How To Activate Your Motivation Cycle

If you’ve been struggling with sticking to your fitness and nutrition routines recently, I am going to break down why this is happening and what you can do about it to get back on track.

Let’s start here. This is the cycle of motivation:

Action leads to results, which leads to motivation, which leads to further action.

➡️ We take action, like doing a workout

➡️ Which results in us feeling good afterwards

➡️ So we’re motivated to do another workout

But this can work the other way too.

➡️ We eat a whole sleeve of Oreos at 10pm

➡️ Which results in us feeling guilty about it afterwards

➡️ We’re less motivated to stick to our diet the next day because we feel like we keep screwing it up

The key to this is that we are not in charge of the motivation piece. It is the by product of the actions we take and the results we see from those actions. So, we have to take action independent of our motivation.

But what happens when we’re doing our workouts and sticking with our nutrition and we’re still not motivated to keep going with it?

Then, the problem comes from the results portion of the cycle. And this is important because we think we are only in charge of the actions, but, we are actually also in charge of the results.

Here’s why:

If we are motivated to take action but we are not seeing the results that we want, then there are two problems that could be going on:

1. We have unrealistic expectations of the results

For example, we think we are going to lose 5 lbs in a week. When this doesn’t happen, we lose our motivation to keep trying because we think we aren’t going to get the results we want. So, we need to set realistic expectations for ourselves so we are not inevitably demotivated.

2. We aren’t paying attention to the results that we’re getting

For example, the other day my son helped his sister build something she was struggling with. Now, he didn’t get a ton of feedback from her (she’s 2) so it would be easy for him to miss the results of his action and not be motivated to take more action again. So, I praised him for that action he took, which sparked him to do it again.

We need to do the same thing for ourselves. We need to draw attention to the results that we are getting that we may be glossing over, because they are going to give us more motivation to continue to take action.

If you want to dive deeper into the tactics to help activate your motivation cycle and how to set yourself up for positive results, check out this podcast episode.