Two-Letter Word Changes Everything

How are you? Well, happy, happy, happy, happy Friday. Come on in here. Got a good weekend plan? I sure hope you do. Man, I have no idea. Nothing on my calendar.

I have nothing planned. That probably means I'm seeing a movie. Because if in doubt, my wife is, she already knows what she's going to see already. I need a boost.

I need a daily boost. I need a daily boost. It is the daily boost. From motivation2move.com, 19 and a half years now, man. I listened to some older stuff yesterday.

I actually listened to the very first Motivation to Move show I did a long time ago. It's actually a radio show. It was on an AM radio station. I purchased time on a station, and I did the show on the station, like 7 o'clock on a Saturday morning because that's all I could afford.

Man, oh, man. The only thing that's different these days is the voice is a little bit raspier. My name is Scott Smith. Good to have you here today. Yeah, the weekend, lots of things coming up.

Do you divide your house like this? I mean, I run a business, been doing this forever. My wife has never worked out of the house ever since we got married almost 19 years ago. She's worked with me in the house, effectively meaning that we've been together 24-7 for 19 years.

That's like three marriages in one, right? Well, we kind of divided our duties. I do my business. I do my stuff. I think about that stuff, and she thinks about everything else.

That's why I have no idea what kind of movie I'm going to this weekend because she knows kind of what I like and she knows I'll like what she likes and she's going to do it and I don't care. I love life like that. Do you like life like? I do.

Some people say I got to be the leader. I got to be in charge. I don't know. Sometimes it's kind of fun just to kind of sit back and let somebody else make the decision, right?

I have a bunch of guys I ride motorcycles with. Most of them are captains for an airline that just bankrupt. So I think they're doing a lot of motorcycle riding now.

It's so funny. I go riding with four captains, very senior captains, do these four or five-day motorcycle trips, and nobody wants to lead. Nobody wants to be in charge. We all want to follow the guy in front of us.

Sometimes it's a great place to be. I love doing that. I'm a great follower. Until you get lost, and then I'm going to step up and take care of the problem.

Okay, today, let's talk about something that is kind of controversial these days, which is it's coming back into style. The word motivation is, I think James Clear, I think Alex Hermosi, I think those guys started poo-pooing the hell out of motivations. You don't need it.

You need to hustle and grind. You need good habits. You need a plan. You need a framework. You need all that stuff. That's okay. And I agree with that, by the way.

I really truly do because when you have structure, it's so much easier to do anything else. In fact, I'll go so far as to say this. I will agree with them that you don't really need it. You do need the structure.

But I will also say that once you have the structure and everything is calm and cool, you have what's called a peaceful base in my world. Once you have a good structure and a good plan and you know what you're doing, I think motivation is automatic. I don't think you can control it.

The problem is, and what they talk about, is most people try to live on motivation alone, and that's what they try to do. And that won't get you anywhere without the other side of it, right?

So this is kind of controversial. I'll stand on it because I just know it's there. And if I was at a hotel and at a conference and I was talking to anybody who says, you don't need it, they would say, yeah, we do, man. It just sells.

I can sell stuff. People come in when I just say that because motivation falters. Think about it right now. Has it been something you've been trying to get the motivation to do or something you were motivated and then you fell off the wagon?

Answer, yes. It just happens, right? So we talk about it a lot because it does mean something. It is critical to what we do, so much so that I put it as the first word in my company.

In retrospect, I did it just because I just understood what it meant. Should I have? That's questionable. Because it's something that everybody wants, but people can't hang on to.

It isn't everything, but it is a thing. You know what it is? It's a spark. So let's think about this scientifically. I'm not a scientist. Not even close.

I'm not a psychiatrist or psychologist. I've got a couple in my family, which is, we have great conversations. Imagine me with my smart kids who are psychiatrists. Imagine that conversation.

Well, science tells us that motivation is a psychological force that drives, it directs, and it sustains us. And you've felt that before. That's what most people want it for. I need the drive.

Give me some motivation. Sometimes the motivation turns you in a certain direction. Like if you're really hungry and you need Pop-Tarts at 3 a.m., you're going to be directed right to the grocery store, right? I say that because I actually had somebody do that one time.

That's what they wanted. I'm serious. Many years ago, though. Motivation sustains us as well. So it could be intrinsic. What is that? Well, it's inside.

It's the deep, the personal fire that you feel when you do something just because you love it. I like to live in that world. Pretty much everything I do in my personal life and even what I do here, it's all about that intrinsic motivation to bring it up from the inside.

I think a lot of people that are in the coaching world, the consulting world, like to do that as well. Because once from the inside, it really satisfies you and serves you. So that's where we want to be on the inside. But it also has the other side, which I think is probably the bigger problem.

It's extrinsic, like chasing a bonus or working for some praise. Now, extrinsic is not always bad. There are things we want on the outside. It's awfully good to go after it.

But oftentimes, we're chasing something or we're doing something. We're motivated by something that we don't like. It's bad. There's something else, too.

Have you noticed something? Have you noticed that sometimes in this thing that we're doing, that some of the things that are kind of getting in the way of your motivation are the actual things that you really like in your life?

Have you noticed that sometimes you work so hard so that you can have your mortgage paid and have your nice family life and your vacations? And somehow that gets in the way of everything else. A lot of people don't think about it like that. They tend to think about stuff that gets in the way of what they want.

Think about some of the things that are giving you what you want and maybe in the way of how you want to live. Something to think about today. We'll dig into that more here in the future, but it's true.

So the spark that we have when we have motivation, because we know motivation is a spark, it's just though a flash in the dark. That's all it is. So that's where the other part of my name comes in, where move comes in.

To move is completely doing one thing. It's changing your state. It's changing your physical state, your mental state. It's kind of grit testing, act of execution, if you will.

It's changing your state. If you've ever been to a Tony Robbins event, I've been to many, although many, many years since I have attended. Love what Tony does. He'll say, change your state.

Make your move, change your state. State management, they call it. Get you in state. State inducers all over the place, right? Been there, done that? Yeah, it's true.

So that's all it is. So that's moving. So what I just tell you, I said, moving is changing your state. Back to the Tony Robbins. Back to NLP. Make your move.

What's he doing? Make your crazy move. Yes. Like a football game in Australia or New Zealand, right? Football, not meaning the real football, meaning the kind of football.

The rugby, I guess, is what they play. When you make the move, it changes your state, physical, mental, and, man, you get stuff done. So let's get back to what I do. There's a word missing here.

Motivation, we talked about. It's a spark. Move is the state change. That little word two in the middle. Man, two tiny letters, a very powerful word. So the magic isn't the word motivation or it isn't to move.

Those are the things you want, those things you eventually want to achieve, right? The magic is in that two, there's two tiny little letters. So what is that? Well, psychologically speaking, again, here's what it is.

The word two is what psychologists call bridge of intent. It's a connection, the tissue connection, I guess you might want to call it even, that transform that internal feeling or that into an external reality. So whatever motivational spark you have, the two is a transformational bridge that gets you there. The two signals that your movement is not random, right?

Likely today, everything you're doing, most of what you're doing is kind of autopilot, probably kind of random. The minute you put the two in the middle of motivation to move, you've got something that is not random anymore. It represents the exact future state that you want to achieve.

In a sense, it kind of defines your victory, doesn't it? So when you're working with me, coaching calls, wherever I happen to be, community, all that kind of stuff, I'm really working on the two.

I call it the in-between, between the lines. It's the two, and most people race past it. If you don't move, the bridge goes nowhere, right? And your purpose remains unaccomplished, unfulfilled.

That's it. We all know that. That's the problem. I can't move. And most people say move. So all these folks out there saying, you need motivation. I'm like, yeah, okay, it's a spark.

You got to move. Yeah, okay. It's kind of a given. We all know we have to move, right? You need the two. So you made the decision. You know what you want.

Now commit to it. Let the motivation spark. Build the bridge. And yes, move. Think of it this way. If it is a spark, it's not the target, though. It's not the goal, right?

The motivation is not the goal. It's kind of like the bridge of intent is the act of pulling a trigger or letting the arrow go toward the target. That's what that is. So it gets you to the place you want to go.

So if you want to focus on that today, think about that. Think about the two. Two little words. Watch how it changed your life. Have a great weekend.