Mastering Motivation: Wanting What We Say We Want.

How many times have you set goals for yourself and failed to follow through?

How many times have you said to yourself, “It’s time! This year, I am finally going to change my life, I am going to do….X!” 

Whatever “X” is, maybe you make a sincere effort to start doing it, and perhaps you are successful for a few weeks.  However, within a few months you’re back to your regular routine, your regular habits, and your regular life.  So, you give in, give up, and you decide that X is too hard, or you’re too lazy or perhaps just incapable, or maybe you decide you didn’t really want X in the first place, that it’s not, after all, who you really are. 

Why do so many of us fail to achieve the goals we set for ourselves? What comes between us and our aspirations?

Some of it, I’m learning, comes down to misconceptions about motivation.

In this blog, I’d like to address one challenge to motivation we don’t often think about: Ambivalence.  Motivational ambivalence can show up in several forms, let’s dive into a few and explore some solutions.

1.    Goal Conflict

One of the main barriers to achieving our goals is not laziness or lack of motivation, but other goals.  People often struggle with having conflicting goals, leading to ambivalence and a diffusion of focused effort.  It’s not that we don’t want X, but we also want Y, and X & Y are at odds with each other.

For example, say we want to make exercise a part of our weekly routine and because of our work schedule we can only workout in the evenings.  A conflicting goal may be that we also enjoy spending time with our family in the evenings. So, while we may want to go to the gym, our desire to also be home with the kids creates internal ambivalence. 

Antidote to goal conflicts? 

Dig into your values: Conflicting goals often derive from distinct individual values.  Values are our deeply help beliefs that motivate what we do. They can serve as a guide for choices we make. In the scenario described above, a value to stay strong and healthy may be competing with a value to be present for our children after school.  Sometimes, however, if we look deeper beyond goals to the values that motivate them, we might realize a way that our differing values can connect and support each other. For example., staying strong and healthy will allow us to be more present and available for our children over the course of their lives.  Understanding the values behind our goals might resolve some of the ambivalence and help us stay motivated to exercise.

Taking the time to understand our deeper values, what is important to us, and evaluating whether our goals align with these values can also diminish ambivalence and goal conflict by helping us prioritize our most important goals.  There are many exercises and tools available to help us gain clarity on what is most important to us, but some questions we can ask ourselves are:

• When do I feel most alive? What feels most rewarding to me? What values am I expressing in those times in my life?

• Who inspires me? What are their qualities? What does this tell me about what I value?

• What do I want my legacy to be? How do my goals connect?

• What makes me angry, feel stomped down? What values am I expressing in those moments?

• Think of a time when everything was working/feeling good. What value(s) was I honoring?

• What breaks my heart? What do I stand for? What's worth putting myself on the line for? 

Distinguish urgent versus important goals: Another form of goal conflict occurs when urgent goals get pitted against important goals.  Sometimes we get sidetracked by urgent tasks that are less important to the achievement of our larger, more meaningful life goals.   So, while it may seem we are being productive by ticking off boxes on our to-do list, our vital priorities remain unaddressed.

In these cases, it is helpful to do the following exercise: 1. Create a list of all the specific tasks you want or need to complete, 2. Rank each task according to urgency (using due dates can be helpful here), 3. Also rank each task according to importance (i.e. those that have the greatest effect on your long-term goals and/or life values), 4. Prioritize the tasks that are high on both urgency and importance.   

2.    What You Want to Want (WYWW)

Sometimes we want something because we think we should want it. 

Society has a powerful way of indoctrinating us with shoulds, to the point that it can be hard to distinguish our true needs and wants from those our social context tells us to want and need. The question becomes, “Do I want it, or do I want to want it?” 

The importance of this distinction lies in the impact on our motivation.  Something we want to want is generally motivated by reasons external to ourselves, and we tend to experience more ambivalence toward those goals. Something intrinsically driven (motivated by reasons internal to us) is a far more powerful motivator.

Antidote to WYWW goals?

Focus on Intrinsic Goals: Being able to decipher between extrinsically and intrinsically motivated goals, between a should goal and a want goal, is key.  Take a moment to reflect on (or journal about) why you are pursuing a particular goal at this time in your life. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is important to you about achieving this goal?

• How or why will your life change/be better after you achieve this goal?

• How does achieving this goal help you to become the person you want to become?

Turn shoulds into wants: Sometimes, when we are able to realize the intrinsic value of should goal, we internalize it. Considering the potential impact of a goal with the questions above, can increase our intrinsic interest in the goal, thereby moving a should goal into a want goal.

If still unable to internalize a should goal, you can foster wanting what you want to want, with these further questions:

• What would make you want the goal more?

• Is there an aspect of the goal you do want and can accomplish?  

For example, let’s go back to exercise. 

If you realize the reason you added exercise to your list of goals was because all of your friends said it’s good for you, but you have no intrinsic desire to do it, you can start to ask yourself, “What would make me want to do it more?”  You might decide walking, or dancing, is something you actually enjoy, even more so if you did it with a friend.  So, signing yourself, and a friend, up for a dance fitness class twice a week may feel more like something you would want to do and would look forward to, and you would be more likely to follow through. 

If a goal remains a should goal, but you think it is still one that is important to your life and wellbeing, you may just have to push through, motivated or not, to do it (going to the dentist regularly feels like that for me). However, if not that important to your wellbeing, maybe that is not a goal for you invest your energy into.

3.    Wired for Survival, Not for Success

I heard this in a podcast, and it shifted how I think about motivation:

“The human brain is not designed for success. The human brain is designed for survival… Survival is about conserving energy.  Success is the opposite.  Success is about expending energy, doing things that are uncomfortable.”

 - Rory Vaden, 7 Step Guide to Overcome Procrastination

The point Vaden was making is, if we are waiting to feel motivated to do the things we set ourselves as goals, we will never do them.  We are not wired to feel like doing hard things, to expend energy.  We are motivated to conserve energy. 

Extrapolating a bit, I believe this suggests ambivalence over our goals (not wanting to do what we set for ourselves as goals) can be a natural state of being.  It is NOT an indication of lack of desire, or commitment, or capacity. 

What follows, is that not wanting to, or not feeling motivated to follow through on our goals, is both natural AND something we just need to fight through.

Antidote to not feeling like it?

Discipline: Something we have always known, but don’t necessarily want to hear.  The way through is sometimes, just through. 

Commit yourself to your goal.  Vaden suggests shifting the focus of your thoughts from "Do I feel like doing X today?” and, “Should I do X?" to "How can I do X?" This slight shift in perspective means you stop spending energy on wondering whether you should, and moves you toward an active mindset geared towards finding solutions to how you can achieve your goals.

Find ways to force yourself to do it.  For example, register for your exercise classes ahead so you have to do them. Better yet, commit to going with a friend because we are more driven by the commitments we make to others, than to ourselves.

If you find yourself procrastinating from doing X, decide you will just do it for 7 mins, and start.  Once you get going, you are likely to continue past the 7 minutes.  Remember, while new goals and habits can feel painful and effortful to engage in in the beginning, they get easier over time as you grow. 

4.    Fear of Failure

Finally, this is one I have had considerable experience with.

When we don’t believe we can achieve our goals, fear of failure and all that comes along with it, creates an ambivalence toward goal pursuit.  A sense of competence is a motivation driver, without it, motivation dissolves.

Rather than risking failure, we avoid, we procrastinate.  While procrastination may initially serve as a way to avoid the discomfort of stretching ourselves, feeling inadequate, or overwhelmed, over time you pay for the delay in regret, and an actual experience of failure when we don’t accomplish the goals we set for ourselves.  It lands a blow to our sense of self-efficacy.

Antidote to the fear of failure?

Setting smarter goals: Goal success is as much about the success of creating the right goals. There is a massive amount of literature out there on how to create goals for success, but for now, think: break bigger goals into smaller, more manageable, time-limited, measurable, and specific tasks. 

Writing a book can feel impossible and overwhelming, but spending an hour each morning over the next 3 weeks to write an outline for a book concept as the first step, can feel much more manageable. 

If your goal is to start a meditation practice, an initial 1-3 minute daily commitment to meditating each morning after grabbing a cup of coffee, has a far greater chance of keeping you motivated than a more ambitious goal of 20 minutes a day. 

Implementation Intentions: Another antidote to the fear of failure, is to expect failure. Anticipating setbacks, failures, challenges, and obstacles, and planning for them by creating implementation intentions, has been shown to lead to greater tenacity in goal achievement.

An Implementation Intention looks like this: If Y (setback) happens, I will do Z. 

In the case of the meditation example above, an implementation intention might be: if I am rushed one morning and unable to meditate for the 1-3 mins, I will meditate that night before bed. 

Process Visualization: Another practice that has been found to counter ambivalence and lead to goal success is process visualization. Often when we imagine achieving a goal, we imagine the outcome, the final result.  What has found to create more success is visualizing the process of how you got to the final goal; the work that went in, the steps taken, the obstacles you encountered and how you overcame them. 

Summary

A somewhat unexpected hinderance to the successful pursuit of goals we set out for ourselves is our own ambivalence.  We might want something, but we may also want other things which conflict with those goals.  Sometimes, we aren’t even clear about what we want, we might think we want something because we are told we should.  Changing our behavior, pursuing unknown experiences, building new habits can feel scary and uncomfortable. Yet, we are wired to seek safety, not discomfort.  Finally, while we may have goals we want to accomplish, we are not motivated to try if we think we will fail. 

Understanding the role ambivalence plays in the pursuit of our ambitions is both helpful in counteracting the self-blame and regret that can accompany goal failure, and is critical to charting a path toward successful goal achievement.

The antidotes offered in this blog are just a taste of the solutions that can be pursued.  If you are interested in exploring these strategies further and applying them to your own goals, contact us at Vibe Vault Fit.