Before I get into motivation, I want to tell you why I think habits are super interesting things. Sure, they can help you accomplish your goals if you design them correctly. Sure, they can help you make big changes in your life. To me, the most incredible element of habits is that they're automatic once developed. Once you have an established habit, you quite literally don't have to think about it anymore. Your mind goes on autopilot and does what it has to do, leaving your brain to focus on more pressing issues like making decisions and keeping your safe.
So, habits are a kind of like taking a mind-breather. They're freeing up our bandwidth. This is what I love, love, love. Anything we can do to make things easier on our overtaxed minds is an absolute win in my book.
Which gets me to today's topic: motivation. BJ Fogg's book "Tiny Habits" excellently lays out his research into habits and habit building strategies and it's more or less split into three big factors: motivation, ability, and prompt. You will be most successful with developing any new habit when both motivation and ability are high (basically, you WANT to do it and you CAN do it) and then create a really good prompt to get you to do the behavior.
This is the crux, though. Motivation is slippery as hell. You can create a bulletproof prompt and have an incrdible ability level but based on the day (or the hour or the minute) your motivation can be all over the map. If you're unmotivated, you just aren't going to do it. Period, full stop. Think about starting a new routine going to the gym. You find a gym that's right down the street from work, so it's super easy to get to. Ability is high. You plan to go on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday right after work ends, so there's your prompt. But then, when the clock strikes five you find that you're exhausted from your day at work and your motivation is nil. Are you going to force yourself to go to the gym?
The big question then becomes "How do we keep our motivation up?" Seriously, this is a huge question. When I see people try and fail at something it's usually because their motivation is all over the map. Once you fall off the horse, it's a bit harder to get back up on there.
There are some good thoughts on this.
The first is to pick a new habit that actually seems like fun to you, because you're going to be motivated to do something fun. Let's go back to my gym example from earlier. You might feel unmotivated to go spend 30 minutes on an ellipical machine, which is boring to you. But what if your gym has some really fun classes? Maybe you're into dancing and they offer Zumba, for example.
The second is to focus on the big picture. Let's say your reason for wanting to work out is to get yourself ready for beach season and you already bought the bathing suit you want to wear and ROCK on the beach. Sure, in the moment of being exhausted after work, you might not want to go, but if you remember the bigger picture you might be able to maintain your motivation. (Sidenote: If you're looking to exercise with a particular body goal in mind, consider finding a photo of someone with the desired physique and put it on the home screen of your phone.)
The third is to get others to do things with you. I have a client who is an elderly man and his goal has been to maintain walking 10,000 steps every day. He started an association of people in his neighborhood and they have their own facebook page where they post their daily step counts. They support each other and walk together and by and large, he's maintained his step count along the way!
The fourth is to make sure you celebrate, celebrate, celebrate. I've talked about this before on the blog, but celebrating your habit before and immediately after you do it creates new neural pathways in your mind. Even if what you're trying to do is super small, like washing your plate immediately after a meal, taking a few seconds to celebrate will help keep you on track.
The last motivator I'm going to talk about today has to do with how I started the article, which is to remember how you're working to make this process automatic. This may seem like a weird motivator, but once you've crossed the hump of turning a behavior into a habit it simply becomes second nature. Take a moment to appreciate that. I know that any process I can automate in my life, I want to take advantage of because it's one less thing that I have to worry about. So, when you're feeling unmotivated, take a moment to consider how fantastic it will be to not have to consciously make the decision to do this thing every day. Let yourself go on autopilot!
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