Motivation | Tip Tuesday

Here is another installment of Tip Tuesday, All about Motivation!

Watch it on YouTube here.

Listen to it right here: 

Read the transcript here:

Hey I’m Mercedes Pollmeier with Modus Athletica. I have an award-winning book Peak Nutrition and Simple Strength, which is self-published. Thank you so much for joining me.

Today we're going to be talking about motivation. We're going along in this strem of habit formation. This week with motivation, we're really going to dig deep

and connect to the reasons why we do the things that we want to do. First! Let's define the word motivation.

Motivation really is “a reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way” and what's really interesting about this definition is the word “reason.”

A simple example of a motive would be getting a glass of water because I'm thirsty or making some food because I'm hungry.

So this is really easy to connect to but often the reasons for doing something are quite hidden and when it comes to health and fitness goals, it's really hard to dig deep and find the true motives of why we're wanting to do something.

The examples before of getting some water because you're thirsty, the motivation isn't really hidden. It's there because you know water helps us survive, but when it comes to health and fitness, we don't really know what these obvious reasons are.

They're harder to come up with and we really have to dig down and get into the truth of things so that we can continue to move forward.

And I would say that there is an argument that almost everything that we do has some sort of link to surviving.

The problem with motivation, that when it comes to health and fitness goals is that first we're really excited and we have a lot of energy in the beginning when we make a new goal.

And you know, we're busting a lot of our workouts, we’re getting to the gym. We're doing our home workouts, and then all of a sudden we get really busy and our energy just starts to tank,

and this is we're like “Where’s the motivation?” The motivation is always there, it’s always inside but what we have done is actually lost that energy, that spark. 

We can't really rely on this word or feeling of motivation alone.

So how do we stay inspired?

We have to connect to our why we need to dig deep and really find the true reason of why we want to do something. I call this connecting to your why.

If you want more information on this I go pretty deep and how to come up with this in my book Peak nutrition.

I've also taken a lot of this information, learned these valuable lessons from Precision Nutrition. I absolutely love this company. I'm a certified level 2 coach through Precision Nutrition.

If you're a health and fitness coach looking to deepen your knowledge in motivation, goal-setting health, and nutrition, I highly recommend you look into them. All right.

So now we're going to get into this exercise on how to create that connection that lives deep deep inside of us.

We call this the Five Why's. 

This is a fairly simple activity, but it's also very difficult! What you're going to do is actually ask yourself a question five times.

I'm going to think about a climbing goal.

Goal: I'm going to climb harder. 

So a question would be why do you want to climb harder?

Well, because it's fun and I want to progress that's interesting.

Why do you want to progress? 

Well, because it gives me meaning and provides meaning to climbing.

Okay, so why do you need to provide this meaning to climbing?

Because it makes me try hard and I'm able to see my potential.

That's interesting. Why do you want to see your potential?

Well, because it makes me feel somehow valued.

(Okay, so now we're getting deep into this.) So why do you want to feel valued?

Because when I feel valued it boost my self-confidence.

So now we've come to a somewhat very deep level of motivation of why I want to accomplish something and what might happen is that you might find by doing this exercise later on, let's say you revisit this exercise in three months from now and compare it to what you did today, that deep reason might be a little different and that's okay and that's good.

I want you to keep getting deeper and deeper and you might have more self-realization around your goals.

Today I want you to take five minutes and sit down and connect with your why ask yourself five times why you want to accomplish that goal and you can even connect this to last week's exercise.

All right. So let me know in the comments how the process went for you.

I think it would be really interesting to see how the process felt.

Was it a little scary. Was it easy?