Strategies for boosting motivation

Contents:

Examples of strategies to use when you need to boost motivation
How to re-ignite motivation when you’ve “fallen off the wagon” or gotten off your path to health

Strategies that specifically focus on boosting motivation:

Step 4 of the I-SSEE method of self-coaching is “Experiment with strategies.”

There are 5 types of strategies:

Strategies that boost motivation
Strategies that you use to cue yourself to engage in a new habit or that minimize or eliminate cues that trigger the habit you’re trying to change
Strategies that you use to get around obstacles
Strategies that you use to increase the immediate reward of engaging in an activity that will help reset and renew your health
Strategies that involve tracking

Here are some to experiment with when you need strategies to strengthen your motivation:

Make sure you’ve carefully done the “Identify” step where you discover your most powerful motivations for change.

1.Create visual reminders of your most powerful motivations for change.

Examples:

If being there for your loved ones is one of your most powerful motivators, use a photo of your loved ones.
If being having the stamina for adventure is a motivation, use a photo of a place you’d like to explore
Write a motivating word or phrase on a sticky note
Create a vision board

2.Place visual reminders at key places:

A reminder can be placed in a highly trafficked area of your home, so you see it frequently. (Hint: Periodically change the actual reminder or the specific location so that your brain notices it and it doesn’t fade into the background)

A reminder can be especially helpful at the “point of decision.” That’s the point where you are wrestling with your internal ambivalence of keeping your old habit vs. strengthening your new habit. Examples of points of decision:

On your calendar for habits you can schedule such as exercise or advanced meal prep
Your refrigerator and pantry if your new habit involves nutrition
Your car if you tend to pick up fast food or you get in it after work to go to the gym
By your laptop, tablet, or TV remote if you are trying to establish a habit of breaking up a habit of sitting too long
At your work station if you are trying to establish a habit of exercising at lunch time or of getting up periodically to avoid sitting too long

3.Involve your social support network. Tell trusted members not just that you are working on resetting and renewing your health but WHY it’s important to you.

When they know why, they are less likely to cajole you back into old patterns

When they know why, they can support you in your motivation. You can even ask them to remind you when they offer supportive comments. For instance “I saw you doing your walk around the neighborhood today. You’re really committed to being there for your grandchildren!”

4.Tune into role models

Youtube is a great place for watching videos other people of your stage of life achieve their fitness goals. Watching another new mom’s routine or an older person’s journey in weight lifting can give you the motivation boost that you need. Podcasts can be another source of inspiration. Many of us are motivated by other people’s success stories when they chronicle their journeys of resetting and renewing their health.

5.Use I-SSEE Step 2 “Seek reliable information” to your advantage

Search for videos and podcasts where someone reliable is giving information on the goal you’re working on. Immersing yourself in learning about a habit is a great way to keep the motivation flowing!

6.Double up to use the potential of other types of strategies to boost motivation

Strategies that help you overcome obstacles can boost your motivation at the point of decision: Examples: prepping lunch for the week on the weekend so you don’t have to think about it M-F— or— putting on your workout clothes well before the time you work out.
Strategies that increase the immediate reward of a behavior give a strong boost to motivation in the moment: Example: For people who really don’t like exercise, listening to a book on tape or watching a favorite show while exercising immediately boosts the reward factor
Strategies that involve tracking: The purpose of tracking is to record all of your emerging patterns of behavior so you can evaluate how things are going. This includes what you do well. Eg. Recording your exercise on a fitness app, spread sheet, chart, calendar, or notebook gives you an immediate boost of reward for job well done.

Strategies to use when you’ve “fallen off the wagon”

You’ve been going along nicely, traveling the path of health that you’ve charted for yourself. Then suddenly, you find yourself slowing down or off the path altogether. What happened? Could this have been prevented? What can you do now?

Prevention: Planning for transitions:

Transitions are frequently responsible for people getting off track.

Some transitions cannot be anticipated:

An injury or illness
A sudden change you had no idea was coming such as being laid off

Many can be anticipated:

Moving
A new job
A new baby
A new season of the year, particularly if you exercise outside or in your garage
A recurring sort of disruption such as a late afternoon thunderstorm or having to work late
An uptick in school or workload
The beginning of a new school year
Vacation

Prevention: When you sense your motivation is weakening:

Maybe you’ve been going like clockwork with your new running routine or eating pattern or with incorporating more social connection into your life… and then… what has been a source of a sense of accomplishment or pleasure or what has been feeling “just right” suddenly becomes something you have to make yourself do. And it’s getting harder and harder. When that happens, what do you do?

Evaluate whether you need a short break in your new routine:

You might choose to take a day off on which you’d planned to exercise and watch a movie instead. Or perhaps you need a longer break and decide to take the weekend off… or a week.
Or you’ve been really consistent about preparing meals that fit your new eating pattern at home, but you’re feeling kind of sick of food prep and cooking, so you decide to order out a meal that is fairly close to the eating plan you’re following.
Or maybe you have a tendency to be a social hermit, but have been making more of an effort to reach out to friends lately and you decide that this weekend you just want to curl up on your very own sofa with your pet instead.

Breaks are totally okay! They can help keep us from burning out when we’ve been diligent about following a new healthy behavior pattern.

Note: an effective break is 1) short and 2) doesn’t depart wildly from your new routine

Evaluate whether you’re being too rigid or shooting for perfection:

Being flexible, adaptable, and reasonable are keys to being able to stay with healthy changes in the longterm:

Perhaps you’ve been following your eating pattern so precisely that you haven’t allowed yourself any flexibility in your choice of foods or your willingness to enjoy a food not typically included in your eating pattern.
Perhaps you’ve managed to do 150 minutes of brisk walking and 2 strength-training workouts for a couple months now. On an unusually busy week, will it really hurt to have a week with 120 minutes of brisk walking and 1 strength-training workout? Not at all. In fact, if you don’t give yourself some occasional grace to get close to your goals but not hit them perfectly, you may be setting yourself up to toss them out altogether.
A big red flag is if you mentally scold yourself or shame yourself for anything less than perfection. Gracefully accepting “good enough” or “close enough” is an important emotional skill and essential for longterm success.
Another red flag is an “all or nothing” mentality. Examples: 1) You miss your Monday workout and decide to wait until next Monday to start instead of just starting back again on Tuesday. 2) You decide you shouldn’t have a piece of cake at a birthday party, rather than being flexible and allowing yourself to enjoy the cake since you haven’t had any baked goods for quite a while. Or you decide you won’t eat the cake, then you give in and have it anyway, and throw your whole eating plan out the window since you “blew it.”

Evaluate whether you need to change things up a bit to add some novelty:

You’ve finally gotten in an exercise groove or in the habit of an eating pattern that serves your longterm health goals, but now what has been working well for you is starting to be unappealing. One the one hand, it can be easy to always have the same or similar meals, or always do the same kinds of movement week after week, but our brains enjoy novelty. Try changing things up and see if that helps. Examples:

If you’ve been running for your aerobic exercise, try biking or canoeing or dancing instead of running for a day or two per week.
If you have been doing a specific strength training program, try switching up the exercises you are doing ; trading bodyweight exercises for resistance bands; or trading barbells for machines for a period of time. A change of pase can leave you refreshed and ready to keep moving forward.
If you’ve been faithfully prepping your lunches on the weekends, and it’s been chicken, broccoli, and rice for weeks on end, keep up the meal prep, but switch up the menu: you could supplement with leftovers from dinner for a couple days, or prep 5+ servings of two different meals, freezing half of each for use the following week, etc.

But if you already strayed from the path during a transition, or because your motivation starting flagging, or for other reasons, what you really need is a plan to get back on the path.

Plan to ramp-up to where you were, rather than try to jump right back in.

If you stopped a habit of healthy eating, give your digestive system a chance to adjust to reintroducing higher levels of fiber:

If you had been regularly eating 4 servings of vegetables a day then things got busy at work and you started to grab something quick with a bit of lettuce and tomato sufficing for your vegetable, then your digestive system might appreciate a chance to adapt: 1 serving of veges for 2-3 days, then 2 servings of veges for 2-3 days, etc. (This is an example, not a plan to follow. You’ll need to pay attention to your body to know when to move forward.)

If you stopped an exercise program, give yourself the best chance to get back on track without injury by starting out with less time and intensity than you had been doing and gradually working up. You will likely be find that you get back to where you were faster than you got there in the first place, but better slow and steady than to get sidelined by an injury from trying to do too much too soon.

If you had been jogging for 40 minutes 4 times a week, and for whatever reason, haven’t jogged for a month, give your body a chance to re-adjust. A ramp up plan might involve 30 minutes of brisk walking with a few intervals of jogging, then move to 40 min of walking with a few intervals of jogging, then gradually increase the amount of time you are jogging until you are back to where you were. (Again, this is an example. You will need to feel out what is best for you. )

If you were doing strength-training at a gym there are a lot of reputable “starting back up” articles online because so many people were not able to go to the gym during Covid.

If you find that you are putting off restarting, lower the bar:

The most important thing you can do is to re-establish the habit.

“Lowering the bar” presents your brain with a smaller task. It’s easier to talk yourself into doing something your brain perceives as easy than to try to motivate yourself to do something harder once you’ve gotten out of practice.

Often the actual obstacle is some kind of block about “getting started” and lowering the bar will help you get over that obstacle.

When you set a lower bar, there are two possible results, both positive:

You will do the easy task and decide to keep going because it feels good.
You will complete the easy task and want to stop. That’s fine! It’s still a success because you have started re-establishing the habit even if at a lower level. Keep it up!

Examples:

Prior to getting off the path, you may have been practicing a new language for a 1/2 hour 5-6 times per week to keep yourself cognitively stimulated. Lower the bar to “Just 5 minutes.”
You may have regularly doing a brisk walk for 30 min a day for 5-6 days per week before you got off the path. Lower the bar to “Just a 10 min. walk.”

Most of us can talk ourselves into doing something for “just” 5-15 minutes at a time.

Break your reset into smaller steps:

You want to reset your exercise routine, but are having a really hard time getting started. Try breaking it down into two steps:

Step 1 Put on the clothes you will work out in much earlier than you intend to exercise.

If you exercise after work, you might try putting them on before leaving work.
If you exercise first thing in the morning, you might try sleeping in them.
If you exercise in the early evening, try putting them on before dinner.

There are three reasons to put them on early:

The act of putting on the right clothes doesn’t raise as much internal objection. You are not asking yourself to exercise right now. You are simply changing clothes.
Putting on the clothes earlier makes the actual task smaller when you get to it, because you don’t have to add “Get ready” to “Go!”
I believe that the clothes serve as a powerful cue that primes your brain to switch into the mindset of “I’m going to do this” rather than, “I wonder if I will do this,” or “I don’t feel like doing this.” Your brain has time to “marinate” in anticipation of the upcoming event, and in that way is primed to “Go!” when it’s time.

Step 2: Exercise. Use a lower bar if you need to, but do something, even for 5 minutes.