What If Motivation Isn’t the Problem?

I took this photo after completing a 10K race this weekend. Looking at it afterwards, I realised it captured the theme of this week’s newsletter perfectly. Most people assume regular exercisers are motivated. The truth is often rather different.

This week I have spent a lot of time talking to clients about weight loss, exercise and the obstacles that get in the way of change. It’s part of my new Health and Energy reset programme that combines coaching with personal training.

The programme begins with a session where we explore fitness goals, what has and haven’t worked in the past, and perhaps most importantly, the beliefs people are carrying that may be making the journey harder than it needs to be.

One conversation stayed with me.

A client told me she felt frustrated, defeated and increasingly powerless around her health goals. She wanted to lose weight, improve her fitness and feel better in herself, but she couldn’t seem to stick to going to the gym.

“It all comes down to motivation,” she said. “And I’m just not motivated”, she sighed with a look of despair.

She then started listing people she knew who exercised regularly. They seemed disciplined, committed and, from the outside at least, as though they genuinely enjoyed it.

“They’re motivated,” she said. “That’s why they do it. And I’m not”

I asked her how she knew that they are motivated.

She looked at me slightly quizzically.

“Well, it’s obvious. Why else would they do it?”

I asked whether there might be an assumption hidden inside that belief. She thought about it for a moment but quickly returned to the same conclusion.

Surely people who exercise consistently must feel motivated otherwise they wouldn’t do it.

So I asked her a different question.

“Tell me something else in your life that you do regularly even when you don’t feel motivated.”

She laughed. Going to work, paying bills, doing the housework, looking after family members and honouring commitments she had made to other people all featured on the list. In fact, much of adult life seemed to consist of doing important things whether motivation was present or not.

As she spoke, she began to hear the contradiction for herself. She already understood that feelings were not a prerequisite for action in almost every other area of her life. Somehow exercise had become the exception.

The belief she had been carrying was that motivation comes first and action follows.

If she didn’t feel motivated to exercise, then it made sense to stay at home and wait for motivation to arrive.

I shared something that tends to surprise clients. Although I am a qualified personal trainer, exercise several times a week and regularly run 10K races, I would estimate that I feel genuinely motivated to exercise perhaps ten per cent of the time.

The remaining ninety per cent is rarely motivation. It is habit, routine, commitment and the knowledge that I will almost certainly feel better afterwards. Sometimes it is simply that I have put my trainers on before my brain has had a chance to negotiate with me.

What I have learned from fitness training, coaching and my own life is that motivation is often the result of action rather than the cause of it.

The psychologist Albert Bandura spent decades studying what he called self-efficacy, our belief in our ability to succeed.

His research suggested that confidence is built through what he termed “mastery experiences”, taking action, navigating challenges and discovering that we can cope. We tend to think confidence produces action. More often, action produces confidence.

The same principle applies to motivation.

We imagine motivated people take action. Often it is the action that creates the motivation.

Once you start looking for this pattern, you see it everywhere.

The aspiring author who tells themselves they are not disciplined enough to write a book, the professional who dreams of a career change but concludes they are not confident enough, the recently divorced person who wants to date again but believes they need to feel more secure first, or the entrepreneur who keeps waiting until they feel ready to launch a business.

Different circumstances, but the same underlying assumption: that a feeling must arrive before action can begin.

Yet when you speak to people who have written the book, changed the career, started the business or found a new relationship, a different picture usually emerges.

Most of them felt uncertain when they began. Many felt frightened. Some felt completely out of their depth. They did not act because they felt ready. They acted despite not feeling ready, and through taking action they gradually became the person they were waiting to be.

This is one of the biggest shifts I see in coaching. People often assume successful people possess qualities they themselves lack. Motivation. Confidence. Discipline. Courage.

In reality, the difference is often much less dramatic than that.

Successful people experience doubt, fear and resistance just like everyone else. The difference is not that they feel better; it is that they have learned not to treat those feelings as instructions. They understand that emotions contain useful information, but they do not necessarily dictate what action should come next.

What I have learned, often the hard way, is that many of the feelings we spend our lives waiting for are found on the other side of action.

We wait to feel motivated before exercising, confident before speaking up, brave before making a change, and ready before beginning. We tell ourselves that once the feeling arrives, the action will follow. Yet again and again I see the opposite happen.

People take the first uncomfortable step and only then discover confidence, motivation or courage beginning to emerge.

Perhaps motivation isn’t the problem.

Perhaps the problem is that we have been taught to wait for a feeling that was never meant to arrive first.

Motivation usually comes after the first step, not before.

Notice one goal you have been postponing because you do not feel motivated. Ask yourself what story you have been telling yourself about that lack of motivation.

Choose one action that takes less than ten minutes and do it before you feel ready. Focus on taking the step rather than changing the feeling.

At the end of the week, reflect on something you did despite resistance. Notice whether your motivation increased after you began rather than before.

I'd love to hear your experience. Have you ever discovered that motivation arrived after you started rather than before?

Until next time,

Katinka

Helping you go from Stuck to Unstoppable

www.kbnlifecoaching.co.uk