85. 3 Invisible Blocks to Motivation and Success
Episode 85
Some of the most powerful influences on your success aren’t your calendar, your study techniques, or your productivity apps. They’re quieter, more hidden, and easier to overlook.
In this episode, we explore three surprising areas of life that deeply affect how well you show up at school and work… even though they have nothing to do with school or work on the surface.
If you've built decent systems but still feel like you're not getting the results you want, these invisible factors might be why. This episode is part mindset shift, part tough love, and part practical strategy, because once you start paying attention to these areas, you can move toward the life you want.
What You'll Learn:
How your social circle might be capping your potential (without you realizing it)
Why building frustration tolerance is essential for follow-through
The quiet power of your internal narrative—and how to change it
How to stay in discomfort long enough to make real progress
What to do when your systems aren’t working, even though you “did everything right”
🔗 Resources + Episodes Mentioned:
SchoolHabits University (Parents, go here)
SchoolHabits University (Students, go here)
Episode 14: How to Use the Pomodoro Technique
Episode 25: How to Create a Task Management System
Episode 77: Time Blocking Strategy
Never stop learning.
▶ ✏️Get my FREE parent training: How to Help Your Student Handle School Like a Pro — Without Study Frustration, Assignment Overwhelm, or All the Drama (If you’re the parent of a high school or college student, this training is for you.)
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The following transcript was autogenerated and may contain some interesting and silly errors. But in the name of efficiency and productivity, I am choosing not to spend my time fixing them 😉
85 3 Invisible Blocks to Motivation and Success
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[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. This is episode 85 and I think we have a cool show today. If you have listened to any previous episodes before, well welcome back and thank you. You know that we cover strategies and systems and habits to help us learn and work smarter and more productively and in ways that get us the results that we personally want.
And obviously that means talking about task management and time management and sort of the nitty gritty strategies that, [00:00:30] you know, I cover a lot here. But today I am coming at that exact same topic. From a different angle over the next, I dunno, 25 minutes or so. That's always what I shoot for.
I'm gonna cover three surprising areas that impact your academic and professional success. And these three areas are the three that we tend to completely ignore 'cause they actually don't appear to have anything to do with school or work. Think of it this way. If we wanna get better at task management, we [00:01:00] often seek out task management strategies like the Pomodoro technique in episode 14 and time blocking in episode 77, and creating a time management system like I teach you in episode 25.
But there are other areas in our lives that if we don't pay attention to them and nurture them the same way that we nurture our systems, then the systems we work so hard to establish, often crumble. Or if they don't crumble, we max them out really quickly before [00:01:30] we have maxed out our own potential. And then that directly impacts our motivation to make any changes at all.
So if you feel like you've done a decent job dialing in your productivity habits and routines, but you're still not seeing the level of success that you want to have. It's my ask of you that you listen to today's episode all the way through, or watch on YouTube and pick even just one of the areas I talk about today and evaluate it.
That is all [00:02:00] I can ask of you, is to give yourself the gift of self-assessment, particularly in the spaces where we don't often self-assess. And what are these three areas that we're looking at today? They might surprise you, so let's get into it.
[00:02:30] All right. The first area of our lives that we don't often associate with our motivation for and success in school and work is our social network and the people that we regularly surround ourselves with. Now, this could be our family, our friends, our coworkers, just essentially the people we're spending the most time [00:03:00] with.
There is an expression, and I don't know how accurate it is scientifically, 'cause I can't imagine there's any way to actually study it, but I think anecdotally it's true and it makes sense and it's that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. Now, again, I don't think that's scientifically proven, but without question, there is some truth to that.
As social creatures, it is impossible not to be influenced by our environment. And that includes people. We [00:03:30] read the cues of what's happening around us. We read the emotions of people that we're spending time with, and whether we are aware of it or not, we often adopt the mindsets and the behaviors of the people we share our lives with.
Now this can be both good and bad, depending on the mindsets and the behaviors of the people that we are sharing our lives with.
For example, if you are surrounded by coworkers who enjoy collaboration and are supportive of each other and are open-minded to listening to [00:04:00] everybody's ideas at meetings, then you're gonna be more likely to exhibit those same characteristics. And if you feel safe sharing your ideas at meetings, you're gonna be more likely to share those ideas at meetings, which means you're going to take your job and yourself more seriously and care about the quality of those ideas that you share, and you won't fear being rejected for having those ideas in the first place.
And that small scenario right there could have a significant impact on your motivation at success at work. [00:04:30] And let me share an example that comes up a lot with the students that I work with. I'm gonna give you an example in the context of a high school student that I'm currently working with on his college application essay.
Now, this is a student who attended one particular school system for most of his life and kind of just coasted along with the same group of kids since he was little, very common. And then as he got older, those kids started making more risky and less intelligent and healthy decisions. Let's just put it that way, and that's the [00:05:00] reality of high school and the nature of adolescence.
But this kid had the self-awareness to look at his friend group, who he loved and who he had grown up with, and he asked himself, is this serving me? This kid has goals of attending a D one college for athletics, and he knows that in order to unlock that higher level of himself, he would need to do everything possible to optimize his environment for the success that he wanted.
Now, that meant not only changing his friend group, but changing schools entirely. That's what he did. [00:05:30] Was it hard? Absolutely. Did his friends resent him for it? Absolutely. And this is a lot of what he wrote about in his college essay, but it ended up being the best decision he had ever made because almost instantly when he changed his friend group, he changed his behavior.
He changed how we thought about time, he changed how we thought about excellence, and he changed his mindset about what was possible for him. And that's because he was surrounded with other kids who had lost your goals [00:06:00] than finding the latest party on the weekend. Now I'm recording this in the summer and it's currently college application season.
Right. Again, and I have another student who came in recently with a very similar experience, and wanted to share something similar in his essay. Of course, it's not the exact same story at all, but the, the idea is similar. He did a complete 180 in his life in terms of his relationship with his family and his own level of personal achievement simply by changing who he was spending time with.
And [00:06:30] in this case, again, that was his friend group, his social network. Now, these two stories are of high school students who had that realization early on. They were lucky to have that realization early on, but not everybody has that realization early on or not. Everybody has the ability to change their coworkers or their family members, but even if you feel locked in a box, like the people you spend time with are just the ones that you're just stuck with. I'm [00:07:00] challenging you to challenge that belief. Now, I'm not suggesting that we cut off relationships with people just because they aren't convenient and they don't lift us up. Life doesn't work that way, but I am suggesting that we either limit the amount of time we spend with people who don't support us in our goals or maybe seek out one person who you aspire to be like and spend more time with them. You know the expression dress for the role that you want to have. I think that applies in terms [00:07:30] of who we spend our time with too. If you want to be an elite student with an academic edge and a competitive profile, then you're not gonna achieve any of that if you're spending the majority of your time with people who don't share those goals.
And that is the reality. Like it or not. Or if your coworkers spend a ton of time complaining about their job and talking about how they can't wait till the end of the day and generally have a negative outlook on their work in the company. But you're looking for a different level of professional success than the strategy is [00:08:00] to maintain a professional relationship that is functional, but then limit the time you spend with those coworkers.
Maybe you eat lunch elsewhere. Maybe you go for a walk during your lunch break instead of going into the break room to be influenced by that negative conversation. I can't imagine how much harder my own professional journey would've been if I weren't surrounded by people who supported my goals. I'm not saying people always understood them because going off and starting my own business, it was risky, and I remember feeling not supported [00:08:30] with that venture by some important people in my life, but I still had enough people in my life supporting what I was doing, that I was able to block out the one or two voices that weren't supportive the way I needed them to be.
So my assignment to you is. If you are not feeling motivated to show up to school or to do your job, and if you're not feeling like you are as successful as you want to be and you swear all your other systems are locked in, then I want you to consider the people that you're spending your time with. Are they the right people?[00:09:00]
You may love them, you may like them, they may be fun, but if you're looking for any kind of excellence in your life, you need to surround yourself with people who also value excellence. Okay, so that was number one.
The other area of our lives, number two, that we don't often associate with our motivation or our success is our frustration tolerance.
Now, this one's sneaky because most of us don't walk around thinking like, gee, I really need to work on my ability to, you know, tolerate [00:09:30] frustration. That's not really something we say, but the truth is how we handle frustration, how we handle something not going our way directly influences how likely we are to start and finish hard things.
Here's why this matters. School and work are hard, not all of it, of course, but a lot of the tasks that we're required to do, especially if we're trying, trying to grow or level up, are things that we don't naturally enjoy. [00:10:00] Researching for a paper, maybe learning some complex new software, making phone calls that we've been avoiding.
Writing a draft from scratch, starting something big, you know, and not knowing where to begin. These are uncomfortable things, and the, the reality is that our brains don't like discomfort. We're wired, in fact, to avoid discomfort. That's not some weird personality flaw that you personally have. That's just how humans work.
Here's where things go [00:10:30] sideways, though. If we have a low frustration tolerance, we will interpret those uncomfortable moments as red flags, like, this is too hard, or like, I'm bad at this, or This shouldn't be taking this long. And then from there, what happens then is we stop, we scroll, we move on to something easier, and then we tell ourselves that we're being lazy or that we're unmotivated or that we're behind.
And then, you know, we never get outta that rut. But that's not the problem. The real issue wasn't motivation. It was that we [00:11:00] hit a, um, like a friction point, something annoying, something difficult, and then we bailed. Frustration tolerance is the ability to stay with something that's hard without checking out.
And I really wanna emphasize something here, frustration tolerance is not the same at all as just pushing through or grinding harder. It's not about ignoring your emotions or pretending that things aren't difficult, not what I'm saying. It's about [00:11:30] developing the mental skill to notice the discomfort and stay with it.
Anyway, little side note, it's not gonna kill you. Okay? Let me give you an example. I work with a college student who's an extremely rigorous pre-med program. She is brilliant. Okay. Half the time I'm like, I don't know, like for her content. Oh my goodness. But she kept getting stuck. Not 'cause she didn't understand the content.
All right? She did. She was really smart. But because as soon as she didn't understand something, [00:12:00] like maybe she couldn't solve, solve a problem, whatever, right away, or she couldn't summarize a research article in under 30 minutes like she expected herself to, she would just stop. She'd shut down. She's like, this is taking too long.
Like I, I, I can't do this. Why isn't this working? Right? And then, and she'd stop. And we worked on this together. Specifically, we built her frustration tolerance. We built in mental scripts. Like, yes, this is hard. This is supposed to be hard, but I can do hard things. [00:12:30] Please hear me. It is supposed to be hard, right?
It's not the fact that something is hard, that is a sign that it's wrong. It's supposed to be hard. And, and if you, I'm kind of like going off on a tangent here, but let's say that you knew a store closed at 5:00 PM and you went to that store at 7:00 PM knowing it was closed, you can't be that bummed because you knew it was closed, right?
Like, those are the hours. But for some [00:13:00] reason like we, we tell ourselves that we're shocked at the fact that like, school and work is hard. And then we have all these feelings about it. But what if we just start with the assumption that it is hard, it's supposed to be that way, and then we can just handle it.
We can learn strategies and systems, right? But it's supposed to be supposed to be hard. Let's start with that default, and then we have less feelings about it.
so this student and I, we worked in time focus blocks.
We layered in [00:13:30] strategies that I teach inside school habits university, like breaking down tasks and effort calibration. And guess what happened when you can probably guess what happened. She didn't become less frustrated, but she stopped quitting. Right, because we're going to be frustrated because things are hard, but we don't stop.
That's my point here. And then her confidence improved because success came from staying in it longer than she used to. And that's how this works. Okay. We don't have to eliminate frustration to be successful, we [00:14:00] just have to stop interpreting it as a stop sign. So my assignment to you here is this. Think about the last time that you got frustrated with school or work.
Maybe it was like five minutes ago, maybe it was yesterday, whatever. What did you do right after that moment of frustration? Did you quit? Did you quickly go check your email, check your phone? Did you start something else? And if so, what would it look like if you could have stayed with it just five more minutes?
Building your frustration Tolerance is like building [00:14:30] a muscle and like every muscle, it gets stronger when you use it. Now I'm gonna say this, for anyone who has a DHD or executive dysfunction, frustration tolerance might be lower by default in people with A DHD in executive dysfunction. Okay? But it is absolutely something that we can train and support. Inside school habits University there are entire systems built to reduce that friction and help you get back in when you feel like quitting. Because when you learn to sit with discomfort and still go, [00:15:00] still move forward, still take a step, that's where the change happens. Okay? Alright, so next, that was number two.
We're on number three. We're going to explore the third area that impacts our motivation and success in ways that most people never think about. And I'll give you a hint. It's happening in your brain long before you sit down to do your work or open your laptop. That's probably not much of a end. It's called our narrative identity, and that might sound a little [00:15:30] heady or woo woo, but stay with me here because this one's huge.
Our narrative identity is essentially the story that we believe about ourselves. It's the version of who you are that plays in the background of your mind. Now, most of us are not consciously thinking about this story day, day to day, but it shows up in the things that we say and the things that we do.
For example, um, I've always been a procrastinator, or I hear this all the time, like I'm not just a math person. I'm just super disorganized or like I just never finished what I start. I'm always [00:16:00] like stopping projects or even things like I need pressure to get things done, like I work only under pressure, right?
Or I work better at the last minute. These aren't just quirky descriptions of ourselves. They're identity that we've assigned to ourselves, and when you hold onto a certain identity, our brain subconsciously tries to keep proving it true so that we don't have this cognitive dissonance. Google that if, if you're like, what?
So if you believe you're the kind of person who always works last minute, you're gonna avoid starting things early and you're gonna procrastinate even when you don't want [00:16:30] to. If you believe that you're bad at studying, you're probably avoid using better study methods or even trying to learn about them in the first place.
'cause you're gonna assume they won't work for you. And that internal story becomes a self-fulfilling cycle. I see this all the time with students and professionals. They've internalized some personal narrative that's outdated, it's inaccurate, or it's just flat out unhelpful. And that story quietly directs their behavior in a direction they don't wanna go, and then they're [00:17:00] bummed about it and they never figure out why.
Or it just completely tanks their motivation. Let me give you an example. A while ago I worked with a grad student who had failed out of her first attempt at a Master's pro. It's only she failed, failed out, but she quit it because it was going in that direction. She came to me completely defeated and said like, I'm just not cut out for this. Like, I've always struggled in school. Like, that was her narrative. Like, I'm, I'm not good at school. How many times have we heard that? But when I started asking questions and we, you know, peeled [00:17:30] it back, it turned out that she, like many students had never been taught how to manage her time, she didn't have a system for tracking her deadlines.
She didn't know how to study using active recall. She's like, what is active recall? Right? Like most people are like, what is that? Um, the only way to study. She didn't have any real structure for her day. So her performance was not a reflection at all of her ability. It was a reflection of her lack of strategy.
So we worked together to build those systems. It sounds [00:18:00] repetitive from the stories I've shared before. 'cause that's what it takes, right? Self-awareness and then building from there. So she started implementing one strategy at a time. It was like calendars, and then it was time blocking, and then it's like weekly reviews, which is the self-assessment piece.
Then it's like study systems, right? Here's what happened. Yeah. Her story started to change, but not be, not because she was like journaling affirmations. I'm not bashing journaling, but like that's not what she was doing here. Okay. She wasn't journaling about being capable. It was [00:18:30] because she had evidence that she could do it.
The identity shifted, right, because her behavior shifted and the behavior shift gave her the evidence to keep going in the direction that she wanted to go. Now, here's what I wanna drive home. We don't have to fight our old story. Those stories are really ingrained and they're hard to just be like, okay, I won't tell myself this anymore.
Right? It's, it's really hard. We don't even have to fix those stories, but we need to start by asking ourselves, is this story [00:19:00] helping me or is it holding me back? If you're even asking the question, it's likely holding you back. Because you can have the best intentions in the world and all of the best productivity tools in place.
You can listen to every episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. But if your narrative identity is working against you, you'll keep sliding back into old patterns. Not because you're lazy, but because the actions are being driven by a script that no longer serve you. So here is your [00:19:30] assignment for this segment.
Yes, I'm giving you three homework assignments. Notice the stories you say about yourself. Whether you're saying them out loud, whether you're saying them silently, what are the things that you've just assumed are true about you, and where did those stories come from? Sometimes they're from other people.
Most importantly, do you want to keep those stories? And if the answer is no, which I am assuming it is awesome, that is a starting point [00:20:00] because like I've said before, we don't change our identity just with thoughts. We change it with action. That is the most direct way to change our identity with action.
When you take a new action, even a small new action, that's when our brains start writing a new story based on the new evidence it's collecting. But if you never give your brain a chance to collect new evidence, that can prove that you're a different version of yourself, you'll never have the material to write a new story with.[00:20:30]
All right, so that was our third area. Your narrative identity. It's invisible, but it's powerful. Once you learn what it is, how to question it, how to shift it, usually everything else starts to follow from there.
Okay, we're gonna do a quick recap. Today, I shared three areas of our lives that might not naturally connect to motivation and success in school or work in like a very clear, direct way, but they actually play a huge role.
The first was the people that we spend our time with. [00:21:00] Our environment is contagious, and your mindset will often mirror the energy in the habits of the people closest to you, whether that's friends or coworkers or family. If you want to level up in any area, sometimes that just means reassessing who gets the most access to you?
Okay. The second was frustration tolerance. If you check out every single time something gets hard or uncomfortable, it's gonna be really hard to build momentum on anything, and that's where motivation comes down. [00:21:30] Success often comes from staying in the discomfort, little bit longer than we want to, a little bit longer than we are used to, but that is absolutely something that we can practice and get better at.
But if you're telling yourself that's not true, you know, you never tried it. The third was the narrative identity, the internal story that you tell yourself about who you are, what you're good at, what you struggle with. And honestly, that story is often the thing driving your actions. So if you want to change your outcomes, start by [00:22:00] changing the script, so here's the thing. These three areas, your people are tolerance for discomfort and our identity script, they're all, they're super trainable, okay?
We're not stuck with any of them. We kind of stuck with some people, but you can, you can still change it. But they do require awareness and they require action because we cannot out hack a system that's being undermined by our environment, our habits, or our internal beliefs. So if you've been [00:22:30] wondering why your systems aren't working the way that you want them or why you keep falling off track, even when you want to stay track on track, and even if you do have dialed in systems, one of these three reasons, or maybe all three might be why, if you're ready to actually do something about it, If you're ready to build the kind of structure and support that reinforces better habits, stronger follow through, and a more powerful internal script, then I invite you to check out School Habits University. Inside that program, I walk you step by step through the exact systems I [00:23:00] use with my own students and clients to build academic and professional success.
From the ground up, you'll learn how to plan your time, organize your tasks, study smarter, manage your day in a way that feels sustainable. But more than that, you actually start collecting evidence that you are the kind of person who follows through, does what you say you're gonna do, and then that's where everything changes.
You have to do something to collect the evidence, right? You can learn more at schoolhabitsuniversity.com, and I will also link that in the show [00:23:30] notes. That is it for today's episode. Thank you for being here with me. As always, if you found this helpful, the best way to support the show is to leave a review or to share it with someone who needs to hear it.
Until next time, keep showing up. Keep asking the hard questions. Keep doing the hard things. Keep building a version of your life that actually works for you. And remember, never stop learning.[00:24:00]
