From my conversation with Hannah and Feds on The Stretch Zone Podcast
Hannah opened with a question I wish more people would ask out loud. “Why does motivation fail most people? What actually happens between that initial burst of excitement and the drop-off?”
Here’s the answer I gave her, and it’s the foundation of how I coach: motivation is an emotion. And emotions change. Some days your motivation will be high, other days it will be low, and some days you’re just not feeling it at all. Many of us think of this as a character flaw when we are actually mislabelling the concept entirely.
If you build your improvement plan entirely on motivation, you are building on weather. Nobody can be motivated all day, every day, and the plan that requires it is a plan that fails.
What I do instead, with every client, is let motivation do the one job it’s actually good at: starting things. Motivation kicks things off. Then a system takes over because systems don’t have bad days. Once a system is in place, you can tweak it and fine-tune it. And it’s right there working for you even on the mornings when your motivation isn’t.
Here’s how to build a system that holds.
Start embarrassingly small.
Who doesn’t want to immediately play the guitar, immediately speak a language, immediately master an incredibly useful or exciting thing? So, what do we do? We tell ourselves we are going to commit twenty hours a week, or three hours a day, and then the weight of that commitment bears down on us and we give up. The initial commitment is almost always a motivation-sized commitment. So, instead, start embarrassingly small.
I always tell my new clients to take the one or two hours they can commit to communication practice each week and break it up over five days. Start with 15-minute focused sessions and see if something small like that is manageable. They’ll end up doing more eventually, but it’s important they remember and for you to remember, too: a small commitment you keep will beat a heroic commitment you abandon every single time.
Tie it to a habit that already works.
Don’t build your new routine on empty ground. Attach it to something that already happens every day without effort. If you wake up, do your stretches, and have your coffee, put your ten or fifteen minute routine right before or after that. Once it has worked five, six, seven times, you’ll know it fits, and then you can add another session somewhere else. Small changes, stacked on habits you already trust, become cumulative over time.
Give yourself cheat days.
I don’t come in heavy on my clients demanding perfection every single day because we all have those low-motivation days we already addressed earlier. The system needs to bend without breaking.
So if today is a mess, don’t skip the fifteen minute time-block. Shrink it. Can you do five or ten minutes instead? Can you just show up? That’s half the battle. Sometimes you’ll show up for five minutes and find yourself still there at thirty. Showing up has a way of doing that.
Track your cheat days, and at the end of the week or the month, look back. If you’re shrinking your time-blocks often or skipping constantly, that’s not a moral failure. It’s data! It probably means you overextended, and you can’t actually commit the time you thought you could. That’s okay. It’s not the system’s fault, and it’s not yours. Flip the system. Rebuild it around the time you really have, and keep moving.
Trade drama for data.
“I want to get healthy” is not a goal. “I want to become fluent” isn’t either. We can get very dramatic and emotional about why we want something, and that emotion is useful fuel, but the target itself needs to be quantitative. Specific, measurable, with a date attached and a reason behind it. A number by a deadline for a purpose. The drama gets you to the starting line. The data tells you whether you’re moving.
Remove the friction beforehand.
Think ahead about everything that might stop the habit from happening, and build the contingency now, while you’re calm and you have the time. The drive to the gym where you swim is often congested? Figure out alternative ways to get there before the day comes. Your bathing suit might still be wet from yesterday’s swim? Keep a second one in your gym bag. It sounds almost silly written down, but this is exactly how you stop yourself from handing yourself an excuse in the weak moment. Your future self will always take the easiest route available. Your job today is to make sure the easiest route is the one that keeps the habit alive.
Treat it like a job.
Feds shared a story during our conversation that may be the best advice I’ve ever heard on maintaining habits. A client of hers ran every single day, and when asked how she never skipped, she said, “I treat it like a job. I have an appointment, so I show up.” Because think about that honestly. Would you just not show up to your job? That mindset shift is extremely powerful. It makes it to where your habit is not up for negotiation. It’s just an appointment you keep. Period.
Watch the conversation.
My thanks to Hannah and Feds for having me on The Stretch Zone. I was honored to open their fourth season. The full episode also covers why my goal with every client is to say goodbye, what an 80-year-old Vietnamese grandmother on the back of a motorbike can teach us about communication, and my honest answer to the question “when should you have pushed yourself further?”
The full conversation is available here: