Getting up in the morning and feeling excited to take on the day is a feeling we all want to have in our lives.
Most people, however, don’t experience this excitement beyond the first month of starting a new habit, a new business, or any new endeavor. They get distracted quickly and within a relatively short period of time they’re off track.
All the work that went into sticking to a new diet is now gone. The hours of planning and the cooking and the selection of healthy food just got thrown out of the window. You’ve lapsed back into your old ways and now you’re back to square one.
That’s a frustrating experience.
But why does that happen?
In this post, I will explain the reason for this sudden loss of motivation and offer solutions that can help you become more consistent.
1. Personal Motivation
Feeling motivated to do something means that you’re inspired to take action. That is you have some form of incentive that’s pushing you forward. And the incentive that inspires people to take action is having compelling reasons to act and follow through.
But as I said in the introduction of this post, people don’t need much motivation when they start something new. They’re all excited to start the race.
In fact, if you watch any given race, you can’t tell from the get-go who is going to make it to the finish line and who is not. In fact, when all the athletes are lined up, it appears as though everyone has the same amount of determination to finish first. But that’s only in the beginning.
The same goes for personal motivation. The first week (or month) everyone joins a gym, and it appears to the casual observer that everyone is determined to do whatever it takes to reach their goal. But just like a race, you will quickly notice who has what it takes to reach their goals, and who doesn’t.
In fact, as soon as the second month rolls around, most people are not inspired anymore. They no longer feel motivated to go to the gym and they start revising their commitments and feeling bored, overwhelmed, stressed, and lazy. They eventually and inevitably give up.
So why do people lose motivation and how can we correct that?
2. Compelling Vision
People lose motivation because the vision they created for themselves and the reasons they have for sticking to their goals are no longer compelling. Their original vision and their original reasons are not doing the work to push them into taking more action. They’ve become stale; so to speak.
But that’s natural.
Every reason you have for action has a certain lifetime beyond which it loses its thrust. And while some reasons can motivate you to take consistent action for a day or two, other reasons can motivate you to take action for a longer time period. For example, saying to yourself “lose 20 pounds to look better” can motivate you to go sign up for a gym membership and possibly stick to going regularly for a few weeks or so, but you probably won’t stick to it for the long term based on that reason alone. You can also say to yourself “lose 20 pounds to reduce health risks including heart disease” and this reason can motivate you to go to the gym more regularly and for probably a little longer than the first reason, but you will also eventually stop if you only rely on this reason alone.
That’s why I recommend that you update your reasons frequently.
Every now and then you have to express your reasons using new and vivid vocabulary. Inject more emotions and mental images into your reasons. Find people that are working on the same goal and learn from their experience. Find role models that you respect and learn more about the strategies that they use.
You have to update and even upgrade your reasons as you go along the journey. You have to create short-term goals along with long-term goals.
Doing so allows you to create a fortress of reasons against negative thoughts and feelings. You’re also adding more substance to each reason in a way that increases its lifetime. And that’s one of the keys to staying on track.
3. Identity
People don’t stay motivated because their goals are not aligned with their concept of self.
If you want to lose weight just to look good for others, your level of commitment to your goal won’t be as high as the person who thinks of herself as an athlete. For the person who thinks of herself as an athlete, going to the gym is something she does because it’s part of her belief-system. It’s part of her identity. It’s who she is.
Try to answer these questions:
- How important is the goal that I have self for myself to me?
- Can I see myself without having this goal or habit in my life?
- What are the effects that I will experience when I reach my goal?
- Am I pursuing this goal in order to receive an external reward?
I ask these questions because these were the very questions that I have asked myself. And I noticed that results came much faster when I connected my sense of identity to my goals. The goals that I wanted to achieve became indispensable to who I am and who I wanted to become.
4. Continuity
If you work on you goal but you don’t take the steps you should take on a consistent basis, you will screw up your momentum and disrupt the process.
All too often, people have a good plan in their hands, they’re rightly motivated, but they often skip practice. One week they’re out there grinding, and next week they become preoccupied with the things they have to attend to.
Now I understand that you have other commitments that need your attention, and they might well be urgent commitments, but the reality of the matter is if you skip practice and you’re inconsistent, you will most likely never going to see results.
The process of seeing change is slow. It takes small incremental and consistent steps for you to begin to change an area of your life. And if that’s something you can’t do, you will remain stuck.
You have to make a conscious effort every day to put yourself in a position to take action. Every little step counts, so even if you can’t fully practice on certain days, at least make sure to put in a little bit of time to keep the momentum going. The important thing is to not stop.