Motivation Is Overrated (And Here’s Why)
Motivation has long been the darling of the self-help industry. Entire shelves in bookstores, thousands of podcasts, and countless Instagram accounts are dedicated to the idea that if you just stay motivated enough, anything is possible. But here’s the truth most won’t tell you: motivation is unreliable. It comes and goes. It’s reactive, not strategic. It’s emotional, not structural.
We’ve turned motivation into a drug, something to be consumed daily to keep us moving. But like any drug, it loses potency over time. Eventually, the hype wears off, and you’re left wondering why you still feel stuck despite all your “inspiration.” The core flaw? Motivation promises movement but doesn’t guarantee progress.
When Drive Doesn’t Deliver
You can be ambitious and still be lost. Many high-performing professionals are constantly busy, always striving, yet they quietly admit they feel off-track. They attend leadership seminars, read productivity books, even wake up at 5am, and still feel like something’s missing.
That’s because motivation creates motion, but without clarity, the motion isn’t meaningful. You end up working harder but not necessarily moving forward. This condition has a name: motivation fatigue. It’s the psychological exhaustion that arises from chasing goals that aren’t grounded in purpose.
Motivation fatigue feels like burnout, but with a twist, you’re not tired from lack of ability, you’re tired from lack of inner focus. This can be even more dangerous because it’s harder to detect. On the outside, everything appears fine. On the inside, you’re quietly questioning everything.
It’s the hidden tax of high achievement, doing everything “right” but never feeling quite right. Motivation fatigue tricks you into believing the answer is more effort, more pressure, more doing. But the truth is, you don’t need more drive; you need direction. Clarity doesn’t demand more from you. It helps you stop wasting energy on the wrong things. And until you confront that truth, no amount of hustle will lead to peace.
What Most People Get Wrong About Motivation
The traditional advice says: “Get motivated first, then act.” But in practice, this almost never works. Waiting to feel inspired before taking action is like waiting for the perfect weather to go outside, you’ll never leave the house.
Clarity comes first. It’s what makes action obvious, frictionless. When you have clarity, your brain doesn’t have to spend energy evaluating every option. You already know the path, so you walk it. As Michael Serwa, a seasoned career coach in London, explains: “inner focus is what lets you say no without guilt, and yes without panic.”
That’s not just a nice quote. It’s a cognitive shift. When your decisions are rooted in clarity, motivation becomes secondary. You don’t need to be hyped up. You just need to stay on course.
Most people try to fix their inconsistency by increasing pressure, when what they really need is to reduce noise. They wait for motivation to give them permission, instead of building clarity to claim direction. The uncomfortable truth is this: if you need to constantly convince yourself to act, you probably don’t know what you truly want. Alignment doesn’t shout, it steadies. And that’s what makes it the real superpower
The True Cost of Confusion in Your Career
Confusion is expensive. It consumes time, energy, and opportunity. It delays progress not just by days or weeks, but by years. You hesitate. You wait. You double-guess. And in the process, life moves on.
Decision paralysis, a state where fear of making the wrong move leads to inaction, is a widespread phenomenon, especially among high achievers. When you’re capable of doing many things, choosing just one feels like a loss.
As confirmed by behavioural research in ScienceDirect, people with low goal clarity are significantly more likely to procrastinate, stress over decisions, and abandon goals midway. Without a clear “why,” the “how” doesn’t matter. You can have all the tactics in the world, but if your strategy is confused, nothing sticks.
Clarity doesn’t just speed things up; it protects you from drifting. Because drifting is dangerous, it’s how smart, capable people end up in careers they never chose and lives they barely recognise. The most painful regret isn’t failure; it’s the slow erosion of purpose through years of unclear decisions. Without direction, even the best opportunities can become traps.
Clarity: The Missing Link in Career Transitions
Career change is a high-stakes moment. Whether it’s a voluntary pivot or a forced reinvention, the period in between jobs, identities, or industries can be one of intense vulnerability. And in that liminal space, clarity becomes the differentiator between paralysis and progress.
You don’t need to know every detail of the next role. But you do need a lens to evaluate what fits and what doesn’t. That lens is career certainty, the understanding of your values, drivers, deal-breakers, and aspirations.
Without it, you’re likely to jump into something that looks right on paper but feels wrong on Monday mornings.
Career transitions expose what was never truly aligned. They don’t just test your strategy, they test your self-awareness. When clarity is missing, change becomes guesswork. But when clarity is present, even uncertain paths become navigable. You don’t need certainty to move forward. You need a solid answer to one question: Is this aligned with who I’m becoming, or just who I’ve been trying to be?
Why Clarity Feels So Elusive (And Where Coaching Comes In)
Most people aren’t trained to know what they want, they’re trained to perform. From childhood to corporate life, we’re rewarded for delivering results, ticking boxes, and matching expectations. We get good at building impressive careers, yet never learn how to ask if those careers actually reflect who we are. We chase promotions, not purpose. We choose what’s praised over what resonates.
By the time many professionals hit their thirties or forties, they start to feel a subtle dissonance, a sense that the life they’ve built looks great on the outside but feels hollow inside. And it’s not because they lack drive. It’s because they’ve spent that drive chasing goals that were never truly theirs. This is where personal alignment becomes more than a buzzword, it becomes survival.
Faced with this discomfort, the instinct is often to double down on thinking. We analyse, plan, optimise. We make spreadsheets of pros and cons. We read books, take online assessments, scroll endless content about finding purpose. But all that thinking rarely brings us closer to clarity. In fact, it often does the opposite. It creates more noise, more pressure, more analysis paralysis. The brain loops, and nothing changes.
That’s why thinking harder isn’t the answer. Integration is. And this is where coaching becomes a powerful tool, not as a source of answers, but as a space for meaning-making. A skilled coach doesn’t add more input. They help you extract signal from the noise. They ask the kind of questions that force a pause: not “What’s next?” but “What have you been tolerating?”, “What do you keep doing because you’re good at it, not because you want to?”, “What would you choose if no one else had an opinion?”
In a city like London, where ambition is the air you breathe, this kind of direction is rare, and essential. You’re surrounded by opportunity, comparison, cultural pressure. The noise is constant. As the BBC has reported, many young professionals experience decision paralysis not because they lack opportunity, but because they lack self-defined criteria. That’s why working with a career coach isn’t about being told what to do, it’s about slowing down long enough to hear your own voice.
Michael Serwa, one of the UK’s most recognised career and life coaches, describes this process simply: “Coaching isn’t about helping you feel better. It’s about helping you see clearer.” His work, along with that of other elite coaches like Jake Smolarek, isn’t rooted in hype or hand-holding; it’s rooted in sharp, unfiltered reflection. They challenge assumptions, disrupt patterns, and help people reconnect with what actually matters, not what’s trending.
In an environment overloaded with advice, tools, and frameworks, clarity remains one of the few things you can’t outsource, but you can be guided toward it. A great coach doesn’t show you the path. They show you where you’ve been avoiding looking. And that, for many, is where the real shift begins.
What a Coach Might Ask You Instead of “What’s Next?”
Too often, career conversations jump straight to tactics, update your CV, refresh your LinkedIn, start networking, send applications. It’s a checklist mindset. And while practical steps matter, real transformation almost never starts there.
Good coaching doesn’t begin with a plan. It begins with questions, the kind most people avoid. A coach might ask what you’ve stopped enjoying but haven’t had the courage to admit yet. They may invite you to imagine what you’d pursue if failure carried no shame. Or they’ll challenge you to define success without using money, titles, or someone else’s benchmark. These aren’t surface-level prompts. They’re designed to go beneath performance, into identity. Into truth.
Jake Smolarek, another career coach from London, captures it sharply: “Coaching isn’t about helping you feel better. It’s about helping you see clearer.” But in practice, he goes further. Jake pushes clients not just to reflect, but to confront. He’s not interested in comfort; he’s interested in clarity with consequences. That kind of clarity doesn’t always feel good in the moment, but it lasts a lifetime.
This is the paradox of real coaching: it doesn’t tell you what to do, it forces you to see what you’ve been avoiding. That’s why real progress often comes after moments of discomfort, not ease. The best coaches don’t add noise. They remove it. And what you’re left with is not a perfect answer, but a clearer mirror.
In the end, the most dangerous career trap isn’t failure; it’s silent compromise.
Decisions Built on Values, Not Pressure
The deeper your self-understanding, the less likely you are to outsource your decisions to fear, comparison, or urgency. That’s the promise of values-based decision-making. It doesn’t remove uncertainty, it reframes it.
When your choices align with your values, you can handle risk better. You make peace with trade-offs. You accept that you can’t have everything, and don’t need to.
This mindset is particularly important for those facing executive burnout. For people who’ve reached the top, only to feel empty once they get there, certainty offers a way out that isn’t destructive, but redemptive.
Values don’t eliminate ambition, they direct it. When your career decisions are built on what actually matters to you, not what impresses others, the whole game changes. You stop climbing faster and start climbing smarter. And that shift, from pressure to principle, often marks the moment when burnout turns into breakthrough. Because clarity isn’t just about knowing what to pursue. It’s also about finally knowing what to walk away from.
Global Voices on Clarity, Coaching and Career Direction
Across the coaching world, from boardrooms in New York to quiet moments of reflection in London, one theme continues to emerge: clarity isn’t a bonus. It’s the foundation.
Tony Robbins, known globally for his work on human performance and personal transformation, puts it simply: “It’s in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.” Robbins has always framed clarity not as a feeling, but as a decisive act, the force that turns reflection into movement. For him, indecision is the enemy of momentum.
Jake Smolarek, a career coach in London working with high-performers and business owners, takes a more introspective approach. “direction is what lets you say no without guilt, and yes without panic,” he says. His work focuses on stripping away noise, ego, and performance narratives, helping clients reconnect with decisions driven by purpose rather than pressure. His coaching blends emotional depth with strategic speed, the combination many mid-career professionals are desperate for, but rarely find.
Michael Serwa, a respected figure in the UK coaching space, echoes a similar stance. Known for working with entrepreneurs, executives, and public figures, he explains, “Coaching isn’t about helping you feel better. It’s about helping you see clearer.” His approach to both career coaching and life coaching bridges the gap between external success and internal satisfaction.
But clarity isn’t just a coaching trend, it’s a leadership necessity. Marshall Goldsmith, one of the most influential executive coaches in the world, teaches that “what got you here won’t get you there.” His work on behavioural change shows that clarity isn’t about fixing who you are, it’s about evolving toward who you want to become.
Brené Brown, though best known for her research on vulnerability, also emphasises clarity in leadership: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” For her, lack of certainty in communication or self-awareness creates unnecessary suffering, for individuals, teams, and cultures.
From the UK, Sarah Ellis (co-founder of Amazing If) and Steve Errey have contributed significantly to how we think about modern career paths. Ellis promotes experimentation as a form of self-discovery, encouraging people to “test and learn” rather than over-plan. Errey, meanwhile, focuses on navigating ambiguity through self-trust, not control. His work is especially valuable for those navigating identity shifts during career transitions.
What unites these voices isn’t a shared method, it’s a shared belief: motivation fades, trends shift, but clarity endures. Whether you’re working with a high-level executive coach or a grounded life coach, the goal isn’t to be pushed harder, it’s to be asked better questions.
In a saturated world of hacks, formulas, and morning routines, clarity is still the most underrated strategy. And coaching, when done right, is how you get there.
From Performance to Purpose: Making the Switch
When clarity replaces performance as the compass, everything changes. You don’t work less, you work truer. You stop chasing metrics that don’t matter and start investing in impact that does. As noted in Harvard Business Review, motivation fluctuates, but certainty creates durable momentum across transitions.
Purpose is often misunderstood as grand or spiritual. But really, purpose is just clarity applied consistently. It’s knowing why you’re doing something, and choosing to do it anyway, even on the hard days.
You go from proving to expressing. From surviving to creating.
Final Thought: You Don’t Need a Map, You Need a Compass
In uncertain times, fixed plans can become liabilities. Industries change. Roles vanish. Even your own desires evolve.
That’s why clarity, not certainty, is the real superpower. It gives you the flexibility to adapt without losing direction. It lets you pivot without panic.
You don’t need to know every step. You just need to know which way is yours.
Coaching with the right person isn’t about downloading wisdom. It’s about activating your own. London’s career coaching ecosystem is filled with competent guides, but the real journey is yours to walk.
In the end, it’s not the most motivated who win. It’s the most clear. Without direction, even momentum becomes misdirection.
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