Motivation is a tricky thing.
It comes and goes, and seems to have a mind of its own.
Building up that critical mass of momentum is one of the biggest challenges I see people face when starting to work on making changes in their lives.
In fact, building and sustaining that momentum is generally the biggest first hurdle I see many my clients face.
How to Create Sustained Momentum
Once you get clear on where you want to go, you need to get in touch with what motivates you to get there.
If you aren't motivated, you’re going to look at your goals, think about how nice they’d be, and then close your notebook, put them in a drawer and never look at them again.
Maybe this is because you are genuinely content with where you are.
If that’s the case, mazel tov!
But chances are you’re not reading this because everything is peachy and wonderful. Something is missing and you want to fix it.
The Two Types of Motivation
Here’s the truth about motivation.
It comes in two varieties, SURVIVING motivation and THRIVING motivation.
Knowing which type of motivation you’re pulling from can create a lot of insight into why things are working or not working in your life.
Survival Motivation
The first type of motivation is motivation is surviving motivation.
It’s motivation to get AWAY from something.
It will show up in sudden frantic bursts of energy to change your circumstances, but it generally fades quickly too.
In evolutionary terms, this is the literal motivation for SURVIVAL. We’ve sensed danger and our body tells us to REACT. This is the fabled “fight/flight” response.
What gets confusing is this response evolved in the context of our ancient ancestors having to worry about predators or other types of mortal danger that could pop out from behind every tree.
This isn’t the case for most of us anymore, but our bodies are still hardwired to be on the lookout and consider anything we interpret as a threat to be a mortal danger.
Survival Motivation in Action
Now imagine yourself at work. You’ve been responding to pointless emails all day, your boss made a backhanded comment at your earlier, and you’re stressed out about a big project you’ve got due, and to top it all off your landlord just raised your rent to a level that’s stretched your already strained budget even further.
Internally you’re stressed about work, stressed about money, worried about getting kicked out onto the streets, and silently screaming to yourself, “I hate my job! I hate my life! I can’t stand it here one more minute!”
Your body doesn’t know exactly what’s going on but it knows you’re stressed. And if you’re really as stressed out as your body is feeling, it has no choice but to assume that you’re in mortal danger. Your body gets hot, your shoulders get tense, your breathing gets short… The fight/flight/freeze instinct has been triggered.
You’re not sure what to do, but everything needs to change ASAP.
This might be followed by a commitment to update your resume, apply to five new jobs over the weekend, and see if you can’t also find a new place to live too.
…Yet come Friday, your rage has passed and the impulse fades until the next time somebody talks over you at a meeting, the printer doesn’t work, or a new surprise expense lands on your plate.
What happened?
Survival Motivation Fades Quickly
Through years of acclimation to modern life, you’ve also developed mechanisms to suppress this survival instinct. Instead of running from the building scream, you sit at your desk and fume.
Your instinct to escape and survive cut a deal with your more logical mind and decided that applying for jobs would be the more prudent mode of action, as opposed to just running straight out the door and never going back.
Before long that burst of SURVIVAL energy fades, as does your motivation to apply for new jobs.
But that stress stays locked inside your body, causing anxiety, depression, and many other psychological ailments that also have deleterious effects on your physical health too.
Thriving Motivation
This is why it’s important to learn how to tap into a deeper and more sustainable source of motivation which I call THRIVING motivation.
Thriving motivation is the energy to get TO something. This motivation will generally be harder to come by initially, but once you’ve got it, it will be more sustaining and generally available for as long as you need it.
The trick to creating Thriving motivation for yourself is to get clear on a destination and WHY you want to get there. Once you’re clear on that in a way that reenforces the importance of the goal to yourself, the energy to get there will start flowing.
This is why in last week’s post I encouraged you to shift your thinking from where you DON’T want to be to where you DO want to be. It’s the difference between surviving and thriving.
How to Bring Thriving Energy Into Your Life
There are other ways to bring this thriving energy into your life too.
One way is to start making progress towards your thriving life, but perhaps not in the way you think it means.
Rather than pushing yourself to make a change and operating from a place of reactivity, slow down and invest the time and energy into envisioning what the more ideal thriving life would look like. This is why in previous blog posts I prescribed getting clear on your goals and envisioning two perfect future days.
Once you’ve done that, then take the time to plot out some deliberate steps to help take you where you want to go.
It’s going to take longer than a weekend to change your life, so get accustomed to that prospect now and start operating that way.
Start Making Progress Now
If you’ve done the visioning exercises above, hopefully, you’ve begun to paint a picture of what your more ideal life can look like.
So now let’s take some steps towards it!
What’s one thing you can do today that will get you just a little bit closer? It could be as simple as buying a book or doing a Google search. Maybe it’s sitting down and making a list of ten more things you can do to get closer.
Whatever it is, make a point of defining it and doing it.
Don’t feel like you have to be overly ambitious or pick the absolute perfect thing to do. You can always change direction and build momentum later. The trick is to just get moving.
Give yourself a modest goal that you can 100% accomplish without fail in the next 24 hours. And make it a priority.
By committing to incremental daily progress, you might find yourself pleasantly shocked to see how much you’ve accomplished in only a couple of weeks.
Keep at it! Things will build from there too.
On any given day we’ll have a number of tasks and projects set in front of us. These all represent competing priorities in our world that we need to prioritize. What do we focus on first?