Episode 22: Commitment Vs Motivation
Jun 13, 2021
When quitting porn, we often think we need discipline or commitment, as well as motivation. And a lot of people think these are actually the same things. But the truth is, motivation is not required. And if that sounds counterintuitive, you really need to listen in today.
Motivation doesn’t get you anywhere. Motivation doesn’t last, and truthfully, waiting on motivation will keep you from doing anything big, meaningful, or important with your life, and that includes quitting pornography. What you need is more commitment, and in this episode, I’m showing you how to cultivate the discipline and commitment required to change your pornography usage.
Join me on the podcast this week to discover the difference between commitment and motivation. I’m sharing my own story of cultivating more commitment and discipline in my life, and how you can apply this experience to reach your goal of overcoming pornography. This isn’t going to be easy, but it will be so worth it.
I’m running a live commitment workshop. So, if you’ve been struggling with the commitment required to overcome pornography, I invite you to come join us. It takes place on June 23, 2021 at 12pm MDT/2pm EDT and only costs $9 and you get to ask me any questions that you want. And there will even be a replay available if you can’t make it live.
I have amazing news. If you want to take the work I’m sharing on the podcast deeper, I’m running a masterclass called How to Quit Viewing Pornography Even if You’ve Tried in the Past is 100% free! All you have to do is sign up here and I will see you there.
What You'll Learn from this Episode:
- Why motivation is not as important as you think.
- The difference between discipline, commitment, and motivation.
- Why the work of quitting porn is difficult and tiring, and that’s okay.
- What the process of increasing your discipline and commitment looks like.
- How to cultivate the commitment necessary to quit porn despite the discomfort and difficulty.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
- Click here to sign up for my free mastermind called How to Quit Viewing Pornography Even if You’ve Tried in the Past!
- Winning by Tim Grover
Full Episode Transcript:
You are listening to the Overcome Pornography for Good podcast episode 22: Commitment Vs Motivation.
Welcome to the Overcome Pornography For Good podcast where we take a research-based, trauma informed and results focused approach to quitting porn. This approach has been revolutionary and changed thousands and thousands of lives. I’m your host, Sara Brewer.
Hey everyone. Welcome to the podcast this week. I'm so glad you're here. I'm so excited to dive into this topic of discipline versus motivation with you all today. Really quickly before we dive in, I want to let you know that I have a brand-new workshop that I'm going to be offering to all of you who are interested.
This workshop is a commitment workshop. So it’s for you if you have a hard time staying committed to your goal of quitting porn, if you don’t follow through with your commitments to yourself, if you have a hard time following through with what you say that you're going to do, or maybe you lose motivation easily. If you have a hard time with the commitment aspect of quitting porn—When I say commitment, I mean commitment to follow through and to really quit porn. Not relationship commitment stuff.
Although, this is a live workshop and Q&A. So you can come and ask me any questions that you want about commitment or porn related here in this workshop if you attend live. So you'll come, and we’ll do the work together. I will teach you and I will coach you. You'll leave with all of the tools that you need to stay committed to quitting pornography. We’re going to do the work together in this workshop. You're going to love it.
This is going to become a permanent part of my program Overcome Pornography for Good, but I did want to offer it to all of you, my audience who might not be members of this program, to come and join us for this live workshop. It’s $9. I don’t remember the exact date here, but it will be on the link to sign up just in a couple weeks. So the Monday that this podcast is released, it will be later that week.
So this is the only time I'm going to talk about it here on the podcast. It’s kind of just a quick on that we’re throwing out there and that we’re going to do together. So it’s $9. I don’t remember if I said that already. It’s $9. Yes, there will be a replay. So if you can't make it live, that’s okay. Come live though because the experience is just better for you, and you get to ask me any questions that you want. They're on the live workshop.
Okay. How to sign up? Go to sarabrewer.com/commitmentworkshop. All right. I’ll have them link that there in the notes. Sarabrewer.com/commitmentworkshop. No hyphens, no spaces. Commitment workshop. All right, we’ll see you there. That will be really fun.
So let’s dive into the topic today, which I wanted to connect to this commitment workshop that I'm doing. So I want to talk about commitment. Specifically, commitment versus motivation. A lot of times my clients, and I used to think this, that they were kind of the same thing. Commitment and motivation are just kind of the same thing, and you need motivation in order to quit porn.
Here's what I want to offer you today though. Motivation is not required. You don’t need to be motivated to quit porn. What motivation is, the difference between these two commitment and motivation. Motivation is, at least to me, it feels excited. It feels like I want to do this. When I think of running and being motivated to run, I think, “All right, let’s go run. Six miles. Woohoo. Let’s do this.”
Commitment is very different. Commitment is uncomfortable. Commitment is not excited. Commitment is not exciting. Commitment has this undertone of, “I don’t want to. I really don’t want to do this, but I'm going to do it anyways.”
All right. So back to running, commitment is aw. Maybe you start running or you get a mile in, or maybe even before your run you're like, “I do not want to do that. That does not sound fun to me, but I'm going to do it anyways because I told myself I would and because I'm practicing being committed.”
Here's the thing. Motivation is garbage. Motivation doesn’t work. It doesn’t get you anywhere. It doesn’t last. It’s not required. Waiting on motivation will keep you from doing anything big in your life or anything important or anything meaningful to you. Waiting on motivation will keep you from quitting pornography. If I waited on motivation to build my business, I would still just be making notes in my phone about podcast ideas that I wanted to do. Right?
Because in reality when it comes to it, I'm not very motivated all the time to sit here and to record these podcasts. Sometimes I go through a little bit of a battle in my head like, “Okay. Are we really going to do this today?” But I always, always do it because I'm very committed.
So the difference is I'm not, “Yay! Woohoo! Let’s do this podcast.” I mean sometimes I am. Sometimes I kind of have to do the thought work to get there. But it’s okay. I don’t need to be motivated. Motivated doesn’t get the job done. Motivation doesn’t make the difference. What makes the difference, what gets the job done, what helps people is commitment and being committed to it even though I don’t really want to do it all the time.
All right. So when my clients come to me and they say, “I need to be more motivated. Can you help me with my motivation?” I always tell them no you don’t. You do not need to be more motivated. You need to be more committed. You don’t have to be excited to do this work all the time. You don’t have to be really positive and excited about it all the time. You just need to be more committed.
That commitment is doing something that you don’t want to do because you really want the results of that thing. So even though you don’t want to do it in the moment, you really want the results. That’s what commitment is.
I have been listening to Tim Grover’s new book. It’s called Winners. So Tim Grover, he was the personal trainer and the mindset coach for a lot of the greats in the NBA world. So for Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. He also has worked with a lot of CEOs of massive companies. So he is just this mindset coach for all of these greats is what he calls them. The greats. He has worked very closely with people who have done amazing things in their life. He has been a mindset coach for them and helped them accomplish these things.
I was so fascinated. At the beginning of the book, he talks about what winning feels like. What it feels like to win. He did a little survey. He found out that average people, people that hadn’t accomplished these really hard things, described winning as amazing, accomplishment, incredible, spectacular, remarkable. You know winning feels all of these great things, amazing. But the greats—Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant—all these people who had won a lot of big wins in their life, they described winning as hard, exhausting, tiring, difficult.
Do you see the contrast there? That winning for these people isn’t amazing, incredible, spectacular. It’s exhausting. It’s tiring. It’s difficult. Because in reality, the truth is to accomplish these things, to accomplish big goals and great things like quitting porn, it requires feeling exhausted and tired and difficult and letting it be really hard.
So commitment. When we’re really committing to quitting porn, what we’re committing to do is to feel bad and to feel uncomfortable and show up for yourself anyways. Okay? This is just like working out. I've had a goal to work out six times a week. I mostly did it because I was prepping for this commitment workshop. I just wanted to practice some more discipline in my life. Here's what happened.
This is what happens. A lot of the time I don’t want to do it. A lot of the time it doesn’t sound fun, or I'm not motivated to do it. And I go and do it anyways. So this last Tuesday, Tuesday night is the day that I usually work nights. I have coaching calls at nights for my clients who need night calls. It was Tuesday night. I’d finished my calls. Then I had a temple recommend that I went to.
I hadn’t worked out that morning like I planned to because the baby had been up, and our alarm went off on our house. We had a house alarm. It woke us up in the middle of the night. We were up for a couple hours. It didn’t end up happening that morning. My commitment was I'm going to work out today. So at 9:00 p.m. when I was exhausted and I’d been up all night and I’d been coaching all night and I had my temple recommend interview, I went, and I did it anyways.
It wasn’t a huge long four-hour workout or anything crazy, but it was my commitment. My commitment to go and run for half an hour. I kept that to myself even though I didn’t want to. Even though it didn’t feel exciting. Even though it felt bad. That’s what commitment is, and that’s what's required in order to really reach your goals.
So when it comes to quitting pornography, you're going to have a lot of thoughts like, “I don’t want to. I really want that porn right now. I know I said I wasn’t going to do it, but just one more time. I don’t want to follow through with myself right now.” That’s going to come up a lot. That’s okay. That’s okay. That’s not a problem.
This is what I mean when I'm talking about commitment. I'm really just trying to convey this idea that not wanting to do it isn’t a problem. That’s okay. You don’t have to want to, and let’s do it anyways you might really, really want to look at that porn. You're thinking, “Oh but I really want to.” That’s okay. We committed not to. We’re not going to do it anyways.
Okay. So when you're having these thoughts like, “I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t want to.” I want you to never make the decision to give up on your commitment in that moment when you're feeling the urge to quit. Let me say it a little bit differently. If you're having these thoughts, “I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t want to.” That’s okay.
Tell yourself, “That’s fine. We don’t have to, but we’re not making the decision when I'm having this urge to go and look at it. I’ll make the decision when I'm in a better place, and I'm not having all these urges. And I can use my higher brain instead of just giving into my lower brain that wants this dopamine hit.”
Commitment is this firmness. I love that word firmness. Firm mind. When I think of a firm mind, I think of a committed mind. Where we’re not changing our mind when we’re uncomfortable. Okay. If we’re going to change our mind, if we’re going to change our commitment, we’re not going to do it in the midst of the discomfort. So, for example, working out. If I'm not going to work out that day, I'm going to make that commitment before the day. Not when I'm sitting there thinking, “I really don’t want to. I really don’t want to. I really don’t want to.”
Another thing about commitment. I want you to learn to take your commitments very, very seriously to yourself. This has been a game changer to me. When I would make commitments to myself and I would try to do too much, I would commit to too many things. I would never follow through with them.
Think about commitments that you make to people that are important to you in your life. Maybe to your boss. Do you keep commitments to your boss? Do you come into work when you say you're going to come? Or your family or your friends. When you say you're going to show up for them, do you show up? Yeah, probably. You probably are much better at keeping commitments to your family or friends, to your boss, to other people than you are at keeping commitments to yourself.
Okay. If that’s you, and I know it was me for a long time, what you need to do is you need to work on this relationship with yourself and take these commitments very, very seriously. So whenever I commit something to myself, I really look at it and I ask myself how likely am I to keep this commitment? If it’s not over 85/90%, I don’t make the commitment. Because it’s more important for me to do what I say I'm going to do to myself than it is for me to try to make a bunch of commitments and try to do too much.
This is why I have the milestone system set up in my program. This is the most important things that you need to do to quit pornography, and the program is there to help you learn how to do all of those things. I tell my clients to only choose one or two of those to focus on, to laser in on. And to only commit to one or two of those. Then you can do the rest of them if you want to and supplement with them, but just one at a time. Then move on after you finish that one. Move on after you finish that one.
Okay so if you have a hard time keeping commitments to yourself, make sure that you take your commitments very seriously. When I was trying to make this decision to work out six times a week, it took me quite a while to actually make this decision. I've been thinking about it, jeez, I think since March, and it’s June now. I went and got coached on it a lot because I wasn’t totally committed, and I wasn’t going to say that I was going to do it. I wouldn’t let myself commit to it until I was all in.
I once heard someone say, I think it might have been Jody Moore or maybe it was Brooke Castillo. She said, “We overestimate what we can do in the short term, and we underestimate what we can do in the long term.” Right? How true is that? So many of us overestimate what we can do in a couple months. We say, “Okay. These next three months I'm going to totally change my life. I'm going to eat different. I'm going to change my diet. I'm going to work out every day. I'm going to quit porn. I'm going to do all these things.” That’s very overestimated.
What I want you to do is I want you just to choose one to laser focus on. I always only have one big goal, and everything else is bonus. Okay. We overestimate what we can do in the short term, and we underestimate what we can do in the long term.
So when you think long term, what is your view of yourself? It’s probably underestimated. You can probably do so much more than you think you can. But in order to get there, we have to be really good at keeping commitments to ourself, which means choosing just one at a time. So make your commitments small and doable. Okay? I'm really going to dive into this in the workshop next week. Specific things that we can do that are small and doable.
All right you guys. So, again, the difference between commitment and motivation is motivation feels good, and it’s exciting. Commitment is I’m uncomfortable, and I'm doing it anyways. Motivation doesn’t work. It’s not a long-term solution. Commitment is. It is much easier to keep your commitments if they’re small, doable, and if you just have one at a time. Okay?
Make sure to take your commitments very seriously to yourself, and understand that as soon as you commit something, you're not going to want to do it. That’s okay. The real work of commitment and the real work of accomplishing goals isn’t in that moment when you decide to do it. The real work is when you don’t want to. When you're sitting there and you're having urges and you're like, “I told myself I was going to process through these urges and not look at porn, but I don’t want to.” That’s when commitment comes in.
That’s when the real work is done. You breathe into it, “I don’t want to, and that’s okay. This is uncomfortable, and that’s okay. I already committed to myself to process these urges today, and I'm going to keep that commitment. I can make the decision to do something different when I'm in a better place. When I can use my prefrontal cortex, my higher brain, instead of just listening to that urge.”
All right. Again, come sign up for this commitment workshop. It’s going to be great. We’re going to dive into what specifically to commit to, how to build your relationship with yourself, how to overcome limiting beliefs that keep you from being committed. We’re going to create a compelling reason that will help you stay committed even in the midst of all the discomfort. You're going to lead with all of the tools to be able to stay committed to your goal of quitting pornography. All right, sarabrewer.com/commitmentworkshop. Hope to see you there, and we’ll talk to you next week. Bye, bye.
If you’re ready to apply what you’re hearing in this podcast and finally overcome pornography for good, I’d love to be your coach. I’ve created a virtual program with the intent to give you everything that you need to quit. Once you join, you have lifetime access to the content and lifetime access to individual support through coaching calls and coaching boards. For more information check out sarabrewer.com/workwithme.
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