oyserman, and she specializes in what's called identity-based motivation…
Essentially, what her research found is that when we take actions, and while we're taking those actions we experience difficulty–things get hard–even when those things are hard, if what we're doing feels like it's congruent or in sync with our concept of our identity, then we usually believe that those difficulties and the behavior, the actions that we're taking, even though it's really hard, we tend to feel like it's important and meaningful when it's aligned with our identity, but if we're taking an action that we've convinced ourself is not part of our identity, and things get hard, then that's when people start to say things or feel like things are pointless, and then you start hearing those phrases like, “Oh, this isn't for people like me,” or, “Other people can achieve this, but it's just not who I am.”
What's so interesting about that is, in either case, it's just a decision. People have a tendency or get a tendency a lot of times to say things or believe this story about what is or isn't for them, as if somewhere someone ordained that they were or weren't capable of accomplishing something, and, in any case, if people start to tell themselves the same story over and over and over again, they'll just believe it. There's no truth to it necessarily, but people will believe the stories that they keep telling themselves.
It's important for us to realize, in all the different contexts of our life, whether it's your business, your personal life, your health, we have to make sure that we are choosing ahead of time what our identity is in those contexts. Who's the person that you're going to be as an entrepreneur? Are you a giver or are you a taker? Who are you at home, with your husband or wife? Are you someone who is just reacting to their mood, or have you decided who you're going to be, period, whether you feel like it or not?
The identity that you choose for yourself will supersede any concept of motivation, because motivation…
Let's remember two things about motivation. Number one, motivation is just a feeling. It's just a feeling. What can happen for many of us, especially entrepreneurs, because we want to get things done as entrepreneurs, so we chase, almost like on this treadmill, we keep chasing that feeling of motivation, because we think if we can grasp onto motivation and never let it go, then we'll be successful. We'll just finally have motivation forever, and we'll keep going, and we'll make the big gains and expand our businesses and expand our reach the way we want to, but it's a flawed strategy because feelings, by their very nature, don't last.
We're human beings, so our feelings, our emotions, they happen in cycles. We're going to have moments where we feel great. We're going to have moments where we feel not so great. We're going to have moments where we get frustrated, and things don't go the way we wanted them to, so we feel a little let down. It's all part of the game. What happens is, during all these ebbs and flows of the human experience, motivation will be there sometimes, and it won't sometimes.
If our dependency is on something that is not going to consistently be there, and we know ahead of time it's not consistently going to be there, well then our actions, if they're dependent on that motivation, are going to be just as inconsistent as the motivation is. What can and should be remaining constant is our sense of identity, because, just like when me and my buddy had to run up that hill, our concept of identity kept us going, even though the motivation wasn't there.
Motivation doesn't get you to the finish line of whatever your goal is. Whatever your long-term or short-term strategies are, motivation won't get you there, not by itself. It can be a part of it, and it should be a part of it, but it's not the key. Your identity of self is the key, choosing who you are and refusing to let that go. Motivation … There's a concept called hedonic adaptation, and the very–oh, gosh, what is that word?–rudimentary … There you go. You ever have one of those moments where you know for a fact you're saying a word wrong, and you know you know the word, but it just escapes you?
Anyway, a very rudimentary definition of hedonic adaptation is that you experience a feeling, and that feeling can be complete euphoria. A perfect example is lottery winners. There's a lot of research about people when they win the lottery. For a period of time, they feel great. They feel ecstatic. Their life is extraordinarily happy, because there's this change in financial status, but over time, due to hedonic adaptation, those people go back to the level of happiness that they were at before the money got there.
If they were miserable before they won the money, yes, there will be a spike naturally in their perceived happiness because of the money, but over a short period of time, the feelings that they're having and the overall happiness in their life goes back to the same thing. The money doesn't change happiness. We will adapt and go back to whatever our habits are, and if we don't decide what our habits are going to be, then we're going to fall victim to believing that something outside of ourself and outside of our control is going to bring us happiness, when the happiness we wanted is totally dependent on us and ourselves or our self-concept or our ability to improve our quality control over our emotions. All of those things are what determines the satisfaction that these people have from winning the lottery.
In the case of motivation, it's the same way. When it comes to motivation, we can feel motivated. We can come out of the greatest Unleash the Power event that we've ever experienced with Tony Robbins, but, unless we adopt the new habits, hedonic adaptation will take us back to the same levels of emotion that we had before the event. We have to implement the change, based on our concept of self. The motivation can and should play a huge role in our life, but it will not sustain you. Your sense of identity will sustain you.
The second thing is: Let's be honest, and this may sound like I'm being a little harsh, but motivation is pretty selfish, and here's why. Motivation is all about you. When we want to feel motivated, it's all about us wanting to feel a certain way. Motivation has nothing to do with giving. One of the greatest gifts that we'll ever receive in our life is not going to be because we're trying to make sure our needs are being served. Our greatest gifts will come when we're committed to giving to others, to giving to our clients, our customers, our husbands, wives, children, our community, our sense of humanity.
My goal is not to be the best because I feel motivated. I want to be the best at what I do because it's the type of person that I've decided to be. I want to help people evolve their thinking around what it means and what it takes to be successful, whether they're an entrepreneur, an author, a speaker, a salesperson, a parent, a caregiver. It doesn't matter. I want to help people grow their concept of the fact that they already have inside them what it takes to succeed in any area of their life. It doesn't matter the venue. The rules of success are, in many ways, very universal. If anybody thinks that people at the highest level of success are succeeding because they go around chasing motivation all day, they're just kidding themselves. That's not the case. The people that we see succeeding, they do so because they've committed to who they are. I don't care what the context is, whether it's in business or in sports or in parenting.
The people who are doing an amazing job at what they do, they're doing it because they've chosen who they are, not because they're chasing motivational hype.
They may do things that spark their motivation, and they may read things that spark their motivation, and they may stay around people and locations and go to events that keep that fire burning, but their sense of identity is what makes things work, and they already know that they won't always feel motivated, and they recognize that, when they don't, the fact that they keep doing what needs to be done is what separates them from 99% of their competition.
Yes, we need to use motivation, but we've got to dedicate ourselves to the mission of being who we want to be, not just at work, but in every single area of our life: business, home, health, fitness, all of it. The identity you choose in any context will determine what you accomplish. What's really cool is, once you've decided who you are … I've decided that this is who I am, a podcaster, a trainer. I love reaching people and helping them think about things in ways that they hadn't thought before. That gets me going. That actually fuels my sense of motivation when I engage in it. What I love about it is I know I can do this on days when I'm feeling motivated to do it or not. Whatever great books or whatever great podcasts or whatever great conversations I have that sparks my motivation, that's just icing on the cake.
Remember, when you choose your identity, that's what's really going to make your success unbreakable. Yes, use motivation every chance you get. Motivation is a wonderful tool, but remember it's a feeling, and it's just a feeling for you. It gets you going. It's a little bit selfish, but it's okay for us to be a little selfish sometimes. We've got to take care of ourselves. Commit to your identity and use motivation to give you those bursts of energy when you need it.
I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. Please remember, this is just the beginning of the conversation. Please hop on over to aaronkeithhawkins.com/24 and leave a comment with your thoughts about today's episode, your thoughts about identity, your thoughts about motivation, and let me know what you think about this topic. This show is not just about me, or me and my guests, talking to you. This is about us talking with each other, so aaronkeithhawkins.com/24. I will talk to you real soon.
This episode of the Unbreakable Success Podcast is brought to you by the Unbreakable Success Challenge. If you'd like to get coaching that provides an actionable framework to improve your understanding of motivation, influence, overcoming distractions, and achieving the next level of your success, then I invite you to join me at unbreakablechallenge.com. It's free, it's fun, and it can mark the beginning of a brand new journey for you. Just go to unbreakablechallenge.com right now to get started absolutely free. Remember, please take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and, yes, keep on creating the best life of your life. I'm Aaron Keith Hawkins, and I will talk to you soon.
Resources from Episode 24 of The Unbreakable Success Podcast:
The Unbreakable Success Challenge (My free 5 Day Training and Challenge Series) >> Visit UnbreakableChallenge.com
The Unbreakable Success Podcast – Episode 24.
Click to Subscribe on >> iTunes, Stitcher Radio or Tunein.
Most people, especially us entrepreneurs, are convinced that they need to master motivation in order to succeed. With the absolute best intentions, they often spend a lot of time and money trying to ‘get motivated', ‘stay motivated, or ‘find their motivation'.
Unfortunately, the treadmill of motivation-chasing is a flawed strategy that can result in in massive frustration instead of massive success.
I do love the feeling of motivation, but today, we're going to discuss the ONE thing that is predicting our success more than motivation ever will.
Full Transcript:
Welcome to episode 24 of the Unbreakable Success Podcast: Your virtual Mastermind for Success in Business and Life.
In this episode, we're going to be discussing the one thing that is predicting your success more than motivation ever will.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome to the very first episode of the Unbreakable Success Podcast. Yes, to address the elephant in the room, this is still Aaron Keith Hawkins, but we have changed the name of the show. There's a very specific reason that I chose to do that.
In Best Life of Your Life, we were definitely addressing a lot of life issues and really trying to give you skills and interviews to help you create the best life of your life, but I think one of the best things all of us can have in our life is some clarity. I had to make that decision about the show, to rename it and rebrand it, so even a casual onlooker can see at a glance what this show is supposed to be about. I really want the interviews that we have on the show and the discussions that you and I have together to really be about collaborating and masterminding to help us achieve an identity of someone who is successful, because when you have chosen an identity, it's literally unbreakable. Nobody can change your identity without your consent. That is completely under your control.
That's part of the reason I chose the name Unbreakable Success Podcast is because I really wanted to attract people that are looking not to just try to be successful at something or give it a shot at starting a business or give it a shot at being a better husband, wife, or person. I want somebody who's really going … I want to attract people who really have that deep down desire to commit to success as a lifestyle. Yes, that includes money, but that also includes the person that you're being. The impact that you're having in your business, in your social circles, in your family life at home, and, yes, even in your health and your fitness.
Success can be a way of life, if you choose it as an identity.
That's really the reason and was the motivation behind changing the name of the show and adding the subtitle to make it really clear that this is about establishing a forum, a virtual mastermind, where we can collab and get together and just discuss vulnerably not only the wins that we have as we're achieving things and as our guests that we're going to have on the show are achieving things in their business and life, but also the struggles and the peaks and the valleys, all of the things that all of us deal with, but, for some reason, we seem to think no one else is.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for being patient for me to come back and pop out another episode and keep this train going. I hope you enjoy the show. I sincerely appreciate you for sharing it. Let's get into today's episode.
Today, we're going to discuss the one thing, the singular one thing that determines our success more than motivation ever will, more than motivation ever could. I want to preface this conversation by saying this: I absolutely love the feeling of being motivated. One of my favorite books of all time is The Motivation Manifesto, by Brendon Burchard. I can pick up that book, flip to pretty much any page in it and just start reading and I just get fired up. There's something about the way he wrote that book that just really gets me, it gets me going. We all need that, and we need to experience that, if we're going to be successful. We need some juice. We need some fire behind us. There are times when we need to feel that spark, but the truth is, we're not always going to feel that all the time.
Motivation is a great boost to either get you started or to keep you going or to help you finish out at the end of something that's difficult, or that can be there to really help you push through some of our biggest challenges, but motivation is not determining your success.
The one thing that is determining your success, more than anything else, is your identity, because our sense of self-concept, in any given context, is going to control 95% of our actions.
More importantly, it's going to control those actions in the moments when we're under pressure or we're under stress or we're under some emotional turmoil or when things are just really, really hard, because so many people out there are chasing these motivational quotes and, on social media, liking and sharing and retweeting and re-pinning all these motivational quotes, and they are great. I post them all the time. I retweet them all the time, but having moments of motivational juice and hearing some really cool quote about hustling and grinding is not going to determine how successful you are.
I remember, a couple years ago, I was running a half marathon in Philadelphia. It was really a great time. I mean, the City came out, and they showed up by the tens of thousands and were cheering on all the runners. It was a great day. The weather was great. It was a little bit cool, but that's probably a good thing when you're running 13.5 miles. I got to run it with a really good friend of mine. Things were great. To be honest, for the first eight miles, it just felt like a fun jog through the park. We're talking. We're waving at people as they're cheering. It was just a really fun environment.
Then something happened. We wound up hitting the eight-mile marker. We hit I think it was 34th Street, and we turned the corner, and, all of a sudden, right in front of us, was this massive–and I mean massive–steep uphill. All we saw were just hundreds of runners dragging butt up the hill. I would say probably 70 to 80% of the marathoners were no longer running. They were just struggling to walk up this steep hill. I looked at my buddy, Adrian, and he looked back at me, and we didn't even say anything, but I remember thinking to myself, “Oh, my gosh, what the heck did I get myself into?”
I tell you what. When I started the half marathon, I felt motivated. I felt juiced. There was a huge crowd and the National Anthem, and that energy got me going and it kept me going for a bunch of miles, but the one thing about motivation is it doesn't always inherently last, and it especially doesn't always inherently last when things get really tough and unpleasant. As we started dragging up that hill, it was not fun, and I didn't make it up that hill because I felt motivated. There was a decision, a conscious decision, that I had to make to get up that hill.
The decision was that I decided, I had already decided previously, that I self-identified as a runner. I had been training and preparing for months. I mean, I'm not some little guy that runs marathons all the time. I'm six-four, 240 pounds, so to move this mass around takes work and training. I could have very easily decided that getting up that hill and finishing out this half marathon … I could have just decided it wasn't for me. “You know what? I'm not a runner. I can't do this.”
I probably could have explained it away and had a really good excuse for not making it to the end. Of course, we got up that hill, and we finished that half marathon, and I can tell you one thing. It wasn't because of motivation. There was no juice pumping through me. There was no great quote I was thinking of as I finished out the last few miles. What kept me going, and I know what kept most of those runners going, was having complete clarity about the person we had chosen to be in that context. We were runners, and runners finish. Runners keep going. Runners don't stop.
The identity you choose in any context will determine what you accomplish. Click To TweetAt the University of Southern California, there's a researcher named Dr. Daphna Oyserman, and she specializes in what's called identity-based motivation…
Essentially, what her research found is that when we take actions, and while we're taking those actions we experience difficulty–things get hard–even when those things are hard, if what we're doing feels like it's congruent or in sync with our concept of our identity, then we usually believe that those difficulties and the behavior, the actions that we're taking, even though it's really hard, we tend to feel like it's important and meaningful when it's aligned with our identity, but if we're taking an action that we've convinced ourself is not part of our identity, and things get hard, then that's when people start to say things or feel like things are pointless, and then you start hearing those phrases like, “Oh, this isn't for people like me,” or, “Other people can achieve this, but it's just not who I am.”
What's so interesting about that is, in either case, it's just a decision. People have a tendency or get a tendency a lot of times to say things or believe this story about what is or isn't for them, as if somewhere someone ordained that they were or weren't capable of accomplishing something, and, in any case, if people start to tell themselves the same story over and over and over again, they'll just believe it. There's no truth to it necessarily, but people will believe the stories that they keep telling themselves.
It's important for us to realize, in all the different contexts of our life, whether it's your business, your personal life, your health, we have to make sure that we are choosing ahead of time what our identity is in those contexts. Who's the person that you're going to be as an entrepreneur? Are you a giver or are you a taker? Who are you at home, with your husband or wife? Are you someone who is just reacting to their mood, or have you decided who you're going to be, period, whether you feel like it or not?
The identity that you choose for yourself will supersede any concept of motivation, because motivation…
Let's remember two things about motivation. Number one, motivation is just a feeling. It's just a feeling. What can happen for many of us, especially entrepreneurs, because we want to get things done as entrepreneurs, so we chase, almost like on this treadmill, we keep chasing that feeling of motivation, because we think if we can grasp onto motivation and never let it go, then we'll be successful. We'll just finally have motivation forever, and we'll keep going, and we'll make the big gains and expand our businesses and expand our reach the way we want to, but it's a flawed strategy because feelings, by their very nature, don't last.
We're human beings, so our feelings, our emotions, they happen in cycles. We're going to have moments where we feel great. We're going to have moments where we feel not so great. We're going to have moments where we get frustrated, and things don't go the way we wanted them to, so we feel a little let down. It's all part of the game. What happens is, during all these ebbs and flows of the human experience, motivation will be there sometimes, and it won't sometimes.
If our dependency is on something that is not going to consistently be there, and we know ahead of time it's not consistently going to be there, well then our actions, if they're dependent on that motivation, are going to be just as inconsistent as the motivation is. What can and should be remaining constant is our sense of identity, because, just like when me and my buddy had to run up that hill, our concept of identity kept us going, even though the motivation wasn't there.
Motivation doesn't get you to the finish line of whatever your goal is. Whatever your long-term or short-term strategies are, motivation won't get you there, not by itself. It can be a part of it, and it should be a part of it, but it's not the key. Your identity of self is the key, choosing who you are and refusing to let that go. Motivation … There's a concept called hedonic adaptation, and the very–oh, gosh, what is that word?–rudimentary … There you go. You ever have one of those moments where you know for a fact you're saying a word wrong, and you know you know the word, but it just escapes you?
Anyway, a very rudimentary definition of hedonic adaptation is that you experience a feeling, and that feeling can be complete euphoria. A perfect example is lottery winners. There's a lot of research about people when they win the lottery. For a period of time, they feel great. They feel ecstatic. Their life is extraordinarily happy, because there's this change in financial status, but over time, due to hedonic adaptation, those people go back to the level of happiness that they were at before the money got there.
If they were miserable before they won the money, yes, there will be a spike naturally in their perceived happiness because of the money, but over a short period of time, the feelings that they're having and the overall happiness in their life goes back to the same thing. The money doesn't change happiness. We will adapt and go back to whatever our habits are, and if we don't decide what our habits are going to be, then we're going to fall victim to believing that something outside of ourself and outside of our control is going to bring us happiness, when the happiness we wanted is totally dependent on us and ourselves or our self-concept or our ability to improve our quality control over our emotions. All of those things are what determines the satisfaction that these people have from winning the lottery.
In the case of motivation, it's the same way. When it comes to motivation, we can feel motivated. We can come out of the greatest Unleash the Power event that we've ever experienced with Tony Robbins, but, unless we adopt the new habits, hedonic adaptation will take us back to the same levels of emotion that we had before the event. We have to implement the change, based on our concept of self. The motivation can and should play a huge role in our life, but it will not sustain you. Your sense of identity will sustain you.
The second thing is: Let's be honest, and this may sound like I'm being a little harsh, but motivation is pretty selfish, and here's why. Motivation is all about you. When we want to feel motivated, it's all about us wanting to feel a certain way. Motivation has nothing to do with giving. One of the greatest gifts that we'll ever receive in our life is not going to be because we're trying to make sure our needs are being served. Our greatest gifts will come when we're committed to giving to others, to giving to our clients, our customers, our husbands, wives, children, our community, our sense of humanity.
My goal is not to be the best because I feel motivated. I want to be the best at what I do because it's the type of person that I've decided to be. I want to help people evolve their thinking around what it means and what it takes to be successful, whether they're an entrepreneur, an author, a speaker, a salesperson, a parent, a caregiver. It doesn't matter. I want to help people grow their concept of the fact that they already have inside them what it takes to succeed in any area of their life. It doesn't matter the venue. The rules of success are, in many ways, very universal. If anybody thinks that people at the highest level of success are succeeding because they go around chasing motivation all day, they're just kidding themselves. That's not the case. The people that we see succeeding, they do so because they've committed to who they are. I don't care what the context is, whether it's in business or in sports or in parenting.
The people who are doing an amazing job at what they do, they're doing it because they've chosen who they are, not because they're chasing motivational hype.
They may do things that spark their motivation, and they may read things that spark their motivation, and they may stay around people and locations and go to events that keep that fire burning, but their sense of identity is what makes things work, and they already know that they won't always feel motivated, and they recognize that, when they don't, the fact that they keep doing what needs to be done is what separates them from 99% of their competition.
Yes, we need to use motivation, but we've got to dedicate ourselves to the mission of being who we want to be, not just at work, but in every single area of our life: business, home, health, fitness, all of it. The identity you choose in any context will determine what you accomplish. What's really cool is, once you've decided who you are … I've decided that this is who I am, a podcaster, a trainer. I love reaching people and helping them think about things in ways that they hadn't thought before. That gets me going. That actually fuels my sense of motivation when I engage in it. What I love about it is I know I can do this on days when I'm feeling motivated to do it or not. Whatever great books or whatever great podcasts or whatever great conversations I have that sparks my motivation, that's just icing on the cake.
Remember, when you choose your identity, that's what's really going to make your success unbreakable. Yes, use motivation every chance you get. Motivation is a wonderful tool, but remember it's a feeling, and it's just a feeling for you. It gets you going. It's a little bit selfish, but it's okay for us to be a little selfish sometimes. We've got to take care of ourselves. Commit to your identity and use motivation to give you those bursts of energy when you need it.
I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. Please remember, this is just the beginning of the conversation. Please hop on over to aaronkeithhawkins.com/24 and leave a comment with your thoughts about today's episode, your thoughts about identity, your thoughts about motivation, and let me know what you think about this topic. This show is not just about me, or me and my guests, talking to you. This is about us talking with each other, so aaronkeithhawkins.com/24. I will talk to you real soon.
This episode of the Unbreakable Success Podcast is brought to you by the Unbreakable Success Challenge. If you'd like to get coaching that provides an actionable framework to improve your understanding of motivation, influence, overcoming distractions, and achieving the next level of your success, then I invite you to join me at unbreakablechallenge.com. It's free, it's fun, and it can mark the beginning of a brand new journey for you. Just go to unbreakablechallenge.com right now to get started absolutely free. Remember, please take care of yourselves, take care of each other, and, yes, keep on creating the best life of your life. I'm Aaron Keith Hawkins, and I will talk to you soon.