Why discipline matters more than motivation

I have been working from home in a commission based telesales position for several years now. This means that aside from a brief daily Zoom meeting with my managers and team mates, I am all on my own. No supervision, no colleagues near by, it is just me and my headset against the world. It can be tempting to take more breaks, to find excuses to walk away from my home office, to go make that extra cup of tea that I don't really need. In order to stay engaged, I used to be in a constant search for motivation. I would comb the internet daily looking for motivational videos to get me fired up. I would listen to motivational podcasts and audio books. I would read positive affirmations aloud to myself until I started to feel some kind of twinge of motivation to get me moving. This process was exhausting because the truth is, some days I just don't feel motivated at all. I know you know the feeling. Some days the headset is too heavy, the leads list is too long, and the targets and quotas all seem so far away that you get this heavy feeling of "oh why even bother?!". this is where motivation falls flat.

Discipline is a vastly greater force than motivation. Motivation has its place to be sure. I still do listen to motivation materials and I still enjoy motivational videos on YouTube, but I learned a long time ago that relying on the feeling of motivation to get me though the sales shift was simply not enough if I was going to be a top performer. I started paying attention to those in my position who were consistently smashing sales targets and breaking records. Those salesmen almost never spoke about motivation. They spoke about discipline. The top performers were those that identified the goals they had for themselves and determined the behaviors they would need to make into habits in order to reach those goals. Then, they got to work. I realized early in my telesales career that discipline will carry you through when motivation falls flat. 

If you are working from home in a sales role and you find yourself identifying with anything in this post, I would encourage you to closely examine your daily habits and routines. Ask yourself which of these is truly serving you and which could be replaced with a more productive action that will truly move you toward your sales targets because anything which does not move you closer to your goals moves you further from them, there are no neutral actions. If you think you could benefit from some one on one support in crafting a highly productive daily routine and forming a relationship that will hold you accountable to that routine, consider signing up for a coaching session, or, better yet, schedule your free 15 minute intro session to see if we might be compatible. You have nothing to lose.

Now it's time to get disciplined and go make those fat stacks!

~Kat Jack