How Coaches Can Help Solve Their Clients' Motivational Conflicts - podcast episode cover

How Coaches Can Help Solve Their Clients' Motivational Conflicts

Jun 19, 202538 minSeason 1Ep. 86
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Episode description

Is your client stuck, overwhelmed, or sabotaging their own goals—despite saying they want change? Chances are, they’re experiencing a motivational conflict—and most coaches aren’t trained to spot it. In this insightful and entertaining episode, Ani Anderson and Brian Trzaskos unpack the three levels of motivation that drive human behavior: away from, toward, and by. You’ll learn why “accountability” often masks deeper energy misalignments, how to harness dopamine wisely, and how to help clients shift from burnout to flow. Complete with real client stories, neuroscience, and plenty of laughs, this episode is both practical and eye-opening. 

Join us for an empowering deep dive into how motivation really works—and how you can help your clients align their energy for lasting success.

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Transcript

Ani
Hi, and welcome to the Somatic Coaching Academy podcast. We are on episode 86 today, Brian.

Brian
Yes, we are.

Ani
What's up?

Brian
Oh, today, we are helping coaches. How are you doing? We're helping coaches today because that's what we do here, the Somatic Coaching Academy. Helping coaches. We're helping coaches To solve their clients' motivational conflicts.

Ani
Motivation gets conflicted?

Brian
It can be conflicted. It can be very conflicted.

Ani
Within one's self? Yeah, of course. Okay. I'm really excited to hear more about this. Okay, cool. Let's hop in. Are you motivated? I am. I am motivated to know more about motivation. Okay, nice.

Brian
We talk a lot. We've had these conversations, a whole bunch in our kitchen and in our offices and when we're driving in the car about motivation. Of course, here, what we do at the Somatic Coaching Academy is we train people in sensation-based motivational coaching. We're all about motivation.

Ani
We are. People tell us sometimes, Why are you so peppy?

Brian
That's why. That's why. We're going to do it. We do- All about energy. We do motivational mapping. We've had podcasts about that in the past. We come out from a lot of different directions to understand why people do what they do.

Ani
Why do people do...It's one of my favorite. Is it a gif or a meme? I don't know. Why are you like you are? It's one of my favorite.

Brian
Why do you do like you do? Exactly. Why are you doing what you're doing? Yeah. Sounds like maybe coming up in the future, we'll have a whole series of podcasts about relationships and why people do what they do.

Ani
I think our listeners would love that. But for today, here we are. How coaches can help their clients with motivational conflicts.

Brian
Okay. There's three basic ways that everyone is motivated.

Ani
Can I just say something first? Sure. If motivation isn't conflicted, it just works a heck of a lot better.

Brian
Oh, yeah.

Ani
I think that's one of the biggest drains I see with clients, actually, is they've got motivational conflict going on. It's like different parts of you are fighting in there when if everybody inside is looking in the same direction, you got productivity and you've got energy and a liveness, and a whole lot of extra time for making bad jokes. Yeah, totally.

Brian
Well, you make a great point there, Ani, because motivation is about energy. Motivation is about energy. When all of the parts of us, and by the way, it's not like all the parts of us for all the time, all the time are pointing in the same direction because sometimes we're pointing in the same direction to complete a work task. Sometimes we're pointing the same direction to do something in home or relationship or for exercise or whatever. But whenever we're doing anything in particular, it is helpful to have all of our components in alignment to do that same thing. Because when we're internally conflicted, we're spending energy technically in different directions. It's like a tug of war can start to happen. That takes energy. It spends energy wastefully, and then we get tired and exhausted, and then we hurt, and we have pain, and all that stuff.

Ani
I think it's one of the main reasons that people hire coaches, actually. But what the client says is, I'm hiring a coach for accountability.

Brian
Oh, yeah.

Ani
Which is not inaccurate. But I think what's really going on with a lot of the clients that I see is they're hiring a coach to help them to not just gain that motivation, but to have all their parts focused in the same direction so that they can actually move forward with the things that they really want to do. Because when you're not internally conflicted, it's relatively easy or easier to say, I want to go for this thing and just go do it. Then have the accountability for yourself around there. I think accountability is one of the biggest reasons that people hire coaches, and it's one of the hardest things for people to do. I think big reason for that is internal conflict.

Brian
I love that. Great. Great segue. Cool. When it comes to motivation, I was just about to say that there are three basic ways that everyone's motivated. Now, this is a very high-level look where, again, coaches can help their clients to release some of this motivational conflict. If you want a more granular look at motivation, that's where the motivational maps really come in play, because then you're looking at the nine primary motivational drivers. It's more granular in terms of where your values are. Great work. We love doing that work with people. It's super helpful in a lot of ways.

Ani
Also this larger view is also really helpful. Sometimes we think we just have to get granular to figure it out. But also this conversation, this higher-level conversation is so super valuable to have and can inform the granular conversation as well. Totally.

Brian
Okay, so let's get back to these. From a high level, the three basic reasons why everyone is motivated. We think about these in a hierarchy. Bottom, middle, and then top. The bottom reason, the bottom of the hierarchy, is to be motivated away from something. To be motivated away from something. In other words, there's a snake in my bed, and I need to get out of bed because there's a snake in my bed.

Ani
Like a negative stimuli.

Brian
Yeah, which we've talked about in the past. I might be moving towards protection.

Ani
Two weeks ago, we were talking about negativity bias. That was an inside joke for all of you who have already listened to that episode. Yeah.

Brian
You got that one. The first one is motivated away from. Think about all the times when we are motivated away from things. Usually, that is predicated by the phrase, I don't want. I don't want to get in an argument with my partner. I don't want to go broke. I don't want to be in debt. I don't want to, fill in the blank.

Ani
I don't want to go to that wedding and not be able to fit into the dress that I bought.

Brian
Yeah. Any don't wants are a neon sign for, I'm motivated away from something. Now, here's the interesting thing with being motivated away from something is oftentimes there's a lot of energy in that. When there's a snake in the bed, you're like, jump halfway across the room because there's a lot of... So a lot of fear, fear motivation is around that motivated away from. So a lot of us make decisions based on what we don't want to happen because we're afraid of that thing happening.

Ani
I had a client recently. I don't think I told you this. I had a client recently who was having some motivational conflict, and we determined that they were motivated away from. I said, Do you want to continue with that motivation? And I'll be honest with you, I was coming from a certain place with that question. I was expecting them to say no, and they said yes. I'm a coach, and it's their decision. And so we kept on going. I am interested to see where that goes in the future, whether there's some energy drain, burnout kinds of things that happen or some relationship conflict that comes up. I don't know. I know other ways of motivation. I was thinking that's where we were going to go with it, and maybe we are still going to go there. But it was really interesting to notice that. As I've had this... That, I think, was the one time where there wasn't any more conversation about it. But other times I've had conversations with people about it, and they'll say, I'm basically afraid not to be motivated that way because that's worked for me in the past.

Brian
Oh, so they're afraid to be motivated some other way than being motivated away from.

Ani
Yeah, because they're used to it. Their subconscious is programmed I can get myself to move when I'm motivated away from, and I'm afraid to change that, and that's a real thing.

Brian
That brings up a really great point because if you want to get motivated to move, then actually being motivated away from has typically the most energy to get moving. The problem is it doesn't have a good track record of moving in the direction they actually want to go. Because, again, jumping out of bed, snake in the bed, I'm just going to jump out of bed. I don't really care what direction I jump out in. I just need to get out of bed.

Ani
It's very reactionary, isn't it? Totally. Because you have to react to something that you're moving away from. It's really keeping yourself in a reactionary state.

Brian
Exactly. I could jump out of bed any direction and land on something even worse than the snake. Like the cat. The cat or something, right? I'm going to land on something worse than the snake because I didn't care about where I was going. I just wanted to get away from where I was.

Ani
Yeah, sure. Not a lot of intentionality.

Brian
Not a lot of intentionality, but it's great for getting moving. Sure. Sometimes, actually, if someone's really stuck, if someone's really de-energized, the best way to get them moving is actually to motivate them away from something. But then very, very quickly, we have to take them to the next level of the hierarchy, which is motivated towards. We've got somebody moving, but now what are you moving towards. What is it that you do want? Now we know what you don't want. What is it that you do want? That's the next level in that hierarchy.

Ani
I like how you're talking about that because it does take energy in order to move toward, and that can be a massive place where people are stuck. I think this conversation is so valuable because when we're talking about coaches and therapists and other people who help people trying to get their clients to... Or not trying to get, but help their clients to change, the client saying, I want to go hike a mountain. I want to go. The client is talking in 'to' language, like toward language, but then they can't get the energy to move towards.

Brian
Yes. Exactly. 100% right.

Ani
I have seen that years ago when I was doing more clinical work, I would see that all the time people would say, I want to exercise, or I want to... Exercise was a big one back then. Other things, too. But they just couldn't get themselves to do it.

Brian
Yeah. Let's just back down to this bottom level again for a second to clarify as we climb. Again, motivated away from: a lot of energy immediately in the system to get moving, to protect yourself, typically, to get out of the situation that you're in. The drawbacks are, number one, you're not necessarily concerned about the direction you're actually going in. You could end up in actually even a worse place or the same place, not necessarily in a better place, but you got moving. The other drawback is if you stay in that energy for a really long time of away from, what happens is you go into energy debt. The reason why that being motivated away from is so energy-driven is because there's a lot of adrenaline in the system. You're talking about just being motivated to jump out of bed, snake in the bed. I've got to get out of debt. I need some money. I don't want to be broke. I don't want to lose my car. I don't want to lose. There's a lot of energy in that system. We start getting into action. We're moving, but that takes a lot of adrenaline. Now, the very next day, we wake up again.

Brian
There's the snake in the bed again. I got to do it. I got to do it again. If we're chronically motivated by motivating away from, the big energy hit that we get from it eventually dwindles down and we go into an adrenal fatigue. Then we don't even have energy to be motivated away from. And then we wake up in the morning with a snake in the bed and we're just like, All right, I'm exhausted. I can't get out of the bed. Whatever happens, happens. Sort of thing.

Ani
Have you had a snake in your bed?

Brian
I don't know. I don't know why I have that analogy. I'm just following it through. Sort of thing. It's a clear, a primal fear maybe for people around snakes. I think it makes sense. Okay. But I can let it go if we need to.

Ani
No, it's all good. I was just curious.

Brian
All right. So that's just what came to me.

Ani
I don't know. I would not like a snake in my bed. Never happened to me.

Brian
Following my intuition here, Ani. Following my intuition. Okay. All right, folks. Here we go. We talked about motivated away from, and you're 100% right. Motivated to, motivated towards, motivated towards does actually require a little bit of energy. It actually requires energy then to start moving in the direction that you do want to go.

Ani
Being able to overcome enough of our self-sabotaging behavior, which takes energy internally. That self-sabotaging behavior is taking energy. If the self-sabotaging energy wasn't happening, maybe we'd have that energy to move towards even. I keep interrupting you. Go ahead.

Brian
That's great. The thing that coaches can use by the motivated towards level of hierarchy is understanding it does take energy to get moving. But a coach that understands motivation will also, to a little bit of a degree, understand how dopamine works. We've done a past podcast on motivation and dopamine, so go back. Actually, I don't think we did. I think Art and Science did it. Really? You go back and look for an Art and Science episode on motivation being motivational coach or something like that. Go check it out. I remember that now. But a coach who understands motivated towards, what they'll do is they'll help their client create benchmarks in moving towards where they want to go, knowing that each benchmark creates a dopamine reset period for somebody. As people, we get a dopamine elevation when we see what it is that we want to achieve, and then the thing is actually readily achievable. If I want something, let's say I want to buy a new house, and it's going to take me five years to save money for the house. I might be the first month, I might be like, Yeah, second month, I'm going to do it.

Brian
Third month, it's going to be awesome. Fourth month, that seems like a long way off, and I have some money right now, and I'd rather buy a new bike. If it's too far away, if it's too far away, we get an initial dopamine jump, but then dopamine drops off precipitously because a part of dopamine is about expectation of achievement.

Ani
Oh, okay. That's interesting. So as I'm listening to you, I'm thinking, I wonder if this is one of the reasons why it's so important to visualize what you want in your life, like what you want to manifest because the subconscious mind doesn't know the difference between what you're visualizing and what's actually happening, first of all. And you actually take that vision, and it becomes very real for you. But when you said expectation, right? Like you said, expectation. A fulfillment, yeah. Expectation of fulfillment. That still confirms my little theory I'm having here right now, because when I visualize it and I see myself in that house, I am super excited and continuing the expectation of. It's one of the things, Brian, that I think from a standpoint of people meeting their goals and manifesting really gets in people's way is this idea of visualizing, actually. Because in order to visualize what you want to manifest and hold that vision and hold the energy of expectation, you have to have enough energy in your system. A lot of people don't have enough energy. So until you have enough energy in your system, it is hard to be in this motivated toward place.

Ani
So that idea of just visualize your goal doesn't completely work. This is one of the reasons why. Yeah, exactly. That's neat.

Brian
Exactly. Perfect. It's great. You're getting this validation. Again, the important way with this motivated towards is, again, understand the dopamine system. If the actual fulfillment of the thing is way too far off in the future and the expectation of fulfilling it is lost, then dopamine drops and we lose our motivation for that thing and we get sidetracked on something else. The other problem is if the fulfillment of the thing is too short, think about actually taking drugs like methamphetamemes, for instance. You get a massive spike in dopamine when someone takes a stimulant drug. And part of the problem is that the time distance between the actual taking and the dopamine spike is so short. It's so short. That's what causes addiction.

Ani
Can you give me an example that's not about taking drugs?

Brian
So immediate fulfillment of a... Well, think about binge watching television shows.

Ani
Oh, boy.

Brian
Okay, so binge watching. We watch a television show and your dopamine gets up, gets up, and then it ends and you're like, Okay, I got to have another one. I got to have another one. You take another one right away. Oh, it gets you right. You get another dopamine hit from that one. Then after you watch five or six, you're exhausted. I'm like, Oh, yeah. I want another one. Hanging in. We're strung out.

Ani
Thanks for bringing it home.

Brian
Thanks for bringing it home. That's an example.

Ani
Okay, so we've got a little personal private joke going on here. If you're watching, you can see the smirks on our faces.

Brian
That's why it shows that one.

Ani
That makes sense? Yeah. I just have to reveal the little personal joke. I don't really watch television, and I stopped watching TV when my kids were born, which was almost 20 years ago. I've been enjoying actually getting into a little bit of TV recently. It's a time that Brian and I can bond, and I really, really like Ted Lasso.

Brian
You're a little late to the party, Ted Lasso. But it's fun to watch it with you because it's like a new thing.

Ani
It ends and I want another look. I'm motivated toward Ted Lasso.

Brian
exactly. You're motivated toward Ted Lasso. 

Ani
Thank you for that example. Now I understand what you were talking about.

Brian
If it's too short, we'll just actually keep binging on the thing that has a very rapid result and a high dopamine spike. We won't actually move forward at all.

Ani
We'll just stay where we are. Ideally, for that motivated toward, we want to be able to have the expectation but not have immediate fulfillment happening.

Brian
Exactly. What can a coach do to help. What they can help do is actually set benchmarks for their client. In other words, if it's five years to save money for the house, it's like, Well, what would be a benchmark in three months? Actually, what happens is the client is working towards that thing at three months. They're elevating their dopamine, dopamine. They get the thing at three months. It's, oh, my God, that feels really good. A lot of dopamine in the system. It's great reserve. We're going to have a little bit of refractory period, but if you manage it, okay, it's all right. Then you set another benchmark, and then you start it again. All along the way, you're actually managing the dopamine system moving towards. Then five years later, you got what you wanted to get. You stayed on track because you managed the moving towards system.

Ani
That's really cool. What I'm hearing is number one is knowing where your client's at. Are they in that first one or the second one? Are at the moving away or moving towards? If they want to be in the moving towards, do they have enough energy in the system to be able to do that and then helping them to sustain that through benchmarking?

Brian
Yeah. Well, the benchmarking would actually feed energy back into the system.

Ani
It becomes this self-fulfilling energy feeding. Exactly. What our students call that idea is life-giving, by the way, which I love. I've heard people say it spontaneously. I've said it spontaneously. We know what it feels like to be depleted, and that is easy to voice. But a lot of times when people aren't used to having this self-feeding system, they don't even know what it is. And they wish there was something different than depletion, but they don't know what it is. This is something our students have called life-giving because the energy just keeps feeding back.

Brian
Yeah, it keeps feeding back itself. Exactly. So the other thing that coaches can do to help their clients in that moving towards is to use celebrations but to use them non-regularly. Not regularly. Not regularly. They can't be like every Thursday we're going to celebrate. It can't even be every session we're going to celebrate. It needs to be every... Randomly. Why is that? Well, again, it's just the way the dopamine system works. It's like the regularity actually causes a dulling and a diminishing of the responsiveness of the system. If you're doing it just randomly, then if the coach can tell when they're starting to get a little dip, if you want to use it, but you don't want to tell someone we're going to celebrate every Thursday at 2:00, celebrate thing, that'll actually cause a loss of dopamine over time as well. Again, it's just there's a lot of cool things you can manage in regard to that. Yeah, that's neat. But that's the moving towards. The challenges with the moving towards are it takes energy to get it started. Yeah. Okay. That's a challenge with it.

Ani
It takes some Ninja to keep it going.

Brian
It takes some Ninja to keep it going. The benefits of it is you're actually pointed in a direction of purpose that a person wants to go in. So that's why you can see it's a little higher on the hierarchy than the moving away from. Moving away from, we talked about the benefits and the drawbacks of that one. Moving towards, I think we've talked about the benefits and drawbacks of moving that one, right?

Ani
Yeah. And you said there's three, but I think a lot of people are probably listening right now going, Well, that's it, Brian.

Brian
People think that's it. But there's a third one in the hierarchy, and this is motivated by. So the way when motivated away from and motivated towards, energy is always an important part of motivation, right? That's actually a core part of it. You can't talk about motivation without talking about energy. We've talked about the lower level, how energy works with motivated away. We've talked about energy works with motivated towards. Each of those requires the coach to manipulate the energy system, not manipulate in a bad way, but just manage, let's say, help the client managed their- Need it like dough.

Ani
Yeah, right.

Brian
Need it, massage it, whatever, the energy system. But motivated by, when someone's motivated by, this is true intrinsic motivation. And by the way, I think all motivation is intrinsic. We could have that conversation, too. But this is the one where there's no external pressures motivating someone. There's not like, I got to get out of... I got a snake here. I've got to get out of... I want to create something out there. Again, all motivation is good motivation if we understand how to manage it. Motivated by is when someone is really wholly motivated by their core purpose, by their core mission, like their reason for being in the world incarnate in this way. And that is connected to unlimited resources of energy, not something that we need to try to do. It's just you're connected to these unlimited resources.

Ani
I experience motivated away from a push, and I experience motivated towards a pull. And with both of those, there's some attachment and grasping, pulling, pushing thing to it. I experience the motivated by to be more without attachment and certainly not grasping.

Brian
Yeah, great point. There's not a sense of attachment to it. When you do enough of motivated away from and motivated towards, because they both require a level of attention to what you're doing, and for good reasons, if we can get ourselves to cultivating a sense of, What's my purpose here? Really, my being state. Why am I meant to not do here necessarily, but how am I meant to be here? Just nurture that on a regular basis. We're detached from what comes of that in the world because we're just in a state of being. We realize that we're living our life while we're living our life. If we just bring our whole selves to everything that we do, that's that core state of being motivated by.

Ani
Having walked in spiritual circles for a really long time in my life, I thought, I love this conversation as a part of motivation, because one of the things that used to get me in my 20s and 30s was there felt like a disconnect with the spiritual way where we were just good, meditating in our rooms or in our little sangha communities with a door closed, and that was enough. It was enough that I was feeling content in those moments or whatever. Similarly reminds me of more religiously slanted going to church on Sundays and being good in church on Sundays. But then what about the rest of our lives? And how do we really become this spiritually natured person? In the spiritual circles, I felt like there was something missing because I had this, I don't know, probably motivated by thing around... I couldn't tell you it was specifically making a greater contribution or something. I just felt like there was something more to it than there was a missing piece. I think you're really speaking to it because that true motivated by is an internal contentment without the grasping and attachment, and it also is of the world and interacting within the world.

Ani
It's not living alone behind closed doors on its meditation cushion. Yeah.

Brian
I think about being motivated by, I don't even think about it a lot. I live in it a lot. I really make a conscious, intentional effort to live in motivated by. Now, that doesn't mean that I'm not at times motivated towards things. Sure. I have goals. We have things that we want to build and want to create. I have to say, though, I'm pretty regularly not motivated away from many things anymore. I feel like for me, that's healthy anyway. I don't feel like it necessarily needs to be a motivated way. I spend most of my time motivated towards and by things, but I would even say probably even more of my time motivated by. Sometimes when you're really motivated by something and you have other people looking at you, they just wonder, what the heck are you doing? It might not make sense to other people how you move through the world or why you decide to do certain things at certain times or certain parts of the day or how you're behaving thing or how you're in a sense of being. Sometimes you can show up in situations with certain attitudes in a certain ways that are befuddling to other people thing.

Brian
It's just an amazing experiment to continue to practice being in the world in a motivated by sense. Sure. I like to walk through the world with a sense of curiosity. For me, it's like I'm really motivated by in the way of curiosity. I'm motivated in the influence of being curious about all the natural processes that go on all the time. And that includes our human natural processes and allowing for them to be exactly what they are and really understanding that for me, the natural processes are the pathways to, I'm just going to put air quotes here, success. I'm not talking necessarily about material success. I'm talking about just being a successful human, which for me becomes becoming someone who is more curious and more understanding and more connected and more sensing into the connection. I think we're talking about the spiritual things like we are talking about, the more unified connectedness experience. That's really what I'm motivated by.

Ani
And you also have a lot of cool opportunities that show up for you to continue to evolve your career and your relationships all the time. So it's not like there's nothing happening. There is this constant evolution of what some people would look at you and say, Yeah, but Brian, you do have external success. You do have all these opportunities that come to you, and you're still motivated by. It's interesting to me listening because people are going to see a person who's motivated by and judge them based on their own judgments and perceptions of what's going on with that person. So people are going to look at you being motivated by and think certain whatever it is about you. One of the ways that I find for myself, I am primarily motivated by nowadays. It is a wonderful place to be. I really like it very much. I would also say I'm a recovering achiever type. I was motivated toward a lot more in my life than I am now. I was having a good joke with our customer support person yesterday because I was asking her if she could do something for me, and I made a joke that I'm lazy.

Ani
And she said to me, You're not lazy. And this week alone have had three people tell me, You're the most hardworking person I know. Which is funny to me because I don't really feel like that for me. But I understand that some people would look at me and what I achieve, my productivity level, my high level of accountability, and the things that are going on in my life and say, You're a really hardworking person. I like to joke, and it really is a joke, and I was telling Lila about this, that I was joking that I'm lazy because I also have that... I'm motivated by. I'm just in the flow of life. It's lovely, and things are happening, and I'm also content, and I don't have that push-pull going on. I think that it is an aspirational motivational quality for a lot of people to be able to taste that motivated by.

Brian
When we image this hierarchy, when we teach this to our students, it looks like a triangle. The away from is at the bottom, towards is in the middle, and by is at the top. And so there's a peak up there at the top of the triangle. And so the, I guess, benefits and drawbacks thing, if you want to think about it, or possibilities and challenges, let's maybe think about it that way, every one of these levels has those balance points. So the motivated by, it's like you're standing on this little tippy thing, and it can feel a little wobbly. So there's parts of it that are, again, self-generating energy. And not even self-generating, I may take that back. Universely generated energy, because I think motivated towards, we talked about the self-generation. Yeah, sure. Where motivated by is more of a universal generation of energy. You're just tapped in to your purpose, your core purpose. The flow. How am I supposed to be here in the world? And so that just is like you're tapped into that energy source, and it just keeps filling you. Now, the reason it's at a tippy point is because you can sometimes be disconnected from the world, worldliness of the world that way.

Brian
And believe me, that sounds like a really cool thing, right? To not be connected, to let go of all connection to anything in the material world. But as humans, that actually can be a pretty dysfunctional state, right? Now we're talking about dissociation. We're talking about disconnection. As humans, like it or not, we're in human form, which means that there is an aspect of material life that is a part of being human. When we're not human anymore, I don't know what happens after that? But I know when we're humans, we're living on three planes of existence simultaneously, and one of those planes is the physical plane, and one of those planes is the universal plane. Motivated by is wonderful because it's a universally generating source of energy. At the same time, there's a part of us that needs to be paying attention to what's going on in the physical world. I like to think about it. There's a great saying of being in the world, but not of it. Being in the world, but not of it. And that's what I think about primarily being in a motivated by state is basically saying, yeah, I'm in the world, but I'm not really of the world.

Brian
I'm not going to buy in to all of the things that happen, lower down in the motivational spectrum, especially motivated away from things, because I'm committing to being in the motivated by. That doesn't mean that sometimes you don't fall off the top of that pillar and tumble down, and then you're motivated away from something. I think there are things going on in the world right now that are tests for that, really test a person's resolve in terms of where they are motivationally. I see that as sandpaper. It's just sandpaper for growth.

Ani
So one of the drawbacks of that motivated by place is you can be seen as aloof. Yeah, or disconnected. Or disconnected.

Brian
Yeah. Yeah. And you can actually become disconnected and then less in touch and less everything else with humans. Yeah.

Ani
And relationships matter to so many of us. And so that place can risk losing relatability.

Brian
Yeah, absolutely. So every one of those levels has a challenge and a possibility. And it doesn't really matter what level you're at. It doesn't really matter where you're operating most of the time. I'm hoping that our conversation, hopefully, gave coaches a framework, or maybe you're listening to someone else, and this is going to be valuable and relatable for you also, a framework for how can I shift the level in the hierarchy I'm working at if that's something I want to do.

Ani
Yeah. I think for me, one of the big takeaways is becoming aware of where we are, especially... I mean, for coaches, do that for yourself. Becoming aware of where we are so that we develop a better relationship with each of those places in the motivational hierarchy, because then, of course, we will be more able to help other people to navigate their motivational challenges.

Brian
Yeah. So, hey, coaches and humans out there, if you felt like this was a valuable conversation, if you want to make a note on it, a comment, a share, please share it with your friends. Let us know what you thought about it. Check us out on Somatic Coaching Academy website, of course, but drop any comments in the chat. Let us know.

Ani
I think this is a great episode, too, that you can share with your clients if you're working on motivation, because having common language around what you're working on can be so beneficial. This is a great one to be able to share. I'm thinking about a client I'm going to share with myself. So that you can have that common language to be able to work on the client challenges. So thanks so much for joining us for this episode, and we will see you next time.

Brian
Bye-bye.


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