Here’s something worth sitting with for a moment. No one else can motivate you. Not a coach, not a podcast, not a perfectly curated playlist. Motivation is an inside job, and the good news is that means it’s always within reach.
If you’ve been feeling stuck lately, you’re not alone, and you don’t need a complete life overhaul to get moving again. Sometimes all it takes is a small shift in how you’re thinking. Here are four places to start, beginning with an objection you might already be forming.
But I pay a personal trainer, isn’t that someone else motivating me?
I should deal with an apparent contradiction straight away, because I have written elsewhere that I pay for a personal trainer, precisely because it encourages me to turn up at the gym and do the work that keeps me healthy.
Doesn’t that make it somebody else motivating me?
I don’t think it does. What I am actually doing is giving myself a carrot and a stick.
The stick is that I lose money if I don’t turn up. I have built a habit of paying somebody, and that gives me an incentive not to waste money I have earned. The carrot is that when I finish and walk away from the exercise, I feel good. Both of those are my own internal feelings.
It is a bit of a trick. But it isn’t really the trainer motivating me to get up, put my gym clothes on and go. It is the potential loss of the money, the penalty I would suffer if I don’t follow through. And that is internal, because it matters to me. I have given myself a reason to go.
So I have motivated myself. I have just done it by arranging things so that not going costs me something. And to be quite honest, it isn’t cheap.
How to break the negativity loop
Negative thinking is sneaky. It doesn’t announce itself. It creeps in quietly after a disappointment, a setback, or just a hard day, and before you know it those small doubts have taken over the whole conversation in your head.
The problem with negativity isn’t just that it feels awful, it actively works against you. It drains your energy, clouds your judgment, and makes your goals feel further away than they actually are. When you notice that inner critic turning up the volume, try to catch it. You don’t have to silence it completely, but you can choose not to let it steer.
I am not suggesting we take a Pollyanna approach where everything is rosy. That just isn’t realistic. But the way we frame the things that happen to us, and the things around us, makes a difference to how we react.
A lot of people will tell you that nervousness and excitement feel much the same. You have butterflies in your stomach either way. What you label that feeling then determines, to a very large extent, how you react to it.
One of the things I often say to my family when something bad happens is that we will laugh about this one day. So why don’t we make that day today?
That is something I try to do myself, and it applies to minor things as much as major ones. Something in the region of forty years ago my wife, her parents and I took a coach trip, and everything went wrong. The driver got lost on the way to Italy. We turned up at a hotel with no food. We bought an excursion where the food and drink provided were a disgrace.
If I mention that trip now, everybody laughs. At the time, they were all stressed.
Why investing in yourself is the part people skip
“Invest a little in yourself.” That is one of those sayings we all tend to know and would agree with. But really, what does it mean?
It is a bit like being told to get eight hours of sleep, drink two litres of water and take ten thousand steps a day. Pretty much everybody would agree with all of it. How many of us actually do it?
So let us think it through. Your most valuable asset is you. But how much care do you actually take over yourself?
If you have a car, you probably check the tyre pressures regularly. You wash it. You have it serviced. You take care when driving to avoid accidents. You only have one body and one mind, and they have to last you a lifetime. So my question is this: how much care are you taking of that vehicle?
This is where investing in yourself comes in, because sometimes the investment is time rather than money. It can be giving yourself permission to do nothing at all. It can be giving yourself permission to take an hour to exercise, or use a sauna, or go for a walk.
There is absolutely nothing selfish about making sure you prioritise your own wellbeing. A strong, happy, healthy person has plenty in reserve to share with others. If you are weak, unhappy and unfulfilled, ask yourself how much value you can bring to the world, and how much you can really offer anyone else. It is hard to share when you have nothing to share.
Prioritising your own wellbeing, and investing in yourself, is what lets you share what you do have, if you choose to.
What actually makes you happy?
A lot of people will tell you that more money would make them happy. I don’t believe that is true, and the research on why people actually leave their jobs points the same way.
When people are asked why they left, pay is rarely the thing at the top. It tends to be the management, and how much control they had over their own work. Gallup’s analysis of the subject puts it starkly: it takes more than a 20% pay rise to lure most people away from a manager who engages them, and next to nothing to poach someone who is disengaged. Money matters, obviously. It just is not the primary motivator most people assume it is.
So I will ask the question again, because it is the one that counts: what actually makes you happy? If you can answer that honestly, you can start pointing your time at the things that lead towards it.
Here is a concrete example. One of the things that makes me happy is taking the train to London every couple of months and simply walking the streets. I do it because I like taking pictures. I am a street photographer as a hobby. I walk so far that by the end of the day I am usually in extreme pain, and yet the pleasure of doing the thing I love is so high that I cannot make myself stop.
I am not recommending you hurt yourself. That would be ridiculous, and there is a sensible balance to be had. The point is that the desire to experience that particular pleasure is strong enough that I simply ignore the parts I am not enjoying.
That is the tell, I think. Doing what genuinely makes you happy turns out to be almost automatic. Once you start, you find you cannot stop.
Related: if you are pushing on but can’t see any results yet, read how to keep going when you can’t see any progress. It is the companion to this one: motivation gets you moving, persistence keeps you moving when the harvest is slow.