Ask a Coach: Motivation vs Work Ethic
Here’s a transcript of a brief conversation in the Ace Peak Society.
Danielle
This question isn't about debate in particular, but more so my attitude toward debate and other school related activities. To all coaches: how do y'all not allow your emotions (feelings of exhaustion, sadness, restlessness, etc.) to dictate your work ethic? I've found that if I'm feeling down, it's extremely hard to concentrate on school and debate. Just wondering what tips coaches, or anyone here, may have to deal with emotions that affect how you devote your time to debate/school. Especially with everything going on in the world, it's all probably affecting how every single one of us feels.
Coach Joseph
This is such a good question; we could easily talk about this for hours. And it's also a universal one. There’s so much we could say, but here's the most powerful tool for creating productivity when your emotions are fighting you.
There are a mountain of self-help books that all offer some version of this message:
"Your feelings aren't helping you get the results you want? Here's how you can change your feelings! Here's tricks and strategies to motivate yourself!"
And those can work sometimes, but they’re always inconsistent and short-lived - because emotions are inconsistent and short-lived. Any strategy that revolves around changing your behavior by altering your feelings can't consistently help you get good results. It's just impossible to manage your emotions like that. That's not how emotions work! They're intrinsically reactive. Emotions are wonderful and important. They should be honored and explored and cultivated. But a big part of that is acknowledging: emotions are not tools. They are side-effects.
Can you change your feelings? To some degree, yes. But even if you could change them to maximize your productivity, you wouldn't want to. Because that would mean cutting yourself off from all the emotions that aren't useful to you. And once you start down that road, the world goes gray really quickly.
We're in a tough time right now - as people, as a country, as a species. There's plenty to be stressed about, and sometimes you don't want to actively feed those emotions. Maybe a debate round is about to start and you just got some bad news. You might choose not to think about it right away so you can focus on delivering at your best. Techniques like that are also useful to some degree but they ultimately go in the same category as the self-help books. Here's what they have in common:
These techniques all assume that you do how you feel.
If you are sad, you act sad.
If you are exhausted, you act exhausted.
And if that's true, the reverse is also true:
If you want to act productive, you must FEEL productive.
And if you don't FEEL productive, then productivity must be impossible!
So here's the powerful truth I want to share with you:
You don't have to be enslaved by your motivation.
Everyone is born fully enslaved by it. You can see it in animals, who are controlled by instinct. If you shine a light in a frog's eyes, it can't look away. It can't think: "I'm better than this! I choose to look away!" Because it is a frog. But as humans, we have a lot more control over our own behavior. We're able to observe ourselves, analyze, calibrate, make a choice. Perhaps most significant, we're able to do things we don't feel like doing. Acting intentionally, against your emotion, is Discipline. It is the cornerstone of self-mastery.
I don't want to go too far down the spiritual path here, but the Psalms offer some really insightful passages on this. Unlike the pop culture message that you should figure out how you feel and then do it - as if you're defined by/controlled by your feelings - the Psalms often lament how the human heart betrays you. They point out that your feelings are inconstant and often pull you down the wrong path. And when that happens, you have to rise above the frog-brain and say: "No, I choose to act differently."
The key is, you're not saying: "I choose to feel differently." You're saying: "I feel like doing X, but I'm choosing to do Y instead."
When you're motivated to act how you want to act, that's easy. You don't have to be disciplined. But the two diverge quickly. Think about all the new gym signups in the first week of January. A bunch of people are motivated to make a positive change! Their feelings carry them to the gym. They're excited. But then, as always, their emotions change. Now, they have two options: stop going to the gym, or do something they don't feel like doing. And overwhelmingly, people go through door number 1.
Overcoming that frog-brain and building discipline is a life long journey. Think of discipline like a skill you need to hone, just like cross-ex or riding a bike. At first you're shaky and you make a lot of mistakes. But the more you do it, the better you get. Every time you're feeling overwhelmed but deliver your deadlines; every time you're sad but still come through for someone; every time you're restless but still wait patiently, you become better at it. You're chipping away at the shackles of motivation.
Again, that doesn't mean you're turning your feelings off. It means you're putting them where they belong - in the passenger seat. You're feeling, you're engaging with the world; you still feel grief and anger and so on. You honor those feelings and work through them. But you don't let them control you.
The harder it is to do, the more powerful you become when you do it.
Danielle
Thank you so much Joseph! I cannot tell you how helpful and encouraging that is to hear, especially right now. I definitely needed to hear that!!
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