Three tips for maintaining motivation
I recently read a quote that goes something like this, “There are three reasons why people change: They have learned a lot, they have suffered a lot, and/or they are tired of the same thing.” I find that people often come into counseling and seek to change for at least one, and many times all three of these reasons. Regardless, the driving force behind change is commonly pain or some variation of it. It’s in human nature to want to avoid pain. It’s what we do. So we seek change in the form of more happiness, stress relief, or to be healthier. Initially pain can be a very motivating and powerful force to propel us toward change. However, using pain, punishment, or self-loathing as a form of motivation to change is not a helpful tactic. In fact, it can be very damaging in the long term. Other times, our pain can be overwhelming and crippling. I often hear people say, “There’s so much. I just don’t even know where to start.”
Luckily, there are people and programs who can help you build on your desire to change and identify places to start. My goal as a therapist and coach who specializes in weight loss and behavior change is to address common problems to sustaining that motivation. This is not meant to be an instructional guide, because I don’t believe there can ever be a generic step-by-step program that fully captures the process of change because we are all unique. Each person is unique, each goal is unique to that person, and each person’s journey is unique. That being said, there are some common themes in how we encounter roadblocks to happiness and success that we all experience in our own ways. I’ve summed up how to maintain motivation in 3 points:
Planning is doing. Thinking is doing. Thinking about doing is doing.
Before you can run, you first learn to crawl.
The same is true for changing behavior.
Before we can move into action, we must prepare ourselves for action. I recently started to commit myself to a green smoothie a day. Instead of starting on “day 1”, I planned a “day 0” where I made a special trip to the grocery store and gathered up at least a week’s worth of food. This way I wasn’t overwhelmed on day 1 and couldn’t give myself any valid excuse for not following through with my goal.
Reminding ourselves that thinking about doing is a step towards action can help ward off feelings of discouragement that we “haven’t done anything”, which ultimately leads to less motivation to engage in a behavior and decreased sense of efficacy. Give yourself more credit!
(**Check back in a few weeks for more on this topic, why I don’t believe in willpower and the stages of change.**)
2. DO LESS
If you haven’t seen the movie, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, rent it this weekend.
There’s a scene in that movie that I refer to often. It’s the scene where the heartbroken and depressed Peter is in Hawaii trying to get over his break-up with Sarah (who ends up being there also) and he signs up for surf lessons in an attempt to break out of his depression.
While trying to teach Peter to stand up on the board, the instructor yells at him to, “Do less!”, meaning to move more slowly and break down the motion of standing up into a more fluid and simple process. Eventually, Peter just lays on the board not moving at all, to which the instructor says something like, “Well, you’ve gotta do a little more than that.”
This is a familiar place we often find ourselves within the journey of creating new behaviors. We try and try and try, until we don’t know what else to do. So we blame ourselves for the failure and we get stuck in either the same cycle or resign to doing nothing. But there is great wisdom in the art of doing less.
Another trick to behavior change is to break your goal behavior down into smaller and smaller steps. We don’t often realize that the goals we set for ourselves can be scary, daunting, and sometimes lofty. Break your goal into small measurable, attainable, and realistic action steps. Even when you think you’ve broken down your goal into the smallest steps, think again. Break them down further.
When you feel like you’ve tried everything and you’re trying your hardest, but still not seeing the results you wanted, do less. Take your foot off the gas. Lay down on your surfboard and stand up slower. Take a step back and decide to take one small step at a time. Acknowledge it as progress. Then master the little steps and acknowledge those steps as significant.
Mastering the building blocks will help you build confidence, and motivation, and provide a base to return to if (and when, because let’s face it, we are all only human and stuff happens that throws us off track all the time!) roadblocks happen.
3. HAVE A BEGINNER’S MIND
Try. Fail. Forgive. Try again. Fail again. Forgive again. Repeat.
It’s okay if you feel disappointed or upset with yourself if you fall off course. That means you care about yourself and your goals. Learning to detach and forgive ourselves for mistakes or struggles is one of the most valuable aspects of the change process.
When we fail, we can see it as an opportunity to learn something about ourselves and our journey. When we can focus on increasing the capacity for resilience, we increase positive emotional experiences and thus increase general life satisfaction (Cohn, Fredrickson, Brown, Mikels, & Conway, 2009). This study also suggests that happy people become more satisfied not simply because they feel better, but because they develop resources for living well.
When we fail, we build resilience. And that resilience will take us farther in our process towards becoming the best version of ourselves than any step-by-step or generic process can ever take us.
REFERENCES
Happiness Unpacked: Positive Emotions Increase Life Satisfaction by Building Resilience
Michael A. Cohn, Barbara L. Fredrickson, Stephanie L. Brown, Joseph A. Mikels, Anne M. Conway
Emotion. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2011 June 29.