Wellness Wednesday: Motivation Personality Type with Dennis Timpanaro of Gotivation

Hey, welcome back, No Problem Parents, to Wellness Wednesday. This episode, gosh, I'm going to end up airing it again on mindset and motivation somewhere down the road because we're really going to be talking about how to motivate yourself. But as we begin the new year, many of us are looking to get back on that diet or that exercise plan, and we're wanting to do that for our kids too. And so in today's episode, Dennis Tipanaro is going to talk to us about all things go-tivation.

And we're pushing ourselves in the new year to eat better, to diet, to exercise, or even do something as simple as going to bed earlier each night. And we might all be sticking with it for a few days. You might make it through the month of January, but then life gets in the way and we slide right back into our old habits. You probably already know what to do.

That's not the issue, but it's cultivating the discipline to follow through and actually do it. And it starts with knowing what truly motivates you. And so in today's episode, Dennis is going to share with us how GoToVation is helping us find the motivation to get healthy and achieve our goals. And it starts with taking the motivational personality quiz, which we have a link in the show notes for that today.

That's going to give you your motivational personality type. I'm excited to introduce you to Dennis today. He is the co-founder and CEO of GoToVation, where they're teaching parents how to get and stay motivated so they can get and stay healthy. Stay tuned for this amazing resource that you have access to right from the comfort of your home.

Welcome to the No Problem Parenting Podcast. From toddler tantrums to teenage eye rolls, this podcast is your go-to for updated and old school tips and tools that are going to help you become the confident leader your kids crave you to be. I'm your host, Jackie Finnaman, a 30-year counselor turned parenting coach, and I've got a lot to share, including hundreds of resources that you have access to right from your home and strategies that are going to boost your confidence and energize you. So whether you're knee deep in diapers or navigating the tween years, or you're launching your child into adulthood, subscribe and share this podcast with your friends, teachers, and daycare providers. We're going to turn your parenting problems into no problem, one episode at a time. Hey, welcome to the show, Dennis.

Thank you, Jackie. This is going to be super fun. And the timing is impeccable. You talk about motivation being a skill.

The two most shocking things about motivation when I started digging into it, right? I'm not the smartest one. I don't have a psychology PhD, but I worked with people that did. I said, help me understand this better. What am I doing wrong here? And the two things that always shocked me are one, motivation is a skill. So these are behavioral skills, right?

When we think of motivation, a lot of people, we've worked with hundreds of people, right? And they go, wow, motivation, you know, it's a bolt of lightning, you know, it's going to strike me and then I'll be motivated and good to go. Or motivation is something you're born with. If you got it or you don't.

Others are, you know, I think, you know, truly motivation is only inside of me and I have it and nothing can change it. It's kind of a fixed mindset. I am motivated. So I'm a motivated person.

And the reality is it's a set of behavioral skills and traits that we've developed over years. it's from kind of really base stuff like your genetics and your socioeconomic status and how you were you know like your where you're born and what you look like and all those things and then also influences so your values your beliefs how you were parented um how you participated on sports maybe your coaches or teachers so some of it's innate but a lot of it are things that you've learned over time and the the key point there is the word learned So if something's a skill, the best thing, I mean, the same thing we teach our kids, right?

If it's a skill, that means you can practice it. You can get better at it. And people go, wait, what? I thought you just motivated or you're not.

And the reality is you can train yourself to be more motivated. The other half of it, Jackie, is that we're all uniquely motivated. So when you see, maybe on Instagram, you're scrolling at night, it's 930, the kids are finally asleep. and you're like, ah, I can't stand this annoying trainer, this coach, this nutritionist, like, you know, just strikes me wrong. That's okay. Their style might not be what resonates with you.

That doesn't mean everybody that is a nutritionist or a coach or a trainer is going to resonate wrong with you. You haven't found the person that matches your motivational personality, your uniqueness. So again, all the upbringing, all those factors that have been built into your life make you uniquely motivated and you need to figure out what that is. I love this. And I think over the years have brought employees in my old job, like bring them to these conferences and things to help them become motivated. And in my mind, I'm thinking there's got to be at least one speaker here that's going to resonate with somebody that's going to fire them up and get them motivated. And ultimately people would say, no, you can't motivate somebody.

You're saying, no, we can learn motivation. And I think this is really helpful with parents who have kids sitting on the couch gaming a lot and not that there's anything wrong with gaming. I actually don't believe that there's anything. I happen to love it. Yeah. Use it in the right way.

Exactly. Exactly. But there are kids who, you know, it's maybe time for them to get a job or they need to do more with studies or, you know, and their parents are saying they're just not motivated. Yeah. And I do think that is, it's kind of a relief, especially for parents, because we do have to teach our kids that too. And we, we struggle with it just as much as everybody else, Learning it ourselves and then teaching it is tough.

But it's kind of a relief to say, okay, they're not just like this, right? There's skills and there's behavioral traits they can learn to get better at being driven or being motivated to do the right things. It is very difficult to motivate someone. It's easier to teach them how to motivate themselves, though.

And that's what we do, right? We're not here. We're not Tony Robbins. And we're out there like, oh, listen to us, and you're going to be motivated, and you're going to be fired up.

We're going to drive out here and go conquer the world. We're saying, let's figure out where you're getting stuck. Let's figure out who you are first. Let's figure out where you're getting stuck.

And then let's work on those skills that will help get you over the hurdle and get you unstuck. And then you can do it whenever you want. Like, you don't need me. You don't need motivation at that point.

You've got the skills that you can apply to yourself or to your kids if they need the help too. Well, and one of the things I love about motivation is that you help people figure out their type of motivational personality. So you talk about the four types of motivational personality. So why don't you break down the four main personalities? Yeah, I'm kind of a nerd for that stuff. Growing up, you know, I love learning about myself, you know, what is it that makes me tick? And that's what inspired the motivational personalities.

And while nobody is one, you know, no matter what quiz you take, whether it's, you know, Disney Princess, or it's a motivational personality test, no one's one thing. But you tend to gravitate towards, you know, a grouping of traits, a grouping of these things. So when you get your motivational personality, go, hey, that's pretty close to me, it should be close. But know that there's always a little bit of gray area, and we're complex human beings.

So there's four types, four main types. The first one is called the laid back learner. And a laid back learner is motivated by variety. They like enjoyment. They like some fun in their health and wellness.

They're not going to wake up at 5 a.m. and go run in the, you know, I'm from Chicago, the outside of Chicago here, so it's freezing cold and dark right now. That's not going to be interesting to them.

If you say we're going to train for a marathon and do the same thing every day for six months, that's kind of a turnoff, right? They're not blood, sweat, and tears. They like enjoyment. They like mixing it up and trying new things, maybe experimenting with some nutrition, experimenting with some programs they like, and, you know, having that rotation that keeps them engaged.

There's other aspects to it, but that's kind of the main gist of laid back learners. The next one is called a partial perfectionist. I'm a partial perfectionist. Emphasis on the partial.

Work hard, play hard is what drives them. So they'll set ambitious goals and they'll work really hard at those goals. And then when they're done, they are off that goal. They are relaxing.

So for example, you might be really diligent with your eating throughout the week. Maybe you have healthy meals. You cook for the family. You know, you're getting your fiber, you're getting your vitamins and your vegetables in.

And then on the weekends, you're getting, you know, double dish pizza and drinking a bottle of wine. And that's it. And you don't care. That's your balance.

You might work really hard for three months, you know, from spring break to summer to get ready to feel comfortable in your body or to go run or race or whatever it is. And then you let your hair down and you're going to have a good time with it. They need those recharge periods and those ups and downs. And they know they'll come back, but they've got to have that balance in their life.

So next up is the discipline doer. So discipline doer is driven by structure, right? Give them a calendar, give them a plan, give them the tracking devices that track all their steps and their VO2 and how much they slept last night. They love that stuff. And they want it to be structured. They want it to move forward, right? They got to follow it to the T.

Um, they don't like randomness. They don't like, uh, you know, the, the variety that we talked about with laid back learners. So kind of the opposite end of the spectrum there. And then last but not least are self-controlled spectators. It's not just a clever name. Self-controlled spectators are about having control. They want agency over their decisions. So they may not want a coach telling them what to do precisely. They might say, give me all the information.

Let me look through my alternatives. Do I want to run? Do I want to do a stretching class? Do I want to do at-home workouts?

Do I want to go on a shake program? And what's the most beneficial to me? And what will fit within my schedule? And I'm going to make the call of what I do.

And conversely, they also make decisions about what they're not doing. And they're very protective of that. They're not going to sign up for a whole bunch of random programs that they know they're going to put 50% into. They're going to just say no.

And that's the end of it. You won't get them in or out on those ones. So agency control decision-making is really important. It motivates them to feel like they've got that control in their life.

There's an interesting piece. So we have a psychologist on our team that helps us because I'm not a psychologist. And he explained this to me at one point. He said, of course, you know, people are complex.

And not only can you be, you know, shades of each personality, you might resonate mostly with one, but you could be a little of the other. But they also change a little over time. So you might not have this like sea change of you were this one person, now you're totally different. But think about it. A lot of parents on the podcast here, obviously, were athletes growing up, maybe played a sport in high school, or maybe continued on to college. And then lo and behold, a job and kids later, you're not a disciplined doer at this point.

You're not waking up at 5 a.m. every day and shooting free throws or, you know, bouncing the ball back and forth. You're not lifting after school.

You're not traveling to tournaments. You don't have a regimented diet anymore because life changed a bit. So you may be like, well, at one point it was a discipline tour. Now I am more laid back.

I do need to enjoy this or I don't know if I can stick with it or I need more flexibility because I can't fit it in every single day. Life is too busy. So it's okay. There is no wrong personality.

but think about where you are in your life too and see, does that resonate with what's happened to me lately? I like to think again, since these are skills, we're generally talking about like strengths and opportunities. So in general, when we're, when we're trying to help people say, how are you going to stick to whatever program you want to do? We're agnostic, but say you want to start going to yoga classes in the new year. And you're like, yeah, but I know I'm going to get bored of yoga in three months or in three weeks because I'm a laid back learner. We'll say, all right, well, let's lean into your strengths. Your strengths are you like variety and you like trying new things. So if you're going to immediately put yourself in a situation where you're restricted and it's only one thing, you're working against yourself. Why don't we think about something you can sign up for that has variety built in? There's maybe three different types of classes each week you could take. Or maybe there's a streaming platform that's not just yoga,

right? For yogis, it is, you know, 15 types of workouts for busy parents. So the first thing is lean into your strengths, find the things that work with your personality and go that direction. But sometimes we get stuck. And sometimes we get stuck because there's just some of those opportunities, right? You're kind of your blind spots is another way to look at them or anchors, they're slowing you down, they're holding you back, there might be one or two of those that are really holding you back and you get stuck on them. And it trips you up every couple weeks.

and what I recommend is, you know, with motivation we help, but try to reflect on your own and say, what are the traits that I'm really not feeling confident in? And it could be, ironically, confidence. It could be grit or determination, right? I just struggle to stick with one thing for a while. It could be your self-control, right? If you're trying to go on a very restrictive nutrition program for lots of reasons and you struggle with self-control, that's probably tripping you up, right? So lean into your strengths, but find those one to two opportunities that might be just constantly, you know, you're just falling on your face on them and you want to get up and keep trying again. That's where you can get some help. I think there's a stat out there that two thirds of gym memberships go completely unused. Like they buy them, they go,

and then they don't return, which is disappointing. You know, that's not money you want to waste and that's not how you want to feel. So let's dive into the quiz a little bit more. When somebody takes the quiz, they're going to answer about what, 30 questions or so? 30 questions, about five minutes. Five minutes to do this. And then it's going to send you a report and you can choose a free version of this, right? You can just get your, it's going to give you your personal personality type and your superpower, or you can, for 20 bucks, you can pay to get the full report. Yep, absolutely. And the full report, first of all, if you just want to know your personality, just go, go get the free report. That's why we made it. We want people at least have the vernacular to say,

this is how I'm generally motivated and this is who I am and start the dialogue. If you want to go deep, right? If you go, look, I am all about discovering who I am and self improvement. That's why we made the big report. And the big report is a digital report of 30 some pages. It's interactive. You can actually click to the different sections. You can highlight topics that are important to you and go back to them and bookmark things. But it's everything from what motivates you and what doesn't, to activities you might like, activities you might want to stay away from, to different points in life, right? How to activate your personality.

So say you just had a kid, or say you're going through changes at work, or maybe you're a caretaker for someone in your family. There's these different scenarios where your personality is going to be, I'd say, reflected in different ways. The other one that I think is really helpful for the new year is where you are in your journey. So are you just getting started? And if you're just getting started, what should you do if you're a laid-back learner? If you are, you know, like you're going strong, you've got a couple of months under your belt, you're feeling good, what do you do now? How do you keep the momentum going? Or if you're like us and you fell off the wagon, it's, you know, quitter's day on January 13th, what do you do to get back up and minimize that downtime so you don't feel as bad about yourself and you continue to take care of your body and your mind?

So that's what the detailed report gets into. And if you're really into that level of depth, it's worth checking out. We've had a few couples take this together. And I always like hold my breath and go, Oh, I don't know. Or like, is this going to be used to judge each other?

Is someone going to feel embarrassed about it? And what it does instead of all those things, thank God, is that it opens up a dialogue. I'm asking you to work out with me, but you're not interested in like going to the gym and lifting weights six times a week. That's so boring and unmotivating to you. What if we do this thing together, right? Or I've been asking you to go to a class with me and you're very introverted. You're a solo, not a squad. You want to do this alone. You don't want to be in front of a group of 20 other women. How can I flex the way I'm taking care of my body to also bring you along in the journey? I didn't expect that at all.

No, it's super cool. We talked about the personality types, but we haven't gotten into your superpower. So after it generates your personality type, then it tells you what your superpower is. How do you determine that? And what is that? Sure. So superpower is a call, like a subset of your motivational personality. It is your strongest skill. It's your strongest skill. So what we like to do, of course, is highlight that all of us have skills already in us, right? No one's starting from zero. No one's starting from scratch. We just did a webinar.

It was like a two-day challenge about superpowers. And what we were telling parents, because everybody on the call was apparent, was we don't want to try to teach you something new in the busiest time of the year, whether it's the holidays or then next there'll be spring break and then it'll be summer, right? There's always a time. We want to help activate something you already have and just remind you how to use it and that you have used it before.

So that's a superpower, your strongest trait. It can range, I won't go through all of them, but it can range from self-control to grit, which is determination and focus on a very specific goal to achievement. The idea of I love self-mastery. I love shiny metals.

I like achieving something that I haven't previously done before that drives me. So leaning on that superpower is a great first place to start because you know you've got that skill and it's a strong one. What are sort of the next steps then once you get this report? So yeah, so right now we have the motivational personality report.

We suggest everybody starts there. We're doing two things and a couple new ones starting in the new year. So we had a program that used to be called Motivated in a Month. It was pretty popular and we honestly like we couldn't scale it to fit all the people that were using it.

So we've actually recreated a program called Ignite Your Motivation. And after you've taken that personality quiz and you realize who you are, you hop into Ignite Your Motivation. And in 10 days, we work with you to uncover where you've been getting stuck. Right. There's something that's been tripping up.

There's some anchor that's just holding you back. and in 10 days we go through you know potentially years of history and figure out okay what is it that is most likely holding you back after that you flip into uh motivation training and that while that sounds really nerdy uh and maybe it is i don't know someone's probably laughing right now uh the idea that you can train your brain is a very real thing so we take those those areas where you're getting hung up and you go look yeah i dennis i realize that i just i don't have confidence anymore. I haven't done this in years, right? I haven't been to the gym in years or I've started to stop so many times I don't believe in myself anymore. We go, great, now we can train that, right? Confidence is also a skill. There are many different activities and games,

I call them missions too, that will send you on to increase your confidence. And once you've trained that up, we measure it. There's points, it's kind of gamified, if you will. Then you can retake your initial personality quiz and then we measure how much your confidence has grown.

And spoiler alert, it grows, right? I mean, they're all things backed by research. You can train up these skills. And if you get bored, you're like, great.

I feel really good about my confidence now. I want to learn how to have a better growth mindset. So I can have a growth mindset and I can teach my kids. Great.

Let's go in the growth mindset training. And then you go through the training and work your way through it as well. The report's the perfect starting point. And we also have a coach on our team that can help with some one-on-one stuff, just to kind of keep you moving and make sure you feel like you've been heard.

I absolutely love this. at No Problem Parenting, step one is to seek first to understand, you know, why am I behaving the way, why are my kids behaving the way they are, and why am I responding or reacting the way I am, but we like to get to the root of whatever the problem is. No problems, right in the definition of the word problem, it says problems are meant to be dealt with and overcome, so that's what we do here at No Problem Parenting, and we're here to help parents become the confident leaders I say our kids crave us to be. So motivation is all like, it just aligns so well with our, our message and our mission and confidence is, is a skill in and of itself. And we can learn to be more confident. Not only is it going to help you as a parent become confident, but you're going to be able to pass that on to your kids to model that for your kids. Before we wrap up, how do we teach our kids to stay motivated and have a healthy mindset? Yeah, that's a really good question.

And again, I'm not a practitioner. So I want to just share from my experience and what we know, So one of the things that attracted me to no problem parenting was you talk about these skills like confidence is such an important one. And I think of a couple of skills that our kids struggle with that we're trying to teach them. And we have help, too. We have coaches and we have other people that help them in their lives.

But the top two, I would probably say, are confidence and growth mindset. If I were to pick two of any of the skills that we've got listed, we have, I think, 10 or 11 that we offer. Those would be the two that matter the most to me right now for them. and the confidence is everything from how do you help them battle negative self-talk and we all have it we all have it i mean i i have it before i even get on a podcast like this no one's going to want to talk about motivation everyone's busy right now no one's going to listen so i i have those thoughts and i have to learn how to work through them i know your kids have them i know my kids have them everyone's kids have them so that's the first one i would say work with them on a couple specific skills that you've learned like negative self-talk and confidence the other one I said is growth mindset. And I see this in some of our clients. Maybe they aren't clients actually, because they don't sign up because they go, well, I can't, I'm not learning things anymore.

I'm 40 years old. I'm 50 years old. I'm not in school anymore. My job is to teach kids and make sure they do their homework and make sure they move on in life. I'm not learning skills for myself anymore. And as you know, that's a very fixed mindset approach. I can't grow. I can't learn. I'm too old to do this stuff. And we have to remind people that that is also a skill and a state of mind. You can learn to have a growth mindset again and to jump into new things and to have curiosity and to be interested in self-improvement. And if you can do that with your kids from a young age, they're unstoppable. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it helps when we are curious, when we're doing things out of the norm and behaving in different ways and trying new things and all that, our kids become curious about us. Anytime any of us are curious,

we're in that front part of our brain, that prefrontal cortex, the logic part of our brain. and not in the back part, the fight, flight, or freeze part of our brains. Just, I absolutely love everything about this. How can people get started with Gotovation?

Yeah, it's easy. Head to gotovation.com, click the start quiz in the top right, and find your personality. All right.

This has been so awesome. This has been super fun. And for all the parents out there that are like me, that are overwhelmed right now, and probably into the new year, go easy on yourself. Go easy on yourself.

You're doing your best. So don't be too tough. I love that. I appreciate you coming on the show today.

We are definitely going to talk again. Parents, make sure you're heading on over to gotovation.com to learn more information. Thanks so much for being on the show.

Appreciate it, Jackie. And parents, after Dennis and I finished up our conversation, he gave us a special discount code for 20% off your Gotovation report. So you can go to gotovation.com backslash start dash quiz.

And if you want to get that full report, you enter the code, no problem parenting. and you'll get 20% off. Thanks so much, Dennis. All right, that's it for today's episode of the No Problem Parenting Podcast.

Hey, thanks guys for tuning in. If you found value in today's episode, click the subscribe button and share it with other parents who might need a little boost. Stay connected on our socials by following at No Problem Parents for more parenting tips and get your free download of the 60 ways to respond to your kids without losing your cool. Go to noproblemparents.com.

Until next time, remember your confidence comes from embracing both successes and setbacks. So take a deep breath, embrace the chaos, and remember, you got this. Thank you.