Episode 113: How to Find the Motivation to Keep Going

In this weeks episode, Marvette talks about how you can keep your motivation and not get overwhelmed while finishing your dissertation. Dr. Lacy also goes over the importance of resting and taking a break in order to keep your motivation up.

Follow along on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marvettelacy/

TRANSCRIPT:

Hey friends. The time has come to finish your dissertation graduate and become doctor. Welcome to office hours with Dr. Lacey, where we talk about how to finally master this time management thing. So you can stay on top of it without losing your mind. Every Wednesday, you can find a new episode wherever you listen to podcasts. Make sure you hit the subscribe button to make sure you never miss an episode. I'm Dr. Marvette Lacy, your dissertation writing strategists here to be with you along every step of the way. I would like to thank you for coming to today's office hours. Let's get started on today's episode. Hey scolars, what are your plans for the summer? How are you going to get your writing goals accomplish? I know you because if you're like me, which you probably are because you listen to this, then I know you have all of the plans to do all the writing over the summer.

But let me ask you a question. How has that worked out for you in the past? Have you just said, Oh, I just need a break and you're just going to take the rest of May off. And then before you know it, you know, it it's back in July and it's time for the semester to start all over again. Or have you spent your whole summer working, working, and you looked up and you didn't do anything. You have no fun. I want to show you how you can have your hot girl summer and make progress on your dissertation. We will be doing an special challenge inside of the finish your dissertation program for the summer. All about protecting your peace, drinking your water and minding your business and making consistent progress in the dissertation. You want to sign up. You don't want to miss out, come on over to qual scholars.com and sign up.

It's only 197 a month. You can cancel at any time, but I promise you, you won't want to cancel. So let us be your sign and come join us. And I will see you inside the program. Okay. Let's get back to this episode. Hello. Welcome back to a new week of the podcast, how y'all doing, how your mom and them doing. Y'all listen. So I recorded this week's episode and next week episode yesterday, and I was so proud of myself for working in a head of schedule only to find out that my mic was not on and you cannot hear anything, but that's the way it goes, right? And so life happens and you just got to adjust. So I'm going to re-record this and I think it's going to be better because yesterday I was in like a post, vaccination shot, coma type situation.

I got my second shot yesterday and it wore me out. So I'm just going to take it as, this is a good sign. We're going to do this all over again. We got this. So for today, I'm not going to shout out just one client. I want to shout out all the clients in the collective, all the clients who are in the membership, we made it to May. We made it. And everyone has been putting in so much effort, putting in hard work to achieve their goals, whether that's finishing their dissertation, building businesses and people just, it has blown my mind. Not only are people defending and killing it and making money easily, but I am even more proud of how people have changed their lives, how they have developed a relationship with themselves, how they practice self care, not in this like a capitalistic way, but in a way that is a meaningful for them.

And they just, their lives have changed. Like you can just follow any one of them on social media and just see them out here, just living their best life. And I don't want to give this message like everything is perfect and you don't ever have a problem. The most important thing though, that comes from the work that we do together is that they know that they have their own backs. They know that if anything comes up, they can figure out what their next best step is. And that is the most powerful thing of all. No one can take that from you and having such strong beliefs that no matter what happens in life, I can figure it out. I know how to take care of myself is just huge. And so I just want to say thank you to all the amazing members of the collective.

And I am so grateful for. Y'all trusting me to be just a little small part of your journey and helping. And just as much as you think I've helped you, you have helped me as well. And if you are not in the collective, like, what are you doing? Why are you not in there? W why you're missing now, you need to come join us 197 a month. Cancel anytime. There's no like restrictions I have, but I will tell you once you're in, you're not going to want to leave. You're going to love this community so much. You're going to see how much your life changes over such a small period of time that you will not want to leave. You will not. And so I invite you, come on over www.qual scholars, Qualscholars.com. Let's sign up and do this thing.

And we have two things that are coming up, but I promise you, you won't want to miss the first one we're doing a summer of self-love series. This series is all about falling so deep in love with yourself that you have the most amazing summer of all, I'm doing this in collaboration with my friend, client, Dr. Shaquinta Richardson. And if you know her, she, you know, she's all about self love and taking of yourself. So we're teaming up for this series is 12 weeks, and we're going to be covering things like how to stop hustling and get more time for yourself, right? How to have better relationships in your life, and actually be able to establish boundaries and reinforce them without feeling the guilt and the shame. How do you look and feel good from the inside out? And so, so much more. I promise you, you won't want to miss it.

And so if you're in the membership, you already get access to this. If you're not, you need to get in. And we start Tuesday, May 25th, and I would hate for you to miss out. And then the second opportunity is for those of you who are working on your dissertation, and you want to make this summer count, we are doing a guided challenge for the summer, for those of the clients working on their dissertation and make sure that you can make the most of the summer hit some milestones without burning yourself out. So if any of those sounds good, you need to come over to qualscholars.com and sign up because we will be getting started. Okay. So as you know, or you may know, we have a thing every month in the collective, we have a thing throughout all of our calls that we focus on for the month.

And for May, it's all about celebration. And the title of this theme is celebrate that shit. That is what we're doing for May, right? Because I know you, and I know the folks in the collective y'all have some big goals. Y'all want to change the world, right? You want to do it with your research. You want to do it with your business. You want to do it just live in your regular schmegular life. Right. But I also know that in the back of your mind, you question, if you can really do it, like, can I really do this? Is this really possible for someone like me thinking about where I come from and how people live their lives? Can I really do something different? The short answer is absolutely. And how you do that is you got to start with what, you know, start where you are.

What do you know, what can you take? Like, what steps can you just take next? Right. What happens to us is that we get caught up in the planning, right? And like making sure that the goal is just right and making sure that the plan is just right. And we have to know steps one through ten before we can take this first step. But here's the thing. What the greats will tell you is that you have no idea what the journey is going to look like from step one to ten. All you can do all you can focus on. All you can have control over is how do you take that first step? And then how do you identify the next step? Cause like the good MLK said, you have to take the first step and the second one will appear. You don't get to know what the whole journey will be like, yes, we can plan and we can make goals, but those are intentions.

Right? And example, I like to use is you're getting in a car and you're going to go to this store that you've never been to before. And so you pull up the GPS app and you put the address in there, right? And the GPS app will give you some options for the different routes that you can take. And if you're like me, you just pick the fastest one. Right? And so when you select your route, it'll give you an overview of what that trip would be like, turn by turn directions. But here's the thing. As you get into the car and you start driving, you have no idea what you're going to run into. Right? There could be construction. There could be car accidents. Police got, somebody pulled over on the side. Some road is blocked off or the road doesn't exist anymore. And that the GPS dot, and as you get to that point, the GPS just simply reroutes you so that you still make it to your end destination.

Right? You don't put the address to the store, your GPS and think like, am I going to get there? Am I starting to get there? No, you just trusted the GPS got you. And you trust that if something comes up like an accident or a road is closed, that the GPS will reroute you and give you your next best option. Or if you're driving along and maybe there's nothing happening. But then all of a sudden the GPS is like, I can save you 60 seconds. Would you like to do take it right? You probably wouldn't have seen that coming. When you first started out on this road, trip to the store, but you adjust and you either say yes or no, I want to take this new route. And you keep going the same is true. When we think about our goals, right? When we think about our plan of actions, our goals, and our initial plan of action is just us putting the address in the GPS and us getting an overview of the trip before we start driving.

But then life is going to happen. Sometimes there's going to come up. Something's not going to go to plan. Something's going to come up that you did not consider or even know to consider. And you're going to have to adjust. And what happens is we get stuck before we even take step one, trying our best to come up with all the possible ways that things could fail or not go to plan. And you can do that. And there is some benefit to that. However, most likely you're wasting a lot of like a great deal of time and effort, trying to think of this whole planning, your hit, trying to figure out what steps. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. It's going to look like before you take step one, but the only way, right? Get to step ten is that you're just going to have to take step one.

You're just going to have to take step one. There is no having certainty before you take step one that is not life. And that is not what the journey is meant for. Take step one, see what Information you get and then go to step two. And you keep repeating that process all the way until you get to step ten. Here's an example, right? Think about when you first started your doctoral journey or your consultant journey, right? Remember the fire that you had, right. Remember how you were so excited and you had all these plans and you were going to do this and you were going to be this way and you were thinking about it in your head. Right? But think about where you are now, could you have, before you started this journey, cause you have like guessed that life would turn out this way.

Like everything that you've been through, how your classes went, your relationship with your advisor, the number of clients you have, could you have guessed that it would turn out the way that it has right now? No, but you still took the first steps to get to where you are right now. That is what I'm asking you to do when you think about just goes overall. But what I like knowing you, knowing what I've done, what we ended up doing along our journey is we're so focused to getting to step ten and like, Oh, it's going to be so great. And I'm going to celebrate that while we're doing the journey from one to ten, we start to question every decision that we made, we start to keep a record of all the ways that we have failed. All those things that we didn't do, all the ways that we didn't show up perfectly.

And we start to discount our progress. We are like, I mean, I know I'm on step four, but like, it really doesn't count because I forgot to do these things or I didn't really do it that way. Or I was really lazy. Right? Whatever story we're telling ourselves, we, whether consciously or unconsciously start to keep a record of all the ways that we have failed along the journey, right? Maybe you have no books filled of all this evidence of how you're not doing it the right way, right? You're not becoming doctor the right way. You're not owning your business the right way. And because you're not doing it, the quote unquote right way, you think it's not, it's not possible for me to get to step ten. It's going to be impossible. Cause I'm a failure. But here's what I want you to consider. A question I want you to consider is what if that list of evidence that you have compiled of you that quote unquote, doing it the right way.

That list of failures were not things that were happening to you, but things that are happening for you, I will say it again. What if those lists of failures were not things happening to you, but things happening for you. And you may think that this is just semantics. Like, okay, this is Lulu, blah, blah. It is important because when you're in a place of thinking it all, Oh, woe is me? All these things are happening to me. You put yourself in a mode of a victim as someone who is powerless, like as someone who has no control over their life or lives or like the outcome of their goals. But when you think this is happening for me, you put yourself more in the driver's seat, more as someone who has power, someone who can take responsibility for how they've been showing up in the decisions that they've made.

And you know that you can always make different decisions. You can always pivot. You can always make a different action. And when you even think about the list of evidence that you have, or the list of failures, what if those failures were not failures at all, but just like neutral things that just happen and that they need it to happen. Like the journey is happening exactly the way it needs to in order for you to get to step ten, right? Because you had an idea, right? Going back to this analogy with the GPS, you put the address in and it gave you an overview. And so you had an expectation that your trip was going to go exactly the way it was outlined when you, before you started driving. But then as we're driving in, the construction happens and the police happen or whatever, but you had to do some pivots, but you don't make it mean that you're a failure at driving.

You don't make it mean that your car is a piece of shit because your, a route had to change. No, you just simply go to the new route and you get to your end destination. Your goals are the same way. Those lists of failures that you have are the same way to me, failures. It's just like that list is just evidence that you've taken action. That you've made decision towards your goal, that the evidence is neither good or bad, but just prove that you've been putting in the work. And that, that list of things that going away, that you thought could be reframed as just information of how I get one step closer to becoming a doctor or a six figure consultant or whatever your goal is. And what I would encourage you to do is to adopt the mindset that you want to fail on purpose.

Yes. Fail on purpose again. What does it mean to fail? Failure just means that things didn't go according to how you expected them to go. That is it, it doesn't mean anything about you as a person. It doesn't mean anything about your words. It doesn't mean anything about your ability. It just simply means like you tried something or you thought something was going to go one way and it went a completely different way. And now you have information about, okay, well that worked, that didn't work. What can I do next? And thank you, take your next step. And you look at it as not any indictment on you, but like, okay, look at me. I'm taking action. And so what if you decided to fail on purpose? Like what have you decided to intentionally go after a goal that you knew was impossible to achieve, right?

Maybe in the back of your mind, you think it's impossible to be. Doctor is impossible to have a six-figure business, but I'm going to go after it anyway. And I'm gonna fail my way all the way to the end, right? Even if you think right now, there's no way possible for you to accomplish this goal like that. You're going to adopt this mindset of fell in on purpose. I promise you, you will get to the end of that goal. You will get to step ten, right? Because you would be willing to move forward. Anyway, knowing that whatever happens, you will get the information you need and the next step will appear. And because you're not making failure, meaning anything about you, anything about your ability, anything about your words, you're more willing to take responsibility and move forward any way, right? You're not going to get stuck in this place of trying to figure out the perfect plan or try to figure out what certainty is or I'm making sure you feel confident before you take the first step.

You know, you're going to feel the fear. You're gonna feel the uncertainty. You're gonna feel the doubt. And you're still just going to keep moving forward because that time and that energy that you would've wasted on trying to get certain, to make this plan, you can use to getting you close that one step closer to step ten. Now, why am I spending all of the time on this? What does this have to do with celebration? It has everything to do with celebration because for this month inside of the collective, what we are going to be doing is we are going to fail on purpose and we're going to track all the ways that we failed. And then we're going to celebrate each and every failure. Remember, failure is just, you expected something to go one way and it went a different way. That's it? But it's also evidence that you've been taking action.

That is how you learn to love the journey. You love to learn a journey by saying, okay, here's some things I'm going to try. Some of it's going to work. Some of it's going to need to be tweaked. Some of it is just flat out and going to be for me, but I'm a learn it. I'm going to get that information and I'm going to celebrate each. And every step I took, I'm going to celebrate eac and every action that I tracked, I don't care how small or large it is. I am going to celebrate it. I'm going to look on purpose. I'm going to fail on purpose. I'm going to track it. And I'm going to celebrate it because your efforts deserve to be celebrated. Your progress deserves to be celebrated because many of you think that celebration should be something that just comes naturally.

But celebration has to happen on purpose. It has to be intentional, right? When you get to the finish line, when you get to step ten, and if you're a step ten, it's like you got your first three pay clients, or you finished that proposal. You think that, Oh, if I just grin and bear it and get to the end, I, then I can celebrate. Then I can be joyful. Well, what will happen is you will get to the end. You will get to step ten and you won't feel joyful. You won't be able to celebrate why, because you did not practice it along the journey you help restricting and holding off. And you thought that magically you and all this time without being joyful or celebrating, and you think you're gonna get to the end and magically know how to celebrate and be joyful. No, it's a practice.

It's something that you have a muscle you have to develop and what better way develop it. Then along the journey, I would much rather have a journey that I enjoy and then get to the end and have even more joy than being sad and doubtful in uncertainty and like scared and frustrated all throughout the point and being severely disappointed when I get to the end. And it there's no fireworks going off. That is kind of how I fell at the end of my dissertation period of like this, this, it, is this it? Because I wasn't practicing joy and celebration. But now as I hit business milestone, after milestone, I am filled with so much joy because I practice it each and every day and it doesn't have to be this huge thing. It doesn't have to be a party. It doesn't have to be this thing that you spend a lot of money on.

Sometimes celebrating looks like, you know, allowing yourself to sleep in a few hours extra. Sometimes celebrating looks like I'm going to go watch my favorite movie or a TV show. Sometimes celebrating. It looks like I'm a get a new sex toy on the Amazon, giving myself an orgasm, right? You get to decide how you celebrate. But celebration looks many ways. You know what brings you joy, or you can learn what brings you joy, but it is important to do that along the journey. So that is what we're going to be doing for the month of May. I would hope that you come and join us inside the collective, but I will be here each and every week to give you a reminder of how you can learn to love the process and celebrate that. Okay. Y'all that's gonna do it for me this week. I'll be back next week to talk about desiring the dissertation and I can't wait to share it with y'all. Okay, bye for now. Thank you for joining in for today's office hours. If you're ready to take this work to the next level, I invite you to join the happy free and pay collective. We will show you how to finish your dissertation and build your consultant business, using the skills and knowledge you already possessed. Come on over to Marvette lacy.com and let's get started. I'll see you on the inside of the collective bye for now.