What you need to know about motivation
Motivation. It’s something you (hopefully!) get when you read the stories I write each week and yet ‘motivation’ is rarely the direct topic.
So let’s talk straight-up about it, shall we?
I hear this so often: “I don’t have any motivation. I need to find motivation.”
People look for it as if they’re searching for an elusive unicorn.
I spent a lot of my life ‘looking’ for motivation too and I actually thought that only some lucky people were gifted with it.
After numerous life experiments and plenty of research here’s what I found:
We are all gifted with motivation! Yeah!
Then what trips us up?
We think that motivation should come first. We should naturally be motivated to get up off the couch and work out (or achieve whatever we are feeling ‘unmotivated’ about) and then we beat ourselves up when we’re not.
This sends us into a downward shame spiral of not measuring up like ‘everyone else’ who appears to be naturally gifted with this unicorn-like gift.
What trips us up is that we’ve got it backward. I don’t believe that motivation comes first. You know what does? TAKING CONSISTENT ACTION.
When you commit to taking consistent small actions you are rewarded with motivation. The more consistent your action the more motivation you create.
MOTIVATION IS THE AWESOME BYPRODUCT OF TAKING ACTION.
You know what else I hear all the time: “I don’t feel like it.”
Bingo. And that’s why you don’t have motivation.
You MUST commit to taking action especially when you don’t feel like it. You must learn to develop your FLI muscle (Feel Like It muscle.)
Let’s be real: Who really ever feels like getting out of a warm bed to go outside in the cold for a run? Egh, pretty much no one. But who feels better, more motivated, and proud of themselves in the end; the person who did it anyway or the person who stayed in bed?
You must get good at talking yourself into instead of out of it.
And, guess what? Since your mind is malleable you do have the power to teach it new tricks.
It might give you a lot of push-back at first but you truly have the power to over-ride its shit talk and show your mind who’s boss.
We argue with ourselves all the time about doing/not doing things but guess what? It takes two people to argue (even if the second person is your mind) so take back your power and FLI!
START today.