This is great! The new me! … now I’m bored…
You know the pattern:
You find an activity you love to do. You decide to practice it and make it a part of your daily routine … Everything feels great and you’re excited about this new chapter of your life… until…
You wake up one day, and the magic is gone.
You’re not excited.
In fact, you might feel total disdain for the activity….
When working out goes from feeling exciting to being a dreadful drag.
When eating that salad goes from refreshing to gagging at the thought of it.
When your new reading habit goes from intellectually curious to just plain boring.
How do we navigate these moments?
Human nature is so fascinating - particularly when it comes to motivation.
Two forces that contribute to motivation are: Feeling (Body) and Understanding (Mind).
Let’s use the topic of exercise to illustrate this, and I’ll dance back and forth between the pros and cons of each:
With Feeling:
Sometimes you resolve to start exercising. It feels great at first…
but over time, the feelings of the honeymoon period fade.
With Understanding:
You come to the conclusion that you need to exercise more because you understand it will eventually improve your quality of life… but getting yourself to do it is an absolute struggle. And it sucks…
Relying solely on feeling or understanding have their drawbacks: Feelings can be fickle. And Understanding risks staying so conceptual and future oriented that it doesn’t translate into action in the present.
But each one can be used as a guide to help us stay on course towards our goals:
When motivation from feeling wanes over time, I think our body-mind may actually be giving us a helpful and wise signal.
You see, the issue— particularly with modern exercise— is that the body truly needs a huge variety of movement to be optimally healthy. And yet, most exercise is based on incredibly repetitive movements within small ranges of motion…
So, I wonder: when our motivation from feeling wanes, maybe our innate intelligence is actually telling us we need to create better balance in the body by doing something different.
Motivation derived from Understanding helps us with the issue of discipline and how we relate to discomfort.
Our emotional states are always changing and it’s natural for our energy to rise and fall.
So, if you only do things when you feel like it… you miss out on the kind of satisfaction that comes from making progress, developing skills, and increasing your capabilities.
A common metaphor is two people trying to get water by digging a well:
One person digs down 2 feet and then decides there’s no water there and moves to another place to dig another hole 2 feet deep and keeps moving on to dig 50 holes… but never finds water.
Another person stays with 1 hole but digs down 50 feet and then is rewarded with finding the water waiting deeper in the ground.
Ideally, with exercise, as you practice and your body adapts and you get stronger and develop some skills, the physical activities you choose become joyous and you can’t wait to do them again and again.
Understanding where we’re going or what we’re striving for can increase our motivation to persevere… up to a point…
But, If there’s no sign that we’re “finding water” over time — in other words, if we never get rewarded with feeling — our present actions will start to lose meaning and we’ll start to lose faith in our path.
I believe we need to dance between both of these motivational forces to succeed.
Create a conceptual understanding of where you want to go and why you want to go there. But let it be broad and flexible enough to accommodate your feeling state.
For Exercise and movement I can create a broad goal of being healthy and moving everyday. But I can let my body’s wisdom guide me through how it’s feeling in order to decide how I want to get that movement in.
Somedays I might feel good and inspired to do that difficult workout, and others I might not feel like doing much - but I can still take a walk. Or if I’m just bored of my regular workout, then I can try out a new class, or invite friends to play a sport in the park…
I’ve written a lot of words here all to come to this conclusion:
To keep up your motivation for the long term — Have a steady and clear concept of your values, but find as much flexibility and variability within that concept to keep feeding your inspiration.
In what other areas of your life could this apply?