#2: Building Consistency and Self-Motivation to be More Organized

We've all experienced those moments when things get messy – whether it's our living space, workplace, or a trail of unfinished projects. Feeling lost and unmotivated in such situations is common, and the idea of developing consistency can seem daunting. In today's episode, you will explore strategies for finding motivation and gaining a deeper understanding of consistency and motivation.

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Credits: 

Song: Green Lights
Performed By: DLP
Written by: Daniel Labate (BMI 100%)
Published by: Boss Soundstripe Productions (BMI 100%)

Song (Trailer): Epic Hybrid Trailer Music
Performed by: by 2CoolFire
Licensed by: Envato Market

Cover Photo: Angela Clifton Photography
Hair and Make-up: Casey J. Cheek

Transcript

Welcome to The Neat Lifestyle Podcast. My name is Katia Mesquita. I'm a personal organization expert, an online business entrepreneur, and your host on this weekly variety show. I'm excited to bring you an extra dose of inspiration to become more organized, stay organized, and make things work better for you. My goal in this podcast is to help you achieve a more functional, harmonious, and meaningful life. I can't wait to connect with you today. Thank you so much for tuning in, and now let's begin. Hello and welcome to episode number two of the Neat Lifestyle Podcast. Thank you so much for being here with me once again. I'm your host, Katia Mesquita, and today we are going to talk about building consistency and self-motivation to be more organized. When disorganization is being experienced in a way that starts affecting different areas of your life, preventing you from accomplishing something significant or from functioning well,

it is very common to feel lost or overwhelmed or not knowing where to get started to fix it and how to be more motivated to overcome the situation. Developing consistency in taking actions to be organized may also seem a little bit challenging, but how to find motivation and how to develop consistency? Let's start by defining them. I was taking a look at some definitions. Motivation can be defined as: "the reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way." This definition is more related to the reason why the stimulus. Another definition is: "the general desire or willingness of someone to do something." This definition is more related to the drive, the ambition, to do something. Diving a little bit deeper, Edward L. Deci, a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, divides motivation into two different types. One is self-motivation. It is that kind of motivation that comes from within, and it is also called intrinsic motivation.

And the other one is the external motivation, which comes from exterior sources and is also known as extrinsic motivation. According to him, "the self-motivation is powerful, is at the heart of creativity, responsibility, healthy behavior, and lasting change." It is related to human freedom, self-regulation, self-determination, improved problem solving, but still according to him, "people cannot effectively motivate others. People can create the conditions that help people to motivate themselves." The external motivation, on the other hand, is related to control or pressure, some kind of authoritarian solution for compliance. In this case, the person is motivated to comply, to avoid punishment or even to get rewards. It's usually not effective because it might lead to defiance or temporary change or no change at all in a person, since it doesn't reflect their autonomy or their authenticity. When it comes to external motivation based on rewards, studies have demonstrated that instead of increasing motivation, it can actually do the opposite because it is limited as the behavior usually lasts only as long as the rewards keep coming.

So the helpful kind of motivation here is the self-motivation, but to become more organized and have more significant achievements in our lives, we must develop consistent new habits, new patterns, new thoughts, new behaviors. Consistency has different meanings and it depends on the context, but in the context of our discussion here, it refers to the quality of being uniform to our actions over time to do what needs to be done to achieve a goal no matter what. Of course, as long as it's legal and moral, but do whatever it takes, working our schedule around to make sure it happens and consistency is a quality we can improve on. With that in mind, before I expand a little bit more, let me just make a little bit of a disclaimer here. What I'm discussing are reflections and opinions based on books and personal experiences and should not be taken as an advice whatsoever.

I'm not a psychologist, so if you know or if you suspect that you have some kind of psychological or health problem, you should consult your doctor or another trained health or mental health professional. Extreme cases of certain types of mess, such as hoarding disorder, must be handled by a mental health professional. Okay, with that said, let's keep going. When we find ourselves in a problem related to disorganization, the first thing we do is an assessment to check the extent of the problem. The visible result of the disorganization usually can be easily solved by hiring a professional. Of course, for some of the people, they can just do themselves, but hiring a professional is going to work only on the surface level, not on the symptom. The invisible part of the mess resides within the person who created the disorganization. What can help you to solve the problem at its core level is improvement of your personal growth, which may include a change of habits that generates disorganization in the first place, a shift of perspectives and a level of thinking. About level of thinking, there is a very interesting point of view from Albert Einstein. He says, "we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

In other words, according to him, we somehow created our problems, or at least we put ourselves in a position to allow the problems to happen. Or even if someone caused us a problem, it would be because we allowed it to happen or we didn't take the steps to avoid it. And when we created that problem, it happened because of the level of thinking that we had at that moment. So, to solve the problem, we would need to think in a higher level, a different level than what we had before. The level of problem-solving. So considering this view, that, for me, is kind of reasonable, I don't agree with Einstein in everything, okay?

I love his theory of relativity, I have been studying it a lot to include in my program of organizing time because he has a brilliant relativity theory about time, but anyway, we disagree about clutter, about mess, but I'm not going to enter deep into that because there is a whole bunch of quotes that are attributed to him that I never seen in any of his books that I have been read so far, so I have no idea where those quotes about clutter come from. So, bringing his theory to the problem-solving of mess, and I'm not talking about the creative mess supported by Albert Einstein, which I agree in part, as long as the creative mess doesn't take the whole house, just a room for that.

When we find ourselves in a problem related to this organization at the point that it affects our lives and prevent us from functioning well, if applied this theory of elevating our thinking to a higher level in which we can solve the problem, we are going to see that the way out is through personal development. And here are the top 10 tips to bring thinking to a higher level of personal development. First of all, feeling that you are worthy of a better life. Nobody's perfect, and we all make mistakes, but we gotta move on and learn from our mistakes. Second one, taking full responsibility from the problem, not blaming others, not blaming our parents. Remember that our parents had their parents and they may have had to deal with some problems or limitations. Number three, finding the big why, a compelling reason to solve the problem.

What lights you up? What drives you to be open to change some habits? Number four, searching for help. It could be a professional help. It could be searching for books, authors in personal growth. It could be like your friends or family members, but search for help. Number five, facing the situation and looking at it from different angles, allowing yourself to consider that there is a solution and you just need to be able to see it. Number six, make a decision about what to change. Indecision is the key for failure. You may need a little bit of time for thinking, for some researching, but make a decision. Number seven, commit to that decision. You are committing to the result, you are committing to what you want. Number eight, taking outcome-oriented actions, actions that can effectively solve the problem. A lot of people are busy, busy, busy, busy all the time, and not having anything significant accomplished. Regarding discipline,

I heard from one of my mentors about an interview with an athlete in which the question in the interview was, "what's the biggest lie you have ever been told?" And her answer, interestingly, was the lie that discipline limits your freedom. And it's the opposite. The more disciplined you become, the more freedom you experience. So, mastery requires discipline. We also see a lot of discipline in some martial arts as well, and discipline is what helps us avoid falling into the same problem again. Now, regarding motivation, some authors promote the idea that we should stop searching for motivation and we should just focus on building consistency. I kind of get it, and they just fight that with the argument that motivation comes and goes. But one thing is that they don't differ between the types of motivation, and despite being fleeting, I believe that self-motivation, when present, should not be ignored or disregarded as it can still help make the pursuit of our goals more pleasant.

I have been using self-motivation for over five years, and it transformed my life. I have been searching and reading books about motivation and seminars with speakers that somehow helped me with motivation. The main problem related to self-motivation is that frequently people wait to feel motivated to start taking action, and it's backward. It's a backward approach. So, by taking action, actually, we find more self-motivation. It increases our self-motivation because we start to see, but of course, I'm talking about the right actions, we start to see the results and our goal starting to build up, and studies have also shown that improving consistency also increases self-motivation. So, okay, they work together very well. I don't need to disregard self-motivation. Of course, after you solve the problem, you are going to create new habits to avoid getting to the same situation again. And then consistency with new habits is going to be crucial.

And here are some tips to help stimulating self-motivation for those who want, for those who value self-motivation. Number one: if you don't have yet, create a vision for the future you want to build. Number two: set goals that will lead toward your vision. You can have, of course, the things that you have to do, your daily tasks, but include at least one, your one thing that will lead you to your goal, to your vision. Number three: break them into smaller and manageable goals. Annual goal, monthly goal, weekly goal, daily goal. Number four: focus on the big why. Number five: surround yourself with positive influences, whether it's supportive, friends, family, books, music, podcasts, inspiring quotes, whatever. Surround yourself with good influences for you. Number six: celebrate even the smaller achievements.

Number seven: take consistent actions toward your goals. I'm repeating this here because taking action toward our goals also motivate us, so it's good. Number eight: have the one thing you can do to make progress in your project. Number nine: create more time for yourself. Manage your time. Number ten: honor your time to rest. Lastly, building consistency. Here are some tips to develop consistency. Number one: start small. Instead of trying to make big changes all at once, start with small, manageable habits that you can sustain over time. Number two: honor your goals and make them happen no matter what. Number three: create a routine. Establish a daily routine that includes time for the habits you want to develop. You can start by making reminders, and once they start to stick, become a habit, you can start doing them on autopilot. You don't even, you know. Number four: keep pushing forward.

Your success is inevitable. Thanks again for listening to this episode. Remember, when it comes to personal organization, which is also a part of personal development, organizing your time is what it's going to allow. You set a starting point for everything you want to transform in your life. You are going to make time to make it possible, to make it happen, and it also gives you the opportunity to experience more time to do what matters the most to you. I want to invite you to my Free Life Training on Time organization. It's coming up pretty soon, and I can't wait to meet you there. I will leave the link in the show notes. I also want to get to know you a little bit, so let me know where you are listening to this episode and what helps you with self-motivation. So send me a DM on Instagram. I would love to know, and if you received some value, I would appreciate if you left a review on Apple Podcast or whatever platform you like. It really helps to get the podcast out to more people. I'm Katia Mesquita, and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye!

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. If you liked what you heard today, be sure to share it with those you care about so they can also benefit from it. If you aren't already following me on social media, do so by clicking on the link on the show notes or simply by visiting my website at neatlifestyle.com. I appreciate you so much. I hope you have an amazing day. I'll see you in the next episode of The Neat Lifestyle Podcast.