questions that sound something like "How do you stay motivated to be so

productive all the time? How do you not run out of motivation?" and initially when

I wanted to make this video titled "motivation vs. self-discipline"

I was just basically going to say that you need to develop your self discipline

because motivation won't always be there for you, and that is like the most cliche

message ever, so thank goodness I didn't end up making the video that way, because

what happened was, the more I thought about it the more I realized that I

don't actually use that much self-discipline in my day-to-day life.

Sure, there are things that I do that require self-discipline, like not

checking notifications in the morning, eating healthily, or waking up early

every morning. But for every single one of those acts of willpower I can also

tell you how I've designed my life to make that better choice easier to make.

Before I go to bed I set my phone to Do Not Disturb so that I don't see any

notifications on my lock screen in the morning. I have a bunch of favorite

healthy recipes that I love to make and eat, and I have a morning routine that

actually kind of makes me want to get out of bed because I know that I can

enjoy some quiet time in the morning before I get into doing any kind of work.

So I realized that it's not just discipline and motivation, it's not one

or the other, there's a whole third layer to this question and that's what this

video is about, so in this video we're going to break down - what is motivation?

what is self-discipline? how do they work? and how do we design a life that

maximizes our motivation, and minimizes our need to rely on self-discipline? So

let's start with motivation. Feeling motivated is pretty amazing, I'm sure I

don't have to tell you that. That burst of energy that you get when you get a

new idea for a new project, or that feeling after you get a good night's

sleep and you just feel ready to take on the world.

Motivation combined with focused action can create some serious magic, so it's

definitely worth taking some time to learn and understand the patterns of

your own motivation. For example, I study languages in the morning because that's

when I consistently feel the most motivated to do it, and I work out in the afternoon

or evening because I do not feel motivated to do that in the morning at

all. So yeah, a lot of people on the internet wake up at the crack of dawn to

do morning workouts, but I know that this works for me, so I choose to do something

different. As you go through life, I encourage you to have almost the

attitude of a scientist. If you notice that you never feel motivated to clean

the house Sunday evening, this week maybe try doing it Saturday morning. Maybe you'll

just realize you were too tired on Sunday evenings and now you'll no longer

have to force yourself to clean. If you notice you dread going on runs,

maybe it's the activity you're not motivated about, and you can find a

different path to the same end goal, which is fitness, and maybe try a group

exercise class or something. Motivation, however, is also a very fleeting thing.

Oftentimes we have no idea why it comes and goes at certain times and sometimes

even our favorite activities suddenly become the last thing that we want to do,

so relying solely on motivation to power you through life is not the best idea.

Once that initial spark of energy fades, you'll give up on your good progress and

just end up feeling bad again because you gave up. So may I introduce you to

our good friend self-discipline. Self-discipline comes in when you are

lacking motivation. Self-discipline is not a very fun word because it generally

implies doing not fun things because you logically know that they are good for

you. I think a better, more empowering way to think of self-discipline is as a tool

that will help you get to your goals and get you to your dream life, so try to

really pay attention to how you feel after practicing self-discipline. For

example, after a workout that maybe you really didn't feel like doing, how

amazing does it feel to be riding that endorphin high afterwards, feeling really

proud of yourself? Maybe even write that down so that then in the future you can

call on that feeling and think about how that simple act of self-discipline will

make you feel really good in the near or far future. Another tip for exercising

self-discipline is to give yourself as little time to negotiate with yourself

as possible. A great summary of this is the five-second rule by Mel Robbins. In

her book, The Five-Second Rule, she explains - "The moment you have an instinct

to act on a goal you must five-four-three-two-one and physically

move or your brain will stop you." That's what it takes to get what you want.

Not big scary beeps once a year, it takes small but irritating moves every single

day. But as much as self-discipline can make you accomplish some pretty amazing

things, we also can't rely a hundred percent on self-discipline. I think this

is very similar to decision fatigue - the deteriorating quality of decisions made

by an individual after a long session of decision-making. So similarly, with

practicing self-discipline, if you're going through your day making good

choices over and over, but really having to like force yourself to do every

single one of those things, you're probably gonna end the day feeling a

little bit drained. So if motivation doesn't do the trick

and neither does self-discipline, what do we do, Beatrice? I'm glad you asked. I

think a good term for it is "life design". The key to living a life where you're

motivated as often as possible and have to rely on your self-discipline as

rarely as possible, is designing your surroundings, your environment, your

schedule, etc, so that making the good decisions is as easy as possible. I think

the best way to demonstrate this is with a few examples of common goals that

people have, so first off, healthy eating. So I don't mind eating healthy because I

absolutely love the food that I eat, and I don't talk about that often because I

don't want people to be like okay we get it, Beatrice, you like eating

vegetables, wow you're sooooo healthy *rolls eyes* But I just think the mindset that

healthy food has to be less delicious is so harmful. Rather than just accepting

that changing our eating habits means exercising our self-discipline and

crying over a dry bowl of salad every day for the rest of our lives, how can we

instead design a life where healthy eating is not just easy, but, dare I say

it, enjoyable? For one, you can find recipes that are delicious to you, they

definitely exist. There are healthy dishes that I don't enjoy eating,

anything with celery, for example, so I just don't eat that and there are a gajillion

other foods that are healthy that I love. We can also work on changing

our eating preferences through what I like to call an "initial

investment of self-discipline". I did the Whole30 eating challenge back in

February, and yes, it did take some self-discipline to complete, but I feel

like now I'm reaping the rewards of it, because I used to be someone who loved

any breakfast that was sweet and grain-based, but now I actually wake up

every morning craving eggs with vegetables and avocado on toast.

I couldn't have toast on the Whole30, but whatever, but the point is

that because I used some self-discipline initially to get myself to like the food,

I now just feel motivated to eat that kind of food. Another thing we can do is

remove temptations by not buying unhealthy treats at the store. When I was

doing the Whole30 the only time that I ever craved non-compliant food

was if it was literally right in front of me, so if we didn't have cookies at

home, I didn't crave cookies, and so I didn't have to exercise the

self-discipline to resist the pull of cookies, because they just weren't there.

Another goal people often set is to exercise more. Instead of dreading every

single time that we put sneakers on, how can we instead design our life so that

we enjoy exercise more? So first of all, find workouts that you like. If you don't

like yoga or weightlifting, try biking, or hiking, or rock wall climbing, or Zumba, or

kickboxing, or learning kpop dances. And again, just like with eating, we can

train ourselves to change our workout preferences. So I used to hate running. I

would dread every single time that we had to run the mile in gym class, and so I

decided to do the logical thing for someone who hates running, which is to

train to run a 5k. I did the Couch to 5k program, on many days it sucked, but I

finished it. It really built up my running stamina and

eventually I found that once I actually got to a point where I could do some running

without feeling like I was dying, I kind of started to see why people enjoyed

running, and so now I'm not like, a "runner" I wouldn't say, but I've included it as

part of my exercise repertoire, it's something that I genuinely enjoy

sometimes... sometimes. Maybe you're someone who would benefit from a group exercise

format, so I love kickboxing classes first of all because there's so many

people, the music's loud and there's a lot of energy, but also because I'm

motivated to hang in there simply because I don't want anyone to see me

leaving, so then that gives me energy to finish the rest of the workout. And one

last example of applying life design to a goal is if your goal is to learn

something. First of all, pick something that you're genuinely interested in

learning, that's why I'm currently studying Korean ,why I read books about

self-improvement and not organic chemistry. And then create a schedule for

yourself. The thing about school is that it happens on a fixed schedule and class

starts whether or not you're feeling motivated for it,

so once you're out of school, or maybe you're still in school but there's

something else that you're passionate about and you want to learn about, you

have to create that structure for yourself. So for me that meant two hours

a day, first thing in the morning to study Korean, three hours a week for

reading, and lately I've been wanting to get better and more thoughtful about my

social media posting, so I also blocked out two hours, two chunks of time, for

taking a Skillshare course about social media. Skillshare is an online learning

community with thousands of classes on everything from illustration and graphic

design to entrepreneurship to marketing, so when you're applying life design to

learning, you don't just want to sit around waiting for the motivation to

strike, but you also don't want to force yourself at the end of a long day when

you're tired and have no energy to go learn, because that'll just make you

dislike learning. So what you can do is you can design your life by creating a

schedule for learning. That way you make time for it when you know you're likely

to be motivated, you make a habit out of it, and you just don't have to think

about it as much, it almost happens automatically because

it's on your schedule. The nice thing with Skillshare classes is that it's

really structured and you can see exactly how long these lessons are. Each

class is a combination of video lessons and in-class projects, so then you can

literally go to your calendar and be like, okay, this class that I took is

called Social Media for the Creative Entrepreneur by Peggy Dean, this is 44

minutes long with ten lessons, so I'll do five lessons Tuesday, five lessons

Thursday, and use the remaining hour of each day to work on the projects and

apply what I learned to my own blogging. So for example on Tuesday I learned

about using hashtags, and previously on Instagram I would just copy over pretty

much the same hashtags every time, not really thinking much about it, but after

this lesson, I really paused to take the time to find some hashtags that were not

only really relevant to my content but also very specific with high engagement.

Learning through Skillshare is a really good way to keep learning and

discovering in a structured way because obviously we don't always have the

motivation to learn, but having this dedicated place to go to where the

entire lesson plan is already