Don’t Look For Your Motivation Here!

Are you motivated today? Let’s get motivated! Find that inner motivation! What’s it going to take to motivate you?

You’ve heard it, and I’ve heard it – you have to be motivated to reach your goals.

I say Hogwash!

Blasphemy you say – isn’t it your job as a trainer to get me motivated?

Well, maybe for the one hour a day we are together I can encourage, inspire, and yes, even motivate you to get through the workout.

But what about the other 23 hours in the day?

I submit that what you need is a good dose of determination on top of that motivation.

Let’s look at a definition of each word:

Motivation – the state or condition of being motivated

Determination – a fixed purpose

Do you see the difference? Motivation depends largely on how we feel, while determination has a much more solid foundation – it is fixed, or unchanging in nature.

So what does that have to do with losing weight, eating healthier, reaching higher athletic performance? In a word – Everything!

Let me put it this way; It’s late Monday afternoon, you just finished a grueling day at work, your boss was being a major jerk and you have enough paper piled on your desk to heat your house for a month. You don’t feel like going to the gym, you don’t feel like doing anything but going home and plopping down in front of the television. What do you do? Are you motivated to go the the gym? The answer is pretty obvious – absolutely not. This is why determination is far more important than motivation. Determination will drive you to the gym, your present state of (lack of) motivation will cause you to drive right on by.

We humans are emotional beings. Our nature causes us to act on how we feel and the circumstances that surround us much of the time. Hard day at work? I don’t feel like going to the gym. Kids driving you nuts? That pint of ice cream is sure to make me feel better.

How about this? You have been working hard in the gym, not missed a training day in 3 or 4 months. Your nutrition is on track, and yet you still can’t get rid of that last 10 pounds. You are not seeing the results you want as fast as you want. What do you do? Circumstances like this can sap our motivation, no question about it. But are you determined to reach your goals, to do what is necessary to reach them, or do you give up, because it’s just “not working”?

The battle we are waging is largely in our minds. No one lives in a perfect bubble, immune from the pressures of the outside world. We all deal with less than ideal circumstances, it is only a matter of degrees. For years I made excuses why I was obese and unhealthy. For years I was “motivated” to do something about it, only to lose my motivation a few months later. Fear of failure, fear of ridicule, even fear of success can cause us to lose our will to keep going when things get hard.

As a trainer, when a prospective client wants to hire me to “motivate” them, I know we are in for a hard battle. It goes back to what was said before – if you are only motivated 1 out of 24 hours of every day, are you likely to do what it takes? I can guide you and inspire you, but motivation is personal and transient; it comes and goes. The best way I know to overcome these peaks and valleys is to formulate a plan, the “fixed purpose” that defines determination.

We are big on plans around here. We provide a training plan that you execute on a daily basis. The nutrition plan guides what and when you eat. 6 Pack 6 incorporates daily and weekly checkpoints into an overall plan that drives you toward your goals.

Do you have such a plan, the purpose that drives you on in spite of what is going on around you? Do you know what you are going to do today that will help get to where you want to be? Do you know what you are going to do tomorrow, next week, next month, next year? Taking a step back, do you even know what the end result will be? Have you fixed a picture in your mind of what you want to look like, feel like, or perform like? If not, now is the time.

Take out a piece of paper, and write down your “fixed purpose” for the next year, the next 6 months, the next month, next week, and today. Start with the end goal, the “fixed purpose”, in mind and work backwards. The action you take today will determine where you end up tomorrow.

This quote from the great Jesse Owens, a man who overcome far more obstacles than most of us will ever know, sums things up nicely.

“We all have dreams. But in order to make dreams into reality, it takes an awful lot of determination, dedication, self-discipline, and effort.”

It’s a new week. What are you determined to do with it?

Make It Happen!

Dean