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Welcome to Leading With Force — a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
I want to dive deeper on a common phrase that's thrown around a lot in productivity circles. That's the idea that discipline beats motivation and it's 100 percent true. The idea of discipline versus motivation, motivation being finite, discipline being deeply ingrained into your everyday habits.
Discipline by definition, we'll get you farther over the long term than any amount of motivation will. Because motivation is very difficult to maintain through all levels of volatility and market cycles and life events, all of the things that we're Things that cause stress and burnout and second guessing and dejection and pain and suffering and all of those things.
If you had the opportunity to bring someone new on as a partner, I would choose the person that is disciplined and consistent in their daily actions over motivated. Motivated is an emotion you feel in a single moment in time.
And you can carry that emotion throughout many continuous [00:02:00] moments and keep some level of it through many obstacles. Discipline Is a human characteristic. It speaks to the way in which you interact with the world on a consistent basis. And so it's very true that discipline Trump's motivation any day,
I would rather have someone that's committed to the right actions over and over and over, which over the longterm will lead to massive results. Then someone who is really motivated at the particular moment in time that I'm speaking to them about whatever outcome it is that we're trying to achieve. Now it's great to have both obviously, and many people do real talented people, real effective people are motivated and disciplined.
When many people start with that motivation and build the discipline, they start to realize the value of the discipline when it comes to achieving the things that they're motivated to achieve. This is truly what separates high achievers, real performers from people that have a great idea from people who continue to start and continue to start and [00:03:00] continue to start.
And people that persevere through all different types of environments is the difference between discipline and motivation. I want to dive even deeper on that idea today. I want to talk about where willpower, where discipline, where motivation comes from. And talk about how we can start to refine the ideas of motivation, the ideas of discipline to really serve our ultimate purpose.
Let's just dig into the idea of motivation first. And what we really mean when we say we're motivated to do something. Normally, when we talk about motivation, we're talking about being motivated towards a particular outcome. For example, if you're motivated to build a really amazing company, I have a company that one of our organizations that I have massive ambition for massive aspirations for, we want to take this organization and I'm very motivated to get there.
And normally when we talk about motivation, we really talk about the outcome. We're motivated towards some end goal, whether [00:04:00] I'm motivated to hit a certain number on the scale or number in the bank account or accolade for my business or title at work, we're motivated towards outcomes. We're motivated towards the thing that we want to achieve, the place where we want to end up.
We're motivated towards end games.
But if we were to break down everything that went into getting there, all of the things that we need to go through to get to where we're trying to go. And we just looked at those things in isolation. Normally, we wouldn't ascribe the idea of being motivated towards those things For example my first real sales business that we built we built a real estate sales business And we scaled that business from zero to over 150 million dollars in yearly sales within three years
it was a phenomenal blessing. It was an amazing journey and I was incredibly motivated around where we were trying to go. We were trying to take the [00:05:00] company. I wanted to hit a certain amount of sales, a certain amount of revenue, a certain amount of profit.
I was very motivated to build that business. But if you broke down the daily actions that went into realizing that goal and you just looked at them in isolation and asked me if I was motivated to do those things, I would probably say 50 50 maybe even less than 50 percent of the time if I was just looking at the individual activity, was I super motivated to do it every single day.
When I first started my first sales business, my biggest activity was cold calling and door knocking. I would literally knock thousands of doors per year trying to earn people's business, trying to show them how I was different, trying to show them how I was going to bring value to them and just hoping they would have a conversation with me, hoping they wouldn't slam the door in my face, hoping they would take me seriously.
It was a very low percentage game. I was lucky to have a 2 percent conversion rate when I was out just cold knocking on people's doors. Yeah. If you ask me, are you motivated to go [00:06:00] knock doors today? I would say probably not. It wasn't super fun work. It was really challenging. It was really dejecting at times.
There are times when it felt like I should be doing anything else with my life, with my career, that this wasn't working, that I wasn't the right person, that I was never going to have my breakthrough. And it was very difficult to stay motivated to go do those things. And even as things scaled, sales is a very difficult business. You start at zero again, every single month. And you've got to go through the same motions, the same activity. You've got to lead, generate, lead, generate, lead, generate, and follow up, follow up, follow up. It's an incredibly time intensive and emotionally exhausting business.
And so if you were to ask my greatest salespeople on my team, are they motivated to get up and follow up with a hundred contacts today that may or may not be blowing them off, that they may or may not take further down the rabbit hole that they might convert a small percentage of over [00:07:00] time, they would probably tell you they're not motivated to do that specific activity.
What they are is disciplined. What they are is disciplined to be consistent about the things that maybe don't feel great in the moment that maybe don't go, Hey, let's go do this. It's going to be as fun as riding a roller coaster. They're disciplined about the things they know they need to do consistently to get to where they're motivated to go. That's a key difference between discipline and motivation. If you look at everything that happens on the journey between where you are and where you're motivated to go, there's a large portion of it that is going to challenge you, it is going to test you.
And that's a good thing because that journey is the process of you becoming the person you need to become. to achieve the outcome that you're motivated to achieve. It is a growth process. It's the same thing as being a teenager or preteen and going through growing [00:08:00] pains when your bones physically hurt because your body is expanding rapidly and it's painful.
It's a process of becoming a new version of yourself. And becoming a new version of yourself requires discipline. It requires consistently doing things that you may or may not be super motivated to do in the moment. Now, what I will say is motivation is purely a matter of perspective. You can condition your brain to become more motivated to do the things that you weren't normally motivated to do to go achieve those outcomes. All you have to do is start to make the correlation between your consistent activities and the outcome that you're motivated to achieve.
It's the same process of habit building that most clearly is represented by our physical nature, our bodies, right? If we are not where we want to be physically, We have to build a habit through discipline of exercising and eating properly every day.
And that is [00:09:00] going to take time. There are going to be a lot of days in the beginning where we're not truly motivated to get up and go lift a whole bunch of heavy things and sweat a lot and then eat a whole lot of food that is really nutritious, but might not be what we're used to eating, might not be as delicious as what we're used to eating.
And our bodies might not crave it the way that it craves other things. And so we have to develop discipline. And what you find if you've ever been through this process is slowly, but surely day by day, your motivation to go do those things tends to grow.
The more you exercise consistently, your body starts to crave exercise. It starts to make a correlation between exercising and energy, good health, feeling good, looking great, positive emotions, endorphins, all the great things that come with treating your body properly. The same thing with your diet at first for the first 30 or 60 days, breaking your empty carb cycle is going to be a little [00:10:00] bit difficult.
You're going to resist it. You're going to cheat. You're going to say, just this weekend, or just tonight, or just because it's your birthday. And then you're going to start all over tomorrow. You're going to have to break those cravings. You're going to have to break that cycle. Well, you'll start to notice, slowly but surely, 30 days, 60 days, you will start to legitimately crave nutritious food. You probably have somebody in your life that is a very consistent, healthy eater. They're not deterred by anything. You could bring a whole bunch of cake and sweets and goodies around them. They wouldn't even bat an eye. That's most likely because they have developed an amount of discipline where they don't crave terrible food anymore.
They don't crave sweets or junk food. They legitimately look forward to the nutritious food that they consistently eat. That's discipline and what discipline is doing. What being disciplined does over time is builds conditioning. Conditioning is a key word in the tether between discipline and motivation.[00:11:00]
Conditioning is what closes the gap Between having to have a high level of discipline to match a high level of motivation, conditioning is the bridge between discipline and motivation. If you're motivated to achieve a massive outcome, it is very likely that where you are right now, And where you want to be has a whole bunch of challenging things in the middle that are going to test you that you're going to need to show a great level of discipline in order to achieve.
But what discipline and consistency in your daily actions does over time is lower the requisite level of discipline you need at any given moment to start to achieve those outcomes, meaning your brain starts to be hardwired to crave and seek out the things you need to do to get to where you want to go.
Your body will begin to crave exercise and nutritious food. The longer you commit to those daily actions, your requisite level of discipline will fall [00:12:00] because things will start to become natural. You have conditioned your body in your mind to seek out the things that it knows are good for it. That is what conditioning is.
Conditioning lowers the requisite level of discipline that you need to achieve the outcomes that you're motivated to achieve. Conditioning is the opposite of willpower. Willpower is essentially the level of motivation you contain in any given moment to go do the things that you need to be disciplined to do.
Willpower is the thing that you need to summon up whenever it's time to go work out and you don't really feel like it. Willpower is the fuel that discipline requires. I need willpower. I need to summon my motivation. to go and exercise today. I need to summon my motivation to say no to this junk food.
And yes, to this healthy food, I need to summon up that motivation. Motivation is fleeting. Motivation oscillates. Motivation rises and [00:13:00] falls with our energy levels, with our states, with everything that's going on in our lives. And so we need to summon that motivation and that's called willpower. But the more that we condition ourselves through discipline and consistent action, the less willpower we need, the less motivation we need to summon up to make those things essentially automatic.
You will get to a point if we're using this particular health and fitness example where you've been disciplined for long enough that you are now conditioned to feel uncomfortable when you don't exercise for a period of time or when the only choice on the menu is something that you don't find particularly appealing because it's not nutritious.
You will literally rewire your hard drive. To start to see the things that you are motivated to achieve as being your default mode, your default conditioning and the things that drag you away from the things that you're motivated to achieve as being uncomfortable and unappealing.
That takes discipline. Discipline builds conditioning. [00:14:00] Conditioning lowers the level of willpower we need to summon up the motivation to take action every moment.
So those four key words, discipline, motivation, conditioning, and willpower are all part of this energy feedback loop that determine where it is that we end up on our journey. When we are disciplined around the things that we know we need to do to get to where we're motivated to go. We start to condition our brains, our bodies, our minds, everything to take us there.
We become more addicted to doing the good things in our world the more that we are disciplined around them and the more that we can become conditioned. And the willpower that we need. To fuel that discipline starts to get lower and lower. The longer we've been conditioned to do something, there comes a point on this journey.
We're working out and exercising and eating healthy becomes simply unconscious. You live a wonderful life. You get the joy of exercising [00:15:00] vigorously every day and eating great, nutritious food that gives you energy and sustains you. That's how your brain starts to get rewired, but it takes a level of discipline in the beginning.
So my message to you today is this. Think deeply on what you're motivated to achieve and identify the things that you need to be disciplined around to achieve that outcome. And then realize that the longer that you stay disciplined, the more you are conditioning yourself to make those actions unconscious, to really crave those actions and make that your new normal.
That is the process of becoming the new version of you that achieves those goals. But the more you fall off the wagon, the more you abandon that discipline, the more you're standing in place. And you're really not even standing in place, you're actually moving backwards because time is moving forward.
So less time you have to achieve the outcomes that you're motivated to achieve. Every time you say, I'll start tomorrow. Every time you [00:16:00] say, I'll make an exception. Every time you say, I'll start on Monday. Just remember that you're losing a little bit of the blessing that is conditioning yourself to make it easier and easier and easier.
Whatever it is that you're avoiding being disciplined around, give it 90 hard days. Give it 90 consistent days of doing whatever it is that you already know you need to be doing to become the person you need to become to get to where you're trying to go. And just notice on the 90th day, How much more unconscious those actions are, how much less willpower it really takes to be disciplined around those activities Because they become so unconscious.
They may even become appealing to you. That's the value of being disciplined in the moment That's the value of saying this is what I'm going to commit to and I'm going to commit to it until it's unconscious Take some time to think deeply about where you're going. Take some time to think deeply about what you need to do to get there.
Weigh your level of [00:17:00] motivation versus your level of discipline, and then commit to that discipline for 90 days. I would love to hear what you've identified, what you're committed to, what you're going to be disciplined around, and I'd love to hear how your journey is going. Let me know, drop a comment, get in touch with me.
I truly appreciate you watching this episode and I look forward to talking next time.