I think motivation has been romanticised to us. We’ve been sold this delicious little fantasy that one day, at precisely the right moment, motivation will strike us like lightning and suddenly we’ll have all the energy, clarity and confidence we need to get our shit together and start living the life we want. And if that lightning strike never comes? Well, perhaps it just wasn’t meant to be.
I’m calling bullshit.
I don’t think motivation is the catalyst for change. In fact, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that motivation is a scam. There, I said it. Now let me explain.
As we move through the final couple of months of 2026, I am thrilled to see the sun making a more regular appearance, the days stretching a little longer and that familiar shift in energy that seems to happen when we collectively emerge from our winter hibernation and remember there’s an entire world waiting for us outside.
I can feel it in myself, and I can feel it in the people around me. There’s this beautiful sense of possibility that comes with spring, as though we’re all slowly waking up to ourselves again.
But alongside that renewed energy, I’ve noticed something else creeping in. A quiet little sense of urgency.
Do you feel it too?
Suddenly the end of the year is visible, and all those things we promised ourselves we’d do back in January are staring at us from the sidelines, wondering whether we’ve forgotten about them. I’ve found myself mentally calculating how much I can possibly squeeze into these final months, personally and professionally, while desperately searching for another hit of motivation to use as rocket fuel to get me across the finish line.
And here’s the ridiculous part. I’ve been waiting for that motivation to arrive before I actually do anything about it.
Seven weeks, a shit ton of procrastination and several spectacular self-doubt spirals later, I’ve been reminded of a lesson that 2026 seems absolutely determined to teach me.
Motivation doesn’t create motion…. Motion creates motivation.
I know. Annoying, isn’t it?
Because wouldn’t it be lovely if we could simply wait until we felt inspired, confident, energised and completely ready before doing the things that matter to us? Imagine how wonderful it would be if the desire to exercise arrived before the alarm went off, if creative inspiration appeared the moment we opened our laptops, or if the courage to pursue something bigger than ourselves conveniently showed up before we had to take the first step.
But that’s rarely how it works, and the more I look at my own life, the more evidence I find that waiting for motivation is often the very thing keeping me stationary.
When we make motivation a prerequisite for action, we make our commitment to ourselves conditional on how we happen to feel that day. We hand over the responsibility for creating the life we want to something as wildly unpredictable as our mood, and then wonder why we’re not making the progress we imagined.
And I don’t know about you, but I’m no longer particularly interested in letting my mood make all my decisions for me.
The three M’s: Motion, motivation and momentum.
There’s something fascinating I’ve noticed about motivation in my own life. When I’m moving, creating, experimenting and actually doing the things I’ve been thinking about, inspiration seems to find me everywhere. I have a target on my back! Ideas arrive in the shower, opportunities become more visible, my confidence grows and suddenly I have more energy for the very things I was previously avoiding.
But when I’m sitting in overwhelm, overthinking every possible outcome and convincing myself I need a little more clarity before I begin, inspiration seems to disappear entirely.
It’s almost like two magnets facing the wrong way. When I start with motivation, the harder I sit there waiting for inspiration to come towards me, the further away I seem to repel it.
The irony is that the thing I’m waiting for is waiting for me to make the first move.
I see this in something as ordinary as exercise. I’ve been moving my body consistently for the better part of twenty years, whether that’s running, yoga, strength training or whatever happens to feel good in the season of life I’m in. You’d think after two decades I’d have developed some magical, unwavering desire to exercise, but I can assure you there are still plenty of mornings when I’d rather do just about anything else.
If I waited until I felt motivated to work out, I genuinely don’t think I’d ever do it.
Of course, there are moments when motivation arrives first, but I’ve noticed those moments are usually influenced by my environment. A beautiful new workout set, a class with a friend, a new studio I’ve been wanting to try or even a sunny morning can make the idea of moving my body feel incredibly appealing.
And I think there’s something important in that, because the conditions we create around ourselves absolutely influence how we feel and what we do. It’s one of the fundamental beliefs behind amillâ, and something I’ve witnessed time and time again through our retreats and experiences.
But we can’t rely on novelty, perfect weather or beautiful surroundings to carry us through every ordinary Tuesday of our lives.
Sometimes the conditions we need to create are much simpler, or should I say to motion we need to take... Laying out our clothes the night before, putting our shoes by the door, making a commitment to a friend or deciding that we’re going to show up for just twenty minutes regardless of whether we feel like it.
And here’s where the magic happens. Once I’ve started moving, I almost always want to keep going.
The action creates the motivation, the motivation encourages another action, and before I know it I’ve created something far more powerful than a fleeting burst of inspiration.
I’ve created momentum.
You know that saying, own the morning, own the day? I think it’s a beautiful example of this cycle in action, although I don’t believe you need to wake up at 5am, drink a green juice and complete seventeen different wellness rituals before breakfast to qualify as someone who’s showing up for herself.
Owning your morning might look like a workout, a few quiet minutes with your journal, taking the dogs for a walk, sitting in the morning sun with your coffee before the rest of the household or simply resisting the urge to reach for your phone before you’ve even opened your eyes properly.
What matters isn’t necessarily the action itself, but what that action makes possible next.
When I move my body in the morning, I often find myself wanting to make a nourishing breakfast, which gives me the energy to tackle something I’ve been putting off, which makes me feel capable of doing the next thing, and suddenly I’m halfway through the day having made a series of decisions that genuinely support the woman I want to be.
Not because I woke up overflowing with motivation, but because I made one decision that helped me make another.
Motion creates motivation. Motivation creates momentum. And momentum makes the next step feel a little more possible.
Of course, the same principle can work in the opposite direction.
We’ve all had those days when a little scrolling turns into an hour of scrolling, when cancelling one plan makes us want to cancel every plan, or when putting off something uncomfortable makes the thought of eventually doing it feel even more overwhelming.
Sometimes we get so comfortable in the energy of avoiding our lives that even the things we know would make us feel better begin to feel impossibly far away.
And this is where I think we need to be particularly compassionate with ourselves, because not every period of stillness is procrastination. Sometimes we’re genuinely exhausted, overwhelmed or in need of rest, and the last thing we need is another person telling us to push harder.
But I also think there’s a difference between the rest that restores us and the avoidance that keeps us stuck, and deep down, most of us can recognise which one we’re experiencing.
For me, the question has become less about why can’t I find the motivation? and more about what is one small action I can take to change the conditions I’m currently sitting in?
Because sometimes that one action is enough to change the direction of the entire day.
The proof has been right in front of me.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned through building amillâ is that inspiration and motivation shows up on the other side of doing the thing, rather than before it.
Take our retreats, for example. I absolutely adore creating these experiences, but behind every beautifully styled table, thoughtfully curated workshop and seemingly effortless few days away is an enormous amount of planning, coordination, decision-making and creative work.
There are programs to develop, practitioners to coordinate, menus to consider, schedules to finalise, materials to create, content to capture and approximately one million tiny details that need to come together to make the experience feel as beautiful and seamless as it does.
And because I care so deeply about what we’re creating, I can sometimes become completely overwhelmed by the sheer size of it all.
In the past, I’ve caught myself waiting for the perfect day to tackle everything, imagining that at some point I’ll wake up feeling wildly inspired and effortlessly work my way through the entire list.
Spoiler alert: that day NEVER arrives.
What I’ve learned instead is to make the first step so small that I don’t need some extraordinary level of motivation to take it. I’ll tell myself I’m simply going to spend twenty minutes working on the program, or confirm one activity, or make the one phone call I’ve been avoiding.
And do you know what happens more often than not?
Twenty minutes becomes an hour, one confirmed activity becomes another aligned idea, and suddenly the thing that felt enormous when it existed only in my head becomes something I’m actively creating.
The resistance begins to soften because I’m no longer standing outside the experience imagining how difficult it might be. I’m actually in it.
Then, when I return home from hosting a retreat, I’m reminded of this lesson all over again. I come back absolutely overflowing with inspiration, new ideas, creative energy and an almost ridiculous desire to bring the next experience to life.
But that inspiration didn’t arrive because I sat around waiting for it. It arrived because I did the work, immersed myself in the experience, connected with extraordinary women and witnessed what becomes possible when we create the conditions for ourselves to flourish. The experience created the inspiration, not the other way around and I think that’s a really important distinction.
You cannot think your way into a life, you have to live.
Coming from a background in interior design, I find myself constantly drawing parallels between the way we design our physical environments and the way we design our lives.
I could spend months creating the most beautiful concept for a home, collecting inspiration, exploring materials, refining the layout and imagining exactly how it would feel to live within those walls. And while that creative process is incredibly important, no amount of imagining is going to turn that concept into a home I can actually walk into.
At some point, someone has to pick up the tools and begin.
And I think we forget that the same is true of our lives.
We can create vision boards, journal about our future selves, imagine the relationships we want, the work we’d love to do, the adventures we’d like to experience and the woman we want to become. We can spend hours getting crystal clear on what a more fulfilling, aligned and expansive life might look and feel like. (I love that part!)
But the vision is only the beginning.
At some point, we have to be willing to participate in creating it, we have to get into motion and take some action, even when we’re uncertain, even when the timing feels imperfect and even when we don’t have the slightest idea how the whole thing is going to unfold. I’m here to give you the heads up that clarity doesn’t always arrive before the action is taken. Sometimes clarity is the reward for having the courage to take action.
Perhaps that’s what we’ve been getting wrong about motivation all along. We’ve been treating it as something that needs to be receive before moving forward, when its actually generated through the act of moving forward.
There’s a beautiful kind of self-trust that develops when we begin showing up for ourselves without needing to feel completely ready. Every small action becomes another piece of evidence that we’re capable of following through, that we can navigate uncertainty and that we don’t need to have every answer before taking the next step.
And the more evidence we collect, the less we need to rely on motivation to carry us, we begin to trust ourselves instead.
So, here’s what I’m taking into the final months of 2026.
I’m no longer waiting to feel ready before I begin. I’m no longer expecting inspiration to arrive at my doorstep, politely introduce herself and hand me a detailed plan for how to create everything I want.
And I’m certainly not allowing another seven weeks to disappear while I convince myself that tomorrow might be the day I finally feel motivated enough to do the thing.
Instead, I’m choosing motion. Not frantic, exhausting, hustle-at-all-costs motion, but intentional, meaningful movement towards the things that matter to me.
Some days that might look like making enormous strides towards a dream I’ve been carrying for years, and other days it might look like rest, one uncomfortable conversation or one small promise to myself that I actually keep.
I don’t believe we need to completely overhaul our lives to begin creating more of what we want within them. Sometimes the smallest shift in our everyday is enough to remind us that we have far more agency than we’ve been giving ourselves credit for, I think there’s something wonderfully liberating about that.
We don’t need to wait for a lightning strike. We don’t need to become an entirely different person. We don’t need to wake up tomorrow with a brand-new personality, an extraordinary level of discipline or a sudden, unshakeable belief in ourselves.
We can begin as we are, with what we have, from exactly where we’re standing.
So, if there’s something you’ve been putting off, something you keep telling yourself you’ll do when you have more time, more energy, more confidence or more motivation, I want you to consider whether the thing you’re waiting for might actually be waiting on the other side of your first step.
Do the thing. Start small. Let it be messy. Let it be imperfect. Let yourself discover what becomes possible once you’re actually in motion.
And who knows? Motivation might just come running after you.
Sending you my love and gratitude,
Claire x
