Super Awesome You - Achieve Your Goals
This podcast is about helping you to believe in you. (Because wonderful things start to happen once you start to believe in yourself!)
My name is Sam, and running/fitness/entrepreneurship have taught me a lot of things -- how motivation is not a permanent state, how difficult it is to get yourself out of bed and move, and how our brains do their best to keep us comfortable and limited in our action (they have good intentions but often miss the mark).
Each week we'll dive into a lesson learned from running, and sometimes cover a song I'm currently listening to help me get out there and move. Some weeks will have a guest runner on the show talking about their path and what helps them when things are tough.
I hold a degree in Neurobiology and have been obsessed with motivation, goals and psychology for nearly a decade now. I am a former spin instructor, a current runner & marathoner, an entrepreneur, and podcaster. It's great to meet you!
This show was formerly and temporarily called Super Awesome Runner! If you hear that in the intro, that's why :)
Super Awesome You - Achieve Your Goals
Train Your Brain to Show Up When Motivation Doesn't
What happens when your motivation runs dry but your goals remain unchanged? That's the central question explored in this relatable episode of the Super Awesome You podcast, where host Sam delves into the challenging reality of pursuing long-term goals amid fluctuating motivation levels.
The truth is uncomfortable but liberating: you simply do the work anyway. Sam shares personal experiences from podcast creation to marathon training, revealing how the mental muscle that pushes through resistance grows stronger with each repetition. While tricks like accountability partners and reward systems have their place, they're ultimately powerless without your fundamental commitment to showing up.
We explore the fascinating psychology behind practices like the 5AM Club, revealing that the true benefit isn't about magical morning hours but rather about training yourself to begin each day by overcoming significant internal resistance. This creates a powerful mental framework that extends to every challenging task. When you can swing your feet out of a warm, comfortable bed against every bodily protest, you're strengthening the neural pathways that enable consistency in all areas of life.
The most encouraging revelation? Even on days when progress toward specific goals feels nonexistent, you're still building something invaluable—mental resilience and the habit of showing up. In a world where countless people let days pass without meaningful action toward their aspirations, your consistency already places you ahead of the curve. Ready to develop your "do it anyway" superpower? This episode provides both the inspiration and practical mindset shifts to make it happen.
Subscribe, share with a friend who needs this message, and leave a review to help others discover these transformative insights!
You can find the song of the week on the weekly playlist here on Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2wxmDClsiebNBJ2B3Jut5u?si=5edd46976ddc4630
Hello and welcome to Super Awesome you. My name is Sam. I'm the host of the show on the Super Awesome Mix podcast network. You can find more of this show's content on Instagram and on threads at Super Awesome you. Now, if you've been listening to the show for some time, you realize probably that I have name changed back again to Super Awesome you. For a short little while, I was Super Awesome Runner. I just want to address that very quickly, and I actually think there's a lesson here to be had, which is don't be afraid to admit that. Maybe you want to go back to the thing you were doing before.
Sam:I started this podcast a couple of years ago as Super Awesome you, and I was really into that name and I really enjoyed it. Obviously, being part of the Super Awesome Mix podcast network helped with the naming choice and the show's purpose was really just all about helping us feel really good about ourselves and helping us believe in ourselves and realizing that we are kind of super awesome or we certainly can be, whenever we show up for ourselves and put in the work. As time went on, I realized that I started talking more and more about running and I thought, well, what if I just dedicated the show to just purely being about running and spent some time as the super awesome runner show Did that for you know, however long, it's been a couple months, three months and then realized that I actually liked it before as super awesome you because, yes, running is a really important part of my life and I talk a lot about it and in fact, I just had a runner on as a guest on the show. But I think this is a broader show than just about running. So I went back to Super Awesome you. I appreciate you staying with me through that little adventure and I promise I will not name change, at least for the time being. You know, I don't want to say ever, but it doesn't seem like I have any plans to name change again. So I say all of that to once again welcome you back, or welcome you to for the first time to the Super Awesome you podcast this week.
Sam:What I want to talk about is finding the joy in putting in the work. Whenever you set a long-term goal and we talk about goals a lot on the show it makes a lot of sense. That's part of starting to feel like you are a super awesome person is setting a goal and achieving it or working towards it. But part of the issue whenever you set these long-term goals is that motivation is going to wax and wane. You're going to start off you're really motivated. It's going to kind of disappear and then it might come back here and there and it's going to disappear again.
Sam:And what do you do on the days when you just find that you don't have any motivation? Unfortunately, the answer is you just do the work anyway. I hate to say that because it's kind of an annoying answer whenever someone asks you know, I don't feel like running today. Should I run? Or what do I do, or how do I find the motivation to run? And I think the answer is you just need to run without the motivation. The issue here is we want to feel that push, we want to get rolling, and you know there are tips and tricks and ways to kind of get that done and we've talked about that on the show. You can have a friend push you out the door. You can put a reward at the end of the run. You can have it stacked. So if you're doing a treadmill run, you could maybe watch a TV episode of your favorite show while you're running on the treadmill. There's all kinds of different ways, but none of those things work without you actually putting in the effort and putting in the work, without you showing up. A hundred percent better than zero is still zero. You know you can't multiply a percentage against zero and expect it to grow at all. You still have to put in the actual nominal amount of work and I think what ends up happening is you train yourself to learn how to do these things even when you don't feel like doing them.
Sam:One thing that people talk a lot about is like the 5am club. I've referenced it way back in season one. Read that book a couple times. Realize that it's really less about waking up at 5 am. Like, yes, you know, there's something nice about waking up early because you get more hours of the day, ostensibly. Although if you're a night owl, you're robbing yourself of those night hours that you normally would and you're exchanging them with morning hours. But let's just pretend that normally you sleep in, but now you're suddenly waking up at 5. And it's not necessarily about the magic of these hours. There's really nothing too special about the hours from five to seven in the morning, other than maybe the fact that you know, things are a little bit quiet, most people are asleep. You're not going to get as many notifications, there is calmness to it.
Sam:But I say all of that to say I think what 5 am club and waking up early is all about is training yourself to do something, to start your day with something that you literally do not want to do. That alarm goes off and it takes so much effort mental and sometimes physical effort to get yourself to turn off the alarm, swing your feet out from your bed, put them on the floor and sit yourself up and stand your feet out from your bed, put them on the floor and sit yourself up and stand and walk away from that bed. You are presumably warm, you are cozy, you are comfortable. Your body loves sleep. It does not like being interrupted when it is asleep, especially if you are woken up randomly, like, say, during your REM cycle, and you feel really groggy and your body really does not like to be interrupted when it's an REM. But you do it anyway, right, and that's how you start your day. You start your day with a task that you literally do not want to do and you do it anyway. What you're doing there is training your body at a meta level to understand that, even when you are not motivated to do something, you still do the thing because you've created a contract with yourself, because you have a long-term goal that you're working towards. Whatever the why is, that matters to you. The point is that you do it anyway. That is a very powerful tool in your tool set. That is probably one of the most powerful things you can do is literally training yourself to show up, even when you don't want to show up.
Sam:That is true for me, as I record this podcast week after week. I I love doing this podcast, but I would be lying to you if I told you that I love to do it every single week. There are some weeks where it's a bit of a chore. I need to think of a topic, I need to get my desk set up. I need to run through what I'm going to talk about. I need to edit the episode. Once I'm done, I need to publish it. I need to write about it.
Sam:There's a lot of work that goes into recording and publishing a weekly podcast episode on top of everything else that I'm doing in my life, right? So there are many weeks when I don't want to do this, but I have created a contract with myself. I have a long-term goal of working towards becoming a motivational speaker, a self-help person, self-development author, and I realized that the only way to do that is to start publishing content and do it consistently and grow my audience. And so I'm very grateful for all of you listening and in fact, you could help me with the growing my audience part by sharing the show and leaving a five star review, if you haven't already. But that's beside the point right now. The point is, this show, even though I love to do it, can absolutely be a chore. But because I have told myself that I'm doing this podcast, I'm going to do it weekly. I'm going to show up every single week that I have an episode planned, record the episode and publish it. That's that.
Sam:There is really no other way of getting around working towards a goal. When you set an early morning alarm and you don't want to wake up at that alarm, but you do it anyway, you are training that part of your brain that basically says I don't want to do this thing, but here I am doing it anyway and you get stronger at that and stronger at that and it just becomes a little bit more automatic. You realize you don't want to put the dishes away, but you put them away anyway. You realize you don't want to take the trash out, but you take the trash out anyway. And the more that you train this part of your brain to overcome that inertia anytime you don't want to do something but you do it anyway you can expand that to larger and larger tasks. It goes from taking the trash out to recording a weekly episode, to training for a marathon in the dead of summer. Right.
Sam:Whenever I first signed up for the fall marathon, I, you know, in my mind had the lovely cool November wintry style day or fall, you know, late fall day in mind and I completely forgot and discounted the fact that 16 weeks prior to November 2nd or 3rd is, you know, july 3rd. It's in the dead of summer and it's hot and it's humid and the sun is out really early in the northeast so you can't even get out like super early to beat a lot of that. But you signed up for that goal and you realize, like this is how I get it done. I get it done by running out in the heat and then the city heat, even though I don't want to, and even though that's not even what this race is about, you still show up and you put in the hours and you put in the miles. That's the deal that you set with yourself, and there is no shortcut to getting that done. You just have to do it. So when you are faced with a long-term goal, when you want to accomplish something big, and you are faced with those days that you don't want to do that thing anymore, you have to remind yourself that you are training a muscle, a part of your brain you can think of it as a muscle in your body to do the thing anyway. It will get easier as time goes by. You might even learn to like certain tasks, in which case that's just. That's great, because that gets even easier, and you might never learn to like that task, and it doesn't matter, though, because you are strengthening the part of your brain that says I don't like doing this, but I do it anyway.
Sam:David Goggins talks a lot about how much he hates running, and that's literally why he says he does it. He hates it so much, but he needs to force himself to do things that he doesn't want to do, because that's his whole thing. His whole life is not wanting to do things but doing them anyway. That part of his brain is probably rock solid and, like 90% of the brain, matter, because he literally signs himself up for the most ridiculous things, right? I mean ultras upon ultras, like 250 mile races. It's insane. He trains himself to overcome that part of the brain that, you know, kind of whines for motivation. It looks for a reason to do things. It really wants to feel like I'm doing this for a reason, but you override it. That's.
Sam:The really powerful things about our brain is that we've got multiple voices in there. You know, we have the part of our brain that says I don't want to step out of my bed, I'm cozy, I'm warm, comfortable. And then we have that smaller part of our brain that says do it anyway. You're going to feel so cool and so badass whenever you step out of this bed and you are overcoming yourself when you do that. And now you get to carry that energy with you throughout the rest of your day, like I've already done one of the hardest things I can do today, which is get myself out of bed on time with the alarm and no snooze. I can take the trash out, I can go for a run, I can go to the gym, I can work on my business for another 10 minutes, I can clean up the house and tidy things up and not leave things thrown about, and so on.
Sam:That is the power of doing things, even when you don't have the motivation.
Sam:And it will never get easy per se, but you just get better at doing the not easy thing.
Sam:That is what it's all about. Even when you feel like there's not progress being made, like we talked about, you are still making some kind of a progress, even if you're not getting closer to your goal. You are getting better at showing up and working towards something that matters to you and that is huge, because for every single person out there that is showing up and working for themselves and pursuing some difficult goal, there are probably 10, 100, 1,000 other people that are just letting the days swim by and they sit in excuses and they don't get any closer to it. So just by showing up for yourself, just by putting in the work, just by being consistent, just by struggling to be consistent, you are already better than all the people that choose to ignore this part of their brain and sit and stay the same and, you know, never really try to improve themselves. So that's huge. You should always, always celebrate that. I hope you have a wonderful rest of the week and I will see you next Tuesday.
