Motivation Is A Tweeting Bird
From the old YouTube channel.
‘Brief’ description: Here’s a truth that may feel harsh, but which can also set you free: your motivation will come and go on its own schedule. That goes for its effect on pretty much anything in life. Some things we do because we simply have to keep doing them. Some, we’ll almost never have ‘motivation’ for. And most are in a gray area. Personal health and fitness doesn’t usually fall into the “must do” category for many of us, but it probably should. One way to ‘hack’ ourselves closer to treating it that way is to plan ahead for the times when the ‘motivation’ just isn’t there. Once we have some life experience, we KNOW it is a fickle friend. It’s wonderful when it’s present, and it’s usually worth embracing motivation and following its lead when it comes around. Counting on it for things that we care about? That’s risky. But we don’t have to! Instead, we can find ways to stick with our goals by making them easier to accomplish at times when we feel overwhelmed (see the book “Tiny Habits” for many ideas on how to do this.) We can also give ourselves permission to find the things we enjoy in exercise and fitness and fall back on those when our ‘willpower’ is depleted. It’s no secret that a lot of people who stick with fitness and exercise do so because they have found ways to fall in love with the process. And that gets easier the more you do it.
Caption text for the full video:
Motivation is a little tweeting bird, chirping in a meadow.
Motivation is a bouquet of pretty flowers that may just wilt when your head is turned.
All comedy aside: when we have motivation for getting something done, to do with our health and our fitness or anything else in life, fantastic! Run with that motivation when it's there! The problem is: motivation comes and goes. Responsibilities don't. But life will always hand us fun distractions that seem more compelling than some kind of responsibility that we need to fill. And it will also hand us legitimate responsibilities that may conflict with time that we're trying to invest in our personal wellness, our exercise, our fitness, our health in general. We can't count on motivation to be the driving factor in anything in our lives, and certainly not in our fitness goals. One of the best things we can do for ourselves is design our way around the fact that we know in advance that we won't always have motivation. We can design things so that they take a minimum amount of motivation and we can get them done anyway. We can always fall back on those habits. Or we can simply develop more discipline and see about applying that even at times when we're not really 'feeling it'.
Those are the keys to success very often, rather than the intrinsic motivation, because it waxes and wanes.
Video link: https://youtu.be/YkwyhRBzpV8