The Secret to Motivation

I hear the word motivation get thrown around a lot when it comes to health and fitness and I truly think it hinders people more then it helps them. Using motivation as a reason that you might or might not change comes from a lack of understanding of why people change. People generally change at 3 points in life: 

• When they hurt enough that they have to change.
• When they learn enough that they want to change.
• When they receive enough that they are able to change.

If you think back to time in your life where you have made great changes chances are you were at one of these points.

So, if you often find yourself putting off health and fitness changes due to motivation have a think, why do I need to be motivated to start at this goal? Chances are if you will only work on that thing when your motivated that thing might not actually matter to you at all. A better question you might ask yourself in this situation is: out of 10 how important is this to me? Keep in mind a 10/10 is something like the air you breathe, if it was gone for some reason, it would be the only thing in the world that mattered to you.

In fact, I would go as far to say that the more the word motivation comes up in the conversation around your goal the less likely you are to achieve it. Really it should come down to how important is it to you out of 10 and how confident are you in the following system you have put in place in order to achieve it out of 10?

The problem with motivation is it waivers for no reason and isn’t a measurable metric around not achieving a goal. That’s not to say you can’t have bad days where you don’t feel your best, but make the conversation around why that’s the case and understanding what processes you have in place to make sure you’re having more good days then bad days.

You don’t rise to the level of your motivation you fall to the level of your processes. So, to finish my top tips for this subject are:

1. Processes over motivation.
2. Check in each week with yourself as to how important the goal is to you specifically this week using a 1-10 scale as weeks get busier and adversity hits priorities will change.
3. Write down what achieving the goal will do for you then write down the weekly tasks you need to do to achieve that goal and see if its worth it sometimes we want something but the week-to-week tasks of achieving that thing aren’t worth it. Everything has a cost and when we set goals, we often don’t assess the cost associated which ends up with us lacking motivation.