Clarity vs Motivation - What Matters Most?

Clarity Radio with Gerry Kirk

My first episode! I'm excited to *finally* start sharing, to move out of my comfort zone and impact 1 million lives over the next 10 years. Like what you've heard? I'd love your encouragement to keep going. Just post a comment below and subscribe to my podcast to get weekly doses of clarity in your life! Transcript: [0:00]Hey everyone, Gerry Kirk here at the Minneapolis airport where it's snowing outside, just left Atlanta for probably the last time in quite a while. I've been doing some consulting down there now working at a company and really enjoying the work and the challenge and the fun of it all. Um, but yeah, this is my last day there at the office, so kind of setting some mixed feelings, excitement and in some, you know, sadness over things kind of coming to an end, but you know, it's off to a new adventure. And one thing that I was,reading earlier today, that really stuck with me, so I want to talk a little bit about, you know, how we can form better habits and how the difference between motivation and clarity. So I was reading about a study that was done, uh, around fitness. [01:09]So they had three groups of people trying to get more fit and there's was one that was just told to get more fit. That was the control group. There was another one where they were given a kind of a motivation. We're showing that the benefits I could produce different diseases and how you'd feel, feel better and have more energy and all of that, and in the last group they were instructed to write very specific actions that they were gonna take right there that they're going to work out x number of times per week, three times per week on these dates. I'm in this location. Well guess which group? A crushed it. Yeah, it was group three and that's been my experience as well and I had a lot of. The whole thing around clarity has been so fundamental to me in my work as of late, I've noticed that clarity is really the biggest barrier to moving forward. [02:11]It's the lack of clarity it causes, confusion, causes delay, lack of motivation sometimes. Lack of empowerment. Give you another example. I was working with someone who was swamped in meetings just for days, just full and full of meetings, like she just not getting to the stuff she wants to get to. She has way too much going on and so she decided working with me that she wanted to reduce her meeting time by five percent. Yeah, I don't know what that means either. So we worked on that a little bit, right. I'm trying to get, okay, well, you know, let's, let's actually pick a specific number of hours, right? How much time you took to free up to do some of this other work that you want to do. And um, so she decided on six hours, right. And she was going to do this other thing. [03:07]I was gonna eliminate the need for her to be in these bunch of meetings that was going to take about three or four hours. The first time to set up a lot faster after that. So we set up a specific experiment for that week where the goal was to save six hours of meetings and she would spend no more than four hours in the initial prep for it. And we measured that results and sure enough, she got the results, you know, much more than she would have. I'm just trying to do some, some vague thing. Immediately, she was more motivated. She had clarity of focus and purpose. You could see the tangible results, right? Um, so as you're moving forward and what you're trying to do, um, make sure you're working with intense and, and clarity, right? That would make a huge difference. [4:00]Even in relationships. Say you're coming home from work and you're tired, maybe you're a little grumpy. Who knows? And you don't want to be that for your, you know, your family. So just take a moment. I learned this from Brendon Burchard. You'll take a moment, pause, take a breath, and just for a minute, articulate in your mind how you want to be. When you walk in that door, you know what you're going to be