How motivation works, how to get it and sustain it in challenging times.

Feb 22

Here we are guys, another episode of the Mindset Mondays series.

You can listen to the podcast on here.

I am very excited to be discussing this topic as it has been a recurring request from my audience and community.

We are going to evaluate how does motivation occurs, how to sustain it and stay consistent so we can achieve our goals even during challenging times.

Looking at empowering questions to fire up that belly and some strategies to help you stay consistent and achieve those goals.

You can join our community on Facebook www.facebook.com/groups/theempoweredbadassclub

Sources and tools:

https://positivepsychology.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Setting-SMARTR-Goals.pdf

https://positivepsychology.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Building-New-Habits.pdf

Show notes:

Motivational Questions

Empowering questions are basically motivational questions. They are always open-ended and often thought-provoking. They are a well-known tool for any coach and, when expertly used, can be quite effective as a motivational technique at any point and in most situations.

It is a skill that requires some practice; however, empowering questions is rarely something we learn at home or school.

What value does this goal represent to you?
How will you celebrate your victory?
How would that contribute to the world?
What about this goal demonstrates what you stand for?
What keeps you going?
What really excites you about that?
What about this goal fits into your purpose?
What part of this relates to your dreams?
If you had all the time, energy and money to achieve your goals, what would you do?
Why is that important to you?
What do you want to experience?
What works well?
What’s another way to look at that?
How can you reframe that to help you move on?
How will you demonstrate motivation and perseverance?

Building New Habits Our habits can be incredibly powerful. Building new and healthier ones, however, is much easier when we understand how they work.

Habitual behaviors often break down into three elements:

1. Cue - A stimulus or trigger that sets off our habitual routine, e.g. finishing dinner and craving something sweet.

2. Behavior - The actions that comprise the habit, e.g. reaching for a cookie, and

3. Reward - The tangible or intangible positive reinforcement for the behavior, e.g. satisfying one’s sweet tooth.

Breaking an old habit, or building a new one involves: ■ Identifying the cue(s) ■ Planning a new behavior, and ■ Building in a reward. By planning a reward for our desired behavior - the new habit - we can create motivation to continue on with it. Cue Reward Behavior

The table below uses Implementation Intentions (“If-then”) planning to help you craft a goal for each step of the Habit Loop. To complete the table, complete the sentence stem in each step to craft an implementation goal and build a new habit. An example is provided to help you.

Cue ↓ “If…” (E.g. If I start browsing social media instead of doing my homework…)

Behavior ↓ “Then I will...” (E.g. Put my phone and tablet in the cupboard...)

Reward “The Reward...” (E.g. Finish my homework by 5.30 and go to the beach)

Implementation Intentions

People often fail to act on their good intentions. Despite their best intentions to eat more healthily, to be more physically active or to declutter the house, people often fail to do so. The ‘gap’ between intention and action is common. This intention-action gap is observed even when intentions are strong and urgent action is required (such as the need to lose weight for medical reasons). This suggests that motivation alone is not sufficient. If motivation is not the critical element, how do you bridge the intention-action gap? Implementation Intentions (‘If-then’ planning) are an effective strategy for turning goals into action. Whereas goal intentions are more general and abstract, implementation intentions are more concrete and procedural. A generic goal intention may be phrased in the following way: “I want to reach X!” Implementation intentions on the other hand seek to connect a specific future situation (an opportunity for goal attainment) with a specific goal-directed behaviour. In doing so, this situation then becomes mentally represented (activated) leading to better perception, attention and memory concerning the described situation (4). Consequently, the chosen goal-directed action (the then-part of the plan) will be performed automatically and efficiently, without conscious effort or deliberation on the part of the decision-maker. This also has the effect of freeing cognitive resources for other mental processing tasks and for avoiding competing goals or distractions (1). Thus, simply specifying the when, where and how of goal-directed behaviour makes goal attainment more likely (2).

Author: This tool was created by Noel Lyons MSc (http://www.WellCoach.co.uk).

Goal The goal of this tool is to increase the probability of successful goal attainment (by predetermining a specific and desired goal-directed behaviour in response to a particular future event or cue).

Advice

■ Clients often wonder how such a simple strategy can have such a strong effect. The suggested working mechanisms of implementation intentions are related to cognitive resources e.g. the automatization of the behaviour in response to the future situation or cue. Establishing rituals and routines capitalise on our brains’ ability to direct our behaviour on autopilot. They allow us to reach our goals even when we are distracted or preoccupied with other things and to have rock-solid strategies in place for when life’s little emergencies.

or speed bumps get in our way (1). The key assumption is that by deciding in advance the specifics of each action to take, ‘If-Then’ planning removes the need to rely on motivation or willpower (which waxes and wanes in most people).

■ Implementation Intentions have been found to be particularly effective in habit and behaviour modification, where there may be perceived significant immediate costs versus long-term rewards:

■ Attending cancer screening programs (3)

■ A nutritious diet (5)

■ Exercising more (5)

■ Drinking less alcohol (6)

■ Giving up smoking (6)

■ Note that the strength of commitment related to both the plan set and the goal itself is vitally important. Without sufficient commitment, an implementation intention will have little effect on goal-directed behaviour (2) Hence, motivation is important to the extent that the client must want to achieve the goal (over and above competing goals).

■ It is important to note too that implementation intentions seem to have a negative effect on the performance in people who score high on socially prescribed perfectionism (7).

■ Past research has revealed that implementation intentions can also be used to effectively cope with emotions. In a study by Gallo and colleagues (9), participants who formed an implementation intention to not get disgusted or frightened succeeded in reducing their disgust and fear reactions as compared to control participants who formed simple goal intentions. Clients who struggle to regulate certain emotions, like stress, for instance, may benefit from forming implementation intentions before entering a potentially stressful situation (e.g. as soon as I notice that the other person upsets me, I will take a deep breath and stay calm).

Transcript:

Okay, fabulous. All right. So welcome guys to this mindset Mondays. So normally like we are actually doing this on zoom and Facebook and there is a much better sound quality By the way, this is just with the phone. But we are discussing motivation today.

I wanted to really approach this because what I do is every time I speak to people, I obviously have this question of asking what I can help people with, and what is the main struggle at the moment. And this seems to be the one that most people say I can't get motivated to do anything, I can't get motivated to exercise, especially at the moment that we are all from home. Okay, so I look extremely yellow on zoom. So I'm going to switch I don't want to be yellow, I want to be regular very nice. So, motivation. So how are we going to approach it is first of all, we are going to look at the questions that we need to ask ourselves in order to have motivation. We are going to discuss how we can foster and sustain motivation, especially in most more challenging times, such as right now. Okay, any questions that you have comment on this feed comment on this feed comment everywhere? You can call me before you can comment when you watch this replay. It's absolutely fine. Okay, so the motivation, especially right now, a lot of people don't have it. So first of all, you've got to remind yourself that we have reached a certain point where we have a little bit of mental fatigue, and quite a fair amount of difficulties in getting motivated because we are overly overstimulated by being online. overstimulated by being staring at screen, I am in front of one to three screens right now. And overstimulated by the fight or flight response that we are going through something quite drastic at the moment. And on top of that, you know, things like it seems to be dragging on forever. When you look at what's happening with the new measures that the UK is implemented, it's not looking like we are going to get out and back to the gym before mid April anyway, so there is still a while to wait, there's still a while to feel like we can have a normal life. So how do I approach motivation myself, because we don't always get up and get motivated, I don't always want to wake up at 6am and do my practice and then do get on with my day and do my homework and do everything that I need to do. So everybody's human, you've got to understand that motivation will fluctuate. And that it's completely normal to have times where you'll feel much more motivated than other times, I've had a bit of a dip for, I would say two weeks because my anxiety kind of flared up a little bit more. The last couple of weeks, I haven't been sleeping as well. And everything has been unravelling. So when things are unravelling. You know, if you have a chronic illness, if you have, if you if you got tired, if you're tired, if you have illnesses, a lot of it will kind of unravel physically and mentally and your motivation will kind of seek a bit of a hit on this one.

you have to also be compassionate with yourself that motivation is not over there. And that giving up doesn't mean it's you shouldn't be giving up food just because your motivation motivation has been dipping a little bit while you would four wise so it can happen like motivation stops for a week, two weeks, a month a year, it happens it happens you will lose motivation for a whole year it can happen. So just remind yourself that going back into certain routine, feeling like you want to feel motivated to do something doesn't have to happen from you know, the clinical fingers. There things are important to understand where motivation stems from. So, first of all, you have extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, which are terms that we use a lot in workplace. So human resource departments places like this will often talk about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. So why do you do your job, I do my job because it's paid while I do my job because I do a certain amount of hours I do my job because all these reasons the are extreme sick because of go healthcare lalala then this will mean that it's an extrinsic factor to motivation to go and work. intrinsic motivation is I can feel that my job is providing me with challenges to learn opportunities to learn and to grow as a human. I'm passionate about the subject, I'm passionate about the impact I can have on people. And I can see the impact that it has on my life. It makes me happy to go to work. This is intrinsic motivation. So you have to evaluate as well. How many times do you put your health motivation on extrinsic, extrinsic factors? How many times do you decide you want to be healthy just because you want to have a certain picture, you want to have certain looks, or you aspire to be someone else rather than yourself is a lot of the time we're actually motivated to be someone else. Because we look at other people's pictures or videos. And we're, you know, looking at a coach's programme, we're like, oh, I really want to do this. And then that's extrinsic, extrinsic motivation. If you want to learn how to do a handstand, you want to learn how to do a handstand. Because you've seen on Instagram that it's a really cool thing to learn. Do you want to learn handstand because you feel like this is something you will learn and that will challenge you and that you are ready to take on this challenge. You really feel like learning handstand will be useful for the rest of your training. If you are an Olympic lifter, and you want to improve your overhead strength, then learning handstand can intrinsically be a motivation for you to become a bit more mobile to understand it more the shoulder mobility, the core engagement and so on, that's an intrinsic motivation, you really want to get this you don't just want to learn a handstand,

because

you've seen some random person doing on Instagram will because it's become a trend to do at home. Because that's pretty much the only thing we can do at home at the moment is learning version. So everybody wants to learn headstand handstand, or, you know, make sure some sometimes I took a toll from my, my own niche, okay. But you can also look at it from people that do a fitness programme to lose body fat to lose some weight, how intrinsically motivating it is for you to lose the weight, you want to lose the weight because you know, there are societal expectations of you to be a certain dress size, to look a certain way, because you've been looking and seeing a lot on social media that this is how society deemed healthy to look like. Or is it because you don't feel comfortable in your clothes in your own skin. And you just know that this doesn't feel like a place you want to be right now you want to be a bit healthier for yourself. Not coming from a place of hate, okay, motivation cannot come from a place of hate. If you hate where you are, if you're just really off, you know, feeling motivated, because you just hate your body, that's not really going to work. Because one, you're just going to beat yourself up into setting yourself up for failure. So looking at these intrinsic factors are very, very important. I was listening to this podcast, from Brendon Burchard is an extreme, huge motivation for me. He's been part of my life for three, four years now, I always listen to his podcast, even if there's a lot of things that I've read and listened to over and over and over again, because he says this, he says you can't be motivated and discipline to keep going and stay consistent in achieving your goal. Unless you know, there is a positive impact for yourself and for your community. So knowing that there is an impact, you really have to visualise this impact. The motivation will not happen. When Yes, so it's when we always say I'd be happy when that doesn't really happen. You need to see the impact for yourself, you need to see the goal and the intrinsic motivation of your goal. You can't just not have this vision for yourself, you can also put an intrinsic motivational factor as a way of that as a goal. That's not going to happen unless you're having intrinsic motivation for it obviously. so empowering questions are basically motivational questions. They are always open ended and often thought provoking. So there are a few questions like this that you can actually ask yourself, they're well known tool for any coach and you you know, can be quite effective as a motivational technique at any point and in most situation.

empowering question is rarely something that you'll be learning at home or at school. So here it is, guys. Take a pen, write it down. He wants to just work on it in your own time. Okay, so the first one is, what value does this goal represent to you? It's very important to see the value of this goal. Again, we were discussing extrinsic, intrinsic motivation, very much important to look at the impact and value of the goal. How will you celebrate your victory? Really important? To look at how you're going to celebrate your victory? When you achieved your goal? How would that contribute to the world? Again, we looked at the impact, you know, impact on the community? What about this goal? demonstrate what you stand for? Again, when we go back to during a body transformation programme? What does it stand for? For you? does it stand for self love? Or does it stand for as you're wanting to become a certain dress size, because you get pressurised into looking a certain way or being a certain body shape? What keeps you going, very important as what to always look at what keeps you going, and what really excites you about that about your goal, what is going to keep you going again, learning how to amplify factors that help you going so for example, for me, I know that I'm doing my yoga teacher training, because the 300 hours a very, very big venture. When you do a 300 hour course you would go for four weeks abroad, you would go for four weeks and just basically just do your yoga teacher training for four weeks. However, when you do it online,

it's up to you to decide how often you train and to manage your schedule. When you're student you manage your schedule as well and your work right. So what are you motivated by when you do something? Are you motivated by a deadline? Are you motivated, find ways that it really excite you. I'm motivated to get qualified, I'm motivated to have good grades, I really want these things for myself. Otherwise, if I don't want them, I'm not going to wake up at six in the morning and do my an hour and a half practice every day. And I don't sometimes I can't, sometimes I can't. It happens. Yeah. But what's important is just to see the value, the parts that keep you going, and what excites you about that? I freaking love learning all these things. So I need to remind myself that even though some time it's difficult to wake up, even though some time I struggled to fall asleep, because I'd rather do other stuff, and I sleep way too late. And then therefore I don't wake up at six, I need to remind myself that I actually love learning and during my practice, so trying and find ways for you to feel this way. So I've tried to put that into a practical example. But this goal fits into your purpose. Again, always look at your main purpose, and how you how it fits. You know, what if you obviously you don't all, not everyone has to do a five year plan or a five year vision. But what you see is some use, you see some form of vision for yourself down the line and you you want to see your purpose to be you know, congruent to be authentic to yourself. It's not what's the purpose of losing a dress size? Is it because you want to be healthier when you get pregnant down the line? Is it because you've always struggled with the weight and you want to try and find a way to feel happy and healthy. There is always a way of seeing yourself as your highest self, okay, and that's your purpose. And that's how your goal should be attached. Because when you really visualise that for yourself, then you become a bit more consistent with the discipline and the motivation you feel more motivated. Why part of this relates to your dreams? So it's very similar? If you had all the time, energy and money to achieve your goals, what would you do? It's a very good question to ask as well. What would you do? If you had all the time energy and money? What really what would you come down to?

for yourself?

Why is that important to you? Okay, always have a why why is it important to you? I want to become healthier for my children. I want to be a yoga teacher and to do a business degree because I want to reach more people. I want to be able to reach across the world and and spread my message of love and positivity to as many people as I can. So this is why I'm learning how to scale a business and it's passion is making me really passionate. Yeah, so always find something that makes you feel that it's important. What do you want to experience from it? What works well for you? What's another way back to look at that as well? Is there are there other ways for you to achieve this goal differently. To implement different habits to achieve it, rather than habits that don't really fit your lifestyle, or that you struggle with. So what, obviously, most people will come across when they're trying to achieve certain. a certain goal. Let's talk again about health and fitness achieving a handstand. Within a handstand, there are so many elements of learning, there is a foundational training, there is the mobility training, there is the core strength training. And then there is the handstand training. Okay. And a lot of people don't understand that you have to start with all this kind of steps. And obviously, they have to kind of be how does it fit in my life? How does it fit in my life for me to learn all these elements and be okay with it and feel like, I'm still going to be motivated to do the most basic movement patterns so I can reach my goal. Okay, there is, there is another way to look at it. And it's the same when you want to do a body transformation, there's way to look at Luke counting your macros and working out a bit more than you would and just kind of adapting around that and just looking at it from a different perspective. How can you reframe that to help you move on? You can reframe this as well. And how will you demonstrate motivation and perseverance. So actually visualising yourself

how are you going to demonstrate this motivation? How are you actually going to demonstrate that you are motivated and that you perceive everything into this role into this goal, and that you're going to see it through? Right. So what I've looked at now is how the psychology of motivation works. There is this book actually taken an inspiration from positive psychology, however, there is this book that I found really good that you should all kind of read is called The Power of Habit from child to hygge. If you want to see what it's about, you can actually read I've written a review on my blog on fitfrenchkiss.com slash blog, you can actually see what it's about. And it explains how we create habit and how we change habits. So to give you a nice sort of illustration around it, I really like this one. When they expose rats to to have a reward, depending on certain cues, they would have to press a button. So when they pressed a button, a drop of blackcurrant juice would drop down and come into the mouth, which is the reward, okay. When they kept on doing this, the brain started developing patterns. So the response will become more and more traumatic, which means that at some point, the rats actually didn't get the bladder drop of blackcurrant juice, but just kept pushing the button a few milliseconds before the drop would come down. So they got the brain has developed such strong patterns into the habit that they pressed. Before the juice were coming down just a little bit. Because there was a cute there is a cure can't remember, but there was a message. So there was a light, when they see the light, they press the button. And when they saw the light, they were pressing the button faster and faster things were becoming so ingrained. And this is how also addiction can kind of stem from that as well. I'm not going to expand on that one. But it's super interesting, go and read the book. But basically what happened is after they were suppressing the drop, and they were still pressing, they were still getting the cube and not the reward. And that was you know how we build the defeat the habit loop and this is how motivation and how changing habits actually work. So how did your behaviour break down into three elements, the cue, the stimulus of the trigger that said so far habitual routine, so finishing dinner, and craving something something sweet, so those are the cue, then you have the behaviour action that comprise the habit example reaching for cookie going for dessert. So the cue for the rat was the light. The behaviour was pressed a button and the reward was the tangible or intangible positive reinforcement for the behaviour like satisfying your sweet tooth. finished dinner, one dessert. I know I'm like the worst. I've always been like that finished dinner. I'm like, what's your dessert now?

you have your cue your behaviour, your reward. Now how to break an old habit or build a new one involved is identifying the cues that trigger this habit and planning a new behaviour and then build a reward. So building a new reward around that as well. So, by planning a reward for a desired behaviour, then you have it we can create motivation to continue with it. Cue reward behaviour, cue reward behaviour, remember that cue reward behaviour. So, when I look at a table, I'm just kind of explaining to you you can do this exercise. So, if then and the reward, yes a cure behaviour reward, the cure is if I start doing this, if I stopped browsing social media instead of doing my homework behaviour, then I will put my phone and tablet in the cupboard and a reward, I finished my homework by 530 and then I can pick my phone back up or I can go to the beach or I can go for my walk or I can have something okay. So, this is how you want to implement your changes and get the motivation to do so. So, yeah, implementation intention, people often fail to act on the good intention despite the best intention to eat more healthily, to be more physically active, or to declutter the house people often fail to do so. So, we often do that. So, there is also a gap between intention and action, which is quite common, the intention action gap is observed even when intention is strong and urgent action is required. So the stern need to lose weight for medical reason, that's a different you know, that's a different intention that losing weight to look to look a certain way again, intrinsic extrinsic factor, okay, this suggests that motivation alone is not sufficient. And then if motivation is not the critical element, how do you breach the intention, action gap, okay. So, implementation intention, if then are an efficient and effective strategy to do so. So, you can turn your goals into action, whereas gold intentions are more general abstract implementation intention or more concrete and procedural So, you've stopped believing and building your patterns. A genuine goal intention may be phrased in the following way I want to reach implementation intention on the other hand, may be seeking to connect a specific shooter future situation. So an opportunity for goal attainment with a specific goal directed behaviour. So, you need to start implementing action that you know will impact in the long term achieving your goal. So, with a specific goal directed behaviour in doing so, the situation then become mentally represented, which will activate it in your brain. So, again, the queue behaviour reward leading to better perception attention and memory concerning the describe situation. So, consequently, the triggers and goal directed action would be performed automatically and efficiently. So, without conscious effort or deliberation on the part of the decision maker, so, that means that the more you implementing the intention and you create the skew the different behaviours and those reward with the

habit,

this new habit loop, the more dramatic and become an easier it will become for you. This also has the effect of freeing cognitive resources for other mental processing tasks and for avoiding competing goals and distraction, thus simply specifying the when, where and how of the goal directed behaviour and the goal attainment more likely. So, again, this is from positive psychology.com. I've got some exercises that I give to my clients to say. So this basically will really help you harness so the more you create this, if then, implementation based on your intention, the more your brain will easily get this behaviour in his habit automatically, and also become less draining and less draining mentally. Sometimes it's very difficult to keep going and when sometimes you feel very tired of trying to keep up with you know, your habit and your goals. Sometimes it just gets a lot. It just feels like it's a lot, right. So this one is the more you get into that creating that healthier habit loop. Identify your cue and change That behaviour in a reward. And then you recreate this pattern. So it takes repetition and practice and intention. So if your intention is there, and you're implementing strategies there, then your motivation will be a bit more likely to stick.

Okay.

So, implementation intention can be used effectively to cope with emotions as well. So seeing what triggers certain emotions can also help in terms of your mental health. So I think that's pretty much how I wanted to approach it, I think I've provided you with also some real life example. Again, I don't, we're all human and feeding the habit loop, or changing a habit loop can happen very, very, very easily. And very quickly. This is also something you want to identify is when your habit loop is becoming, it goes against your goal, or you know that you can identify that it's actually not productive or becoming toxic as well. Okay, so again, I'm going to approach it from a personal experience for me, it's making sure that I'm not working past a certain time, because I ended up being at like, 930 10pm, still on my computer and still working. And then after that, I need that time to go through my phone and just do random stuff, and just kind of relax. And then I end up midnight, 1am, still my phone, and all the good stuff that I want to do the day after, we can about six and do my practice goes out the window, because I'm too tired. That also has been really bad. Because it makes me even more tired, and it makes my sleep really, really scattered and have poor quality, and impacts everything else impacts my health as well impacts mymental health.

I'm changing my habit loop. I am changing the habit loop by having alarms, that making me ensure that at a certain time I shut off. I need to kind of like really change my habit loop myself, and making sure that I create new habits, for example, with my phone and just put my alarm and just leave things down and just say that's it. So you have to remember that we all have different habit loop. We all are seeking for different goals. But as long as you keep the end goal, and you ask all the questions that we said that beginning inside, and that you always revise, at the end, or halfway your milestones. If you don't achieve your milestone, it's very important to also look at, what have I done? And is this really something that I want? Remember going back to that purpose, going back to the value going back to everything? Is this bringing value to my life? Do I really want to do this. But as long as you start from there, and then identify and create habit loops that will help you stay consistent, then you're setting yourself up for success. And you're setting yourself to stay motivated, even in the times that you're not motivated. Because you know that sometimes, motivation is not always there, but you will come back to it. And when you feel like you've lost the motivation, revert back to the questions. Don't revert to the habit loop, always revert back to the questions first. Because when you start sitting down and re evaluating, again, your goals, what you want from your goals, their purpose, then you start going again, like it fires you up, is knowing that impact that it can have on your life, your future self. It has, it will, it will fire up that motivation again. So I hope that you enjoyed that lovely little talk on motivation tonight. Let me know please share it to someone who needs to actually watch or listen to this because we also have this as a podcast. And if you want to join my facebook group to discuss this between the community, it's called the empowered bidaskclub just send me a DM and I will add you on it. But I hope that you found that this was interesting and clear. And let me know I would love to see and hear from you. You can tag me or you can you know take a picture or whatever do something. Let me know how you get on. And I'm sending you so much love you guys. And again, I will see you next week for next mites and Monday. Keep checking my stories to know the next Mindset Monday. And if you want to ask question before the mindset Monday, you can send it to me and I can answer your question like so thank you so much guys, and go forth and be your own kind of badass

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