Motivation is an odd emotion/mindset to have if you really sit there and think about it. Where does it come from? How is it created inside the body? No matter what the answer to those questions maybe, we each experience and utilize motivation differently and create many varieties of projects with the motivation that we have. Sometimes it’s hard to stay motivated and then other times, it’s easy but we can’t stay motivated ALL the time. Or can we? There are more than a few people who are claiming that staying motivated 100% of the time is not only an ability that people can tap into but that it is also necessary for creativity and innovation to occur. How to we let this happen?

Anybody who has studied psychology or human conditioning is going to tell you first that motivation is a mindset, plain and simple. The more you concentrate on becoming motivated, the more you will exude and give off those qualities. It’s like some sort of immersion therapy, you have to drown yourself in the ‘can-do’ spirit and let it wash over you like water off a duck’s back. After practicing that simple mind trick, you will start to conform to it. Sounds easy, right? Well, if it were only. It’s true that doing something over and over again does condition that brain to begin thinking and acting accordingly but with motivation, it’s more like a ride on a roller coaster. It starts out smooth but eventually there’s a lot of bumpy twists and sharp turns you find yourself going through. Motivation oddly enough, comes to us after beginning a new behavior, not before. Motivation is often the result of an action that we’ve taken, not the cause of it.

Many times, people often struggle to find the motivation to start a task or continuing to finish it because of the time they’re wasting on parts of the project that aren’t as important as you might think. This is why ‘scheduling’ your motivation in necessary for success in whatever you’re tackling. Tons of people never get around to writing a book, an essay or even a journal article because they usually never have the time or create a schedule for the writing process to happen. This is why scheduling motivation should be just as important. Motivation by definition isn’t something that just happens, there is an antecedent that causes it to become active in our bodies and brains. How does one ‘schedule’ motivation? Well, it can look like this,

This sounds weird, at least I thought so when I first started doing research, but words have a profound effect on our brains and if we phrase our motivation just right during our scheduling period of it, it is more apt to work. Setting schedules is great and all but if you really want to knock your motivation mindset into high gear, your schedule will become a ritual.

You journal about what it is that you want to become motivated about that day, you meditate on it, and then execute it. When you do this, it can look something like this:

“I begin each day of my life with a ritual; I wake up at 5:30 A.M., grab a shower, a quick breakfast of oatmeal and a banana and go to the LA Fitness downtown where I’m going to put myself through a heavy upper body workout.” The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each morning at the gym; the ritual is the ride to the gym in the car. The moment I pull the car out of the driveway, I have completed the ritual. It’s a simple act but doing it the same way each morning habitualizes it — makes it repeatable, easy to do. It reduces the chance that I would skip it or do it differently. It is one more item in my arsenal of routines, and one less thing to think about.

Follow the Goldilocks Rule.

As humans, we often find that tasks which are too hard or too easy are ones that we really don’t gravitate to as much or we don’t even think about because they either are too mundane and ordinary or that they aren’t even worth the headache of trying to complete it. The ones most humans are more apt to follow-through with are the tasks that are ‘just right’. Working on these just right tasks are one way to adhere to motivation during the day because completion of these tasks keeps you focused on finishing more tasks more thoroughly and with more detail.

If your motivation fades, what do you do…..what do you do!? The first thing you should do is to keep in mind that your brain kind of resembles a suggestion machine. As I type this, it’s 8:52 AM on a Friday morning and I’ve been awake since 3:30 AM. My brain is getting into that space where taking a nap while it’s chilly and rainy outside sounds seductively delicious right about now but my mind is also suggesting that completing this blog entry is going to feel good because I will have accomplished something else this morning aside from training clients and completed my paperwork. Just remember that this cognitive argument between parts of your brain and body is temporary and won’t last. For example, this blog article won’t take me forever to write, it’ll be done within the next few minutes so why let yourself get bummed out about looking forward to all the other things I have to do this morning?

Life is easier than it has ever been for us. 3000 years ago, people literally had to go out and kill the food that they were going to eat instead to driving to the grocery store and paying for it in a self-checkout line. This is life in 2023 and as difficult as we tend to make it most of the time, it’s really not at all. We have endless options at our fingertips to assist us through the majority of our problems so it shouldn’t be too difficult to stay motivated, at least on the surface level of things. Life does get in the way and bad things do happen, so it’s totally understandable that most of us can become de-motivated at some point, it’s just the way life is. If it was positive 100% of the time, we wouldn’t and couldn’t be able to appreciate the awesome things when they happen.

So today, how are you going to get and stay motivated?

John J. Schessler, Jr. is a Pittsburgh-based Personal Trainer, Writer, Life Coach and Psychology Major with a Mental Health concentration at Southern New Hampshire University. He has work that has been featured in reports from the BBC in London as well as being a published Podcast creator/host of the upcoming show, “Flip Your Script”. He has been working for the fitness industry for 20 years as a trainer, fitness manager and club manager with backgrounds in education, human resources, kinesiology, mental health and counseling. For fitness inquiries concerning training and rates, please contact me at pghwellnesspt@gmail.com.

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