Motivation vs. Discipline: Unveiling the Path to Lasting Success

Phil Calandra Snippet (00:05):

The more discipline you have towards something, it’s like the callus, it’s going to develop. And that is going to be repeated, you’ll be able to continue to plug into that discipline no matter what it is in your life. 

But if you don’t have that, you’re never going to make it because nobody will have enough excitement to keep them motivated. But discipline and the desire that will carry you through.

Rob Brown Snippet (00:30):

What could a listener today, take from this conversation? Look at those priorities that you’re working on that you said, were really important to accomplish your goals this year or this week, or in this sprint? Are you really sticking to them? Or were you just motivated to create a plan, but weren’t convicted to have the discipline to follow with through it? 

Welcome to The Truest Fan Blueprint, a podcast for financial advisors, and other professionals looking to get the most out of yourself and your business. I’m Rob Brown, and my partner Phil Calandra. And I promise to walk you through a journey that will allow you to take action in your business and your life, so that you can be the best that you can possibly be. Thanks for listening.

Phil Calandra (01:37):

Hello again, and welcome back to another edition of The Truest Fan Blueprint podcast. That’s a mouthful it is. I’m Phil Calandra. And I’ve got my partner with me, Rob Brown. Hey, Rob, it’s good to see you. Again,

Rob Brown (01:51):

always good being with you, Phil, I’ve got my my grandpa shirt on today. For those of you who are watching this on, on YouTube,

Phil Calandra (02:01):

I liked that. I liked that. Speaking of likes, if you’re enjoying the podcast, please give us a like, give us a share. Give us your feedback, we’re open to topics, we’re open to making this the best possible podcast and communication platform for you and for our community. So please feel free to do that. 

And today, Rob, we’re talking about something that I think really hits in so many different aspects, so many different corners and pieces of our lives, whether it’s our family, our businesses, our lifestyle. And that is the difference between motivation and discipline and discerning the differences so that you can make maximum use and reach maximum success out of it. 

And I found this Rob, interesting. You know, sometimes social media can provide you some good information. And I found this brief synopsis of the difference between motivation versus discipline. 

So I’m just gonna gonna read it out for our listeners. And then we’ll kind of dive off of that. But motivation comes from the natural human drive to achieve something. motivation doesn’t last forever, no matter how much you want something. It’s a temporary effect created by the brain to boost you in the right direction. That’s motivation. 

Now, the converse, the opposite of that, or what we’re going to discuss is discipline. And discipline is the ability to continue pushing in the right direction, when you no longer have motivation doing it for you. 

Discipline is far more important than motivation. And you should never rely on motivation alone. I don’t know about you, Rob. But I really found that kind of separation of those two ideas. Fascinating. And it hit me. Right between the glasses and eyes. Yeah. How about you?

Rob Brown (04:05):

Yeah, no, absolutely. Because, well, a couple of things. One, the idea that motivation doesn’t last, because I think a lot of times we perpetuate in the way that we think about what we’re doing or the way that we’re encouraging others that we can constantly stay motivated. 

And that would be like, you know, you know, a football player, you know, NFL player on on Sunday. You know, who’s totally motivated for the three hours that game last, having that same level of intensity and motivation. 

During the week. It just it just doesn’t last. And I think that’s a that’s a great thing to think about. Because I think it’s easy to feel like we just need to stay constantly motivated. And that’s impossible if you buy into what you just read.

Phil Calandra (04:53):

Yeah, and I think the corollary word to motivation is excitement. So it’s really easy to get excited. Good when you’re starting something new, or, you know, maybe it’s parenting, you’re excited to be a new parent, it could be a new diet plan, because you’re going on a cruise, in two months could be in a business pursuit. 

So motivation is temporary. And it’s geared or kind of ramped up because of our own excitement. But then what happens when the excitement wanes, right? You’re gonna slip back into probably your predetermined habit cycle or predisposition of a particular area.

Rob Brown (05:35):

Yeah, that’s, that’s totally right. You know, I’ve been asked before, when I’m talking to a potential client in the coaching work that we do, you know, what’s your success rate. And I always say my success rate is 100%, I have never had a client fail. And that sounds kind of bold. But maybe there is a little footnote to that. 

That’s only the clients that come on board. And when we set out in our initial engagement, what they want to work on, that they actually do it. Because if we, if they get really excited, say, I’m going to hire a coach, this is going to be awesome. 

And then they don’t do what we agree to do together. The relationship just ends, it’s it’s not a failure never really gets started, because the motivation just dies within that first couple of conversations. 

But when you said that you had the discipline, to do the thing that you put together in the plan that maybe came from the motivation to start the relationship in the first place, it keeps going, and then success always happens.

Phil Calandra (06:46):

Yeah, and I think back in my own kata journey in several different areas, you know, I lean on my endurance racing and fitness pursuits as an Iron Man. And it paints a picture for me, even as I go forward from it. 

But after the initial excitement wears off, after you’ve signed up for the race, or you’ve made the commitment to yourself and publicly stated, the commitment, what ends up happening, when the excitement wears off is then you compromise, you begin to lose that sense of urgency, you, you let your foot off the gas, you miss a workout, and then you missed two workouts, and then you miss three workouts. 

Same thing could be on the diet plan, right? You start out with full intention of following the eating plan. And then you have one cheat meal. And then it turns into two cheat meals, the whole weekend was achieved. 

And then you discover, wow, this isn’t working out. I’m not losing any weight, or I’m not gaining any fitness, there’s no way I can complete the marathon or the Ironman or whatever. And then what do you do? You quit? You give up? 

That’s our human nature. I talk about that so much. It’s just the way God kind of knitted us together. It’s not natural nature. It’s human nature. And you have to break that apart.

Rob Brown (08:07):

Yeah, absolutely. Because we want to, because at that point, I was thinking you blame it on the diet, that’s a bad diet? No, it was probably just a bad implementation of the diets. You know, I think about some of the activities that I encourage my clients to engage in, that will help them achieve goals. 

And what fascinates me sometimes is like, we’ll come up with a strategy, very simple strategy, like, we want to increase our referrals. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to make sure that twice a week when we’re having meetings with clients, we’re going to have a professional, elegant referral conversation. 

That’s how you can promote referrals and grow referrals. And what will invariably happen is they will commit to that, and they’ll do it for three, four weeks. And we talk about, yeah, this is great. I’m having great conversations, getting some great introductions. We’ve got some meetings coming up because of those conversations. 

And then a couple of months later, we’ll talk about the results for the sprint or the quarter that we were in. And I’ll find out that the referrals died off, and I’ll go well, why did that happen? What did you do? And invariably, they just stopped doing it. 

The even the motivation of having success with the discipline of doing it sometimes isn’t enough to keep that process going.

Phil Calandra (09:37):

Yeah, so what would be the solution here for our listeners, the solution is maintaining a high level of discipline to have that referral conversation. And it’s kind of like I was having this conversation with my brother in law just the other day. 

My niece is a junior in high school so you can imagine what ace 16, soon to be 17 year old is going through. And we were talking about how to create in a young person, the idea of discipline and not being afraid to fail. 

So I have a point to my story here. But we were talking about the repetition of success, the more you have success at something, it’s like, it’s like raking leaves, we’re coming into the fall. And guess what happens in the fall, Rob, the leaves come off the tree. I don’t live in an area where there’s any leaves, thank God because I don’t like the rake. 

But if you hold a rake for 234 hours, a couple of days consecutively, guess what happens to your hand, you get, you get a blister a little bit, and then it forms a halus. And my metaphor to my brother in law is like, the more she does these things. 

Being bold, or standing in front of group sees in the chorus, she’s, she’s fearful about singing in front of people, the more she does that, the more she develops this callus. And I am thinking this story through in my mind, as I’m telling it, because that’s the same thing for our listeners between motivating themselves and being disciplined with themselves.

The more discipline you have towards something, it’s like the callus, it’s going to develop, and that is going to be repeated, you’ll be able to continue to plug into that discipline, no matter what it is in your life. But if you don’t have that, you’re never going to make it because nobody will have enough excitement, to keep them motivated. But discipline and the desire that will carry you through. 

Same thing with your coaching for referrals, you gotta keep doing it, or don’t expect the results to come.

Rob Brown (11:44):

Yeah. And I think you know, when I talk about how that discipline can even fail, because you’re not even getting motivation. From success. I was thinking as you were talking, you know, that’s when you need to look at the callus on your hands. 

That’s when you need to, to take some stock of the fact that the discipline is working, which in and of itself should motivate you to keep going because you’ve, you’ve strengthened yourself to be able to do that thing, whether it’s building those referrals or raking those leaves, whenever I ever that endeavor is

Phil Calandra (12:20):

well, and I don’t think that people realize, when they’re in the moment, we’re in the middle of it, that it’s going to take the extra step of and then and the discipline to see it through. And I’m no different than anybody else. I mean, our listeners don’t feel like I always have unlimited amounts of discipline. 

I don’t either, I fall back, and then I have to pick myself back up and say, Okay, here’s what I set out to do. Is this really a priority? Is it really important for me to achieve this outcome? And then I would say, yes, it is. 

And I have to master that emotion. I’ve heard it said, you know, mastering the mundane, it’s the mundane things that you have to get complete control over. And I think that this makes all the difference. We’re coming up on time. Rob, is there anything else that you wanted to kind of get out to people is the separation between motivation, and discipline?

Rob Brown (13:18):

Yeah, as I was preparing for our conversation today, Phil, I was doing some reading. And a great quote came up, it says that motivation is doing what needs to be done when you want to do it. 

Discipline is doing what needs to be done, when you don’t want to do it. And I mentioned that here at the end, because like the social media posts that you mentioned early on, it creates that stark contrast, and causes us to maybe to think more about, you know, when are we falling prey, to allowing our motivation to kind of rule our days versus saying, you know, each day I need to have some discipline about what it is I’m trying to accomplish. 

And, you know, as we help clients create their quarterly sprint with their action items that they’re working on. It requires that discipline to keep going back and doing it over and over again. So I think maybe is a is a takeaway. 

So you know, what could a listener today, take from this conversation? Look at those priorities that you’re working on that you said, we’re really important to accomplish your goals this year, or this week, or in this sprint? If you’re following along in our, in our process, and are you really sticking to them? Or were you just motivated to create a plan but weren’t convicted to have the discipline to follow it through and if there’s something that you said you want to do, do it? 

Do it now start get that discipline? Go and because we all have those things in our lives, none of us are Perfect. And we could have conversations about motivation and discipline for hours or for every week, probably, because it’s a constant, a constant battle, to stay focused on those things, those disciplines that we need to do on a day to day basis.

Phil Calandra (15:21):

Yeah, I love that. I love that, quote, Rob that hits it squarely on the head. And that’s a good place to wrap it up for today. So, if you enjoyed the podcast, please like it, share it, give us your feedback. We love giving you this information and we look forward to talking with you again and as we always say, we are rooting for your success. Talk to you soon.