GSK believes innovation starts when you stop to listen. That's why GSK and Veeve Health Care have partnered with the HIV community for decades

and developed medicines that better fit the lives of people living with HIV. That's just one example of how GSK unites science, technology, and talent to get ahead of disease together.

Visit gsk.com to learn more.

This is Primal Potential and I am your host, Elizabeth Benton. Through education, motivation, and implementation, we will bridge the gap between knowing and doing so we can master fat loss naturally and help you reach your highest potential. Let's get started.

Hello everybody and welcome back to the Primal Potential podcast. I am Elizabeth Benton and today we are talking about inertia. That point when you stop trying.

Not stop trying forever, but stop trying for the moment. That moment when it feels just hard enough that you give up, you make an excuse or an exception, where it's just a little bit too much effort required for you to keep going.

This moment of inertia, which a lot of people call feeling stuck or unmotivated, this is the point where we break the promises we made to ourselves.

The promises we said we were done breaking. They are broken in these moments of inertia. I had a really great conversation with one of my one on one clients about this the other day.

Even though we didn't use that word inertia, it's really what we were talking about. We were looking back at some of the major changes she has made in the last three or four months I would say and how all of those changes before she made them.

She made them out to be way more challenging in her head than they actually were once she started to do the work. See these are changes we had been talking about her needing to make for over a year, but it was always too hard or she just didn't have the focus, the motivation to be consistent.

But once she started to do the work to ignore the desire to give up and to give in and to push through those moments of inertia what she realized was it was far easier to make the change then she thought it would be so we were talking about some some new changes she needs to make because we're never done.

We're always looking to improve and she was having sort of the same feeling about how hard it would be and how much effort it would take and I said remember how sure you were that these other changes were so hard and so far beyond your capacity until you actually did them and then you were surprised and how quickly it became easy.

What she found is that when she did the work when she pushed through it was so much easier than she had been telling herself for years and we were talking about it this way I was using the analogy I said imagine that you are pushing this big huge boulder up a hill and at the bottom it's not too hard because you're fresh right it's new and you have all the energy to do the work you're super motivated when is it the hardest at the top right at that for this point you've ever been able to do it.

You've ever made it to physically if we're literally talking about pushing a boulder up a hill we're tired the further we go the harder it gets until you get to the top and everything gets easier at the bottom it's not going to be all that hard you have the energy to do the work I just knocked over my bike my mic that keeps happening but I'm not going to stop.

At the at the bottom of the hill you're fresh and you're ready to go when you're motivated right it's the same thing when we start out with a new change we're fresh we're ready to go but it does get hard as we continue on right before it gets so much easier and if you're pushing that boulder up the hill and it sucks and it's hard and you want to quit but you can see how close you are to the top then you can talk yourself into pushing just a bit harder.

Right because you know you're close you know it'll be over soon you know it's going to be easy before you know it so you can motivate yourself it's kind of like if you're working out with a clock and you know you only have 20 seconds left you can muster more effort you can push through for those 20 seconds because you know it's almost over but what if you're pushing that boulder up the hill and you can't see the top what if you were doing it blindfolded or in a thick fog and so when you got to that.

So if you're not going to get to that point or you're super exhausted but you didn't know how close you were it would be so much easier to give up right if you didn't know how little time of struggle is actually left you would be far more likely to quit.

Guys that's exactly what happens when we're trying to make changes in our own lives we're going blind we can't see we don't have the experience to be able to see just how close we are to a breakthrough just how close we are to the peak to the top to easy to the downhill where everything is faster requires less effort.

So there's this image and you might have seen it before I'm going to put it in the show notes over at primalpotential.com for this episode but there's this image of a man in a tunnel underground whatever looks like a tunnel to me and he's digging for diamond so he has his pickaxe and he's hammering away and he's gone pretty far right now those of us who are looking at the image we can see where he is and we can see the tunnel in front and we can see the diamonds on the other side all he sees.

Is the dirt the tunnel in front of him so the bottom of the image shows that he turns around he's come so far he's put forth so much effort he's dug so far and then he's like it's not there i'm not going to get there I can't do it it's too hard i'm tired I give up and what we can see that he can't is he's just inches from those diamonds when he quits.

Guys do you know how many times you would have won already if you just hadn't quit do you know how close you have been to making all of these changes easy if you just kept going through inertia and not quit do you know how many times over you would have made this change easy habitual if you hadn't quit.

Do you know how long ago you would have reached your goal if you just hadn't quit how close you have come when things feel hard that change that promise you made to yourself that you just want to break when it feels hard i want you to think about pushing that boulder up the hill and i want you to remind yourself that it feels hardest at the end when you're closest to the finish when you're closest to the break through it feels the hardest you want to do.

...