Internal Motivation, Passion and Belief

We all hear about what we are “supposed to do”. We all know what is “good for us” and “bad for us”. So what makes us decide how we are going to live our lives? What is the difference between healthy and unhealthy?

These are two questions that I ask myself regularly. I find it natural to think about this as I am helping people decide to change…or not to change. They are interesting questions for me because we always have a choice. We decide what is “realistic” or not. We all have the same number of hours in the day. We all start out with the same number of calories consumed when we wake up (hopefully it’s 0, if not, you’ve got a sleep walking and worse, a sleep eating habit.)

So why do some people find it impossible to live healthy, while others find it impossible not to? I think it boils down to motivation. You’ve heard me talk about motivation before, but this a little different. By definition, motivation is simply the reason for doing something. I want to go deeper with the word (and concept of) motivation. It is one thing to want something, but it is another thing altogether to want something enough to work for it.

When we look at school, sports or work, it is easy to think of ourselves as resilient. We have had challenges since birth that have molded our resolve and given us the sense of what we are capable of. Not only do we know what we are capable of, but we are also in tune with how much resistance we can tolerate along the way. The key to being successful in anything is to be able to achieve our goals no matter how much resistance we experience.

When you want something (motivation) and you want it bad enough (passion) and believe you can achieve it (belief) there is a certain magic that seems to come out that makes things seem as if they were meant to be. We often hear people praised as “made for this” or “in their element” because things seem to come so naturally for them. But what if those people simply want something (motivation), want it bad enough to work for it (passion) and truly believe that they can succeed (belief)? Isn’t that all it takes?

Maybe that’s not all it takes. Support, encouragement and the proper tools certainly help, but without motivation, passion and belief, things will be very difficult. There are a lot of people trying to make changes without one, two and even all three of these factors. Think about it. There are people (maybe you are one of them, we’ve all been there in one area or another) that are trying to change a habit in their lives because it is the right thing to do, or because someone told them to do it. When your only motivation comes from someone else’s ideas, how can you develop a passion?

What is even more difficult is believing that you can achieve it. Imagine living your whole life as an active person. Someone tells you that it is bad for you to be active, so they want you to stop moving so much. Think about how difficult it would be to find the motivation to stop all physical activity just because someone else thought you should. Of course, this is the reverse of what we are used to hearing, but it is a good way to illustrate what we are putting ourselves through when we crash diet or try to quit smoking cold turkey. If you don’t believe in it, or believe that you can do it, you won’t do it.

In the health and fitness industry, I think we have put ourselves in a tough position. We create these vacuums for ourselves by thrusting everything aside and vowing to change everything at once. We’ve all seen the next big thing on television that is the new answer to the age old problem. And what do they always say? They say, “Finally, this is the program for you.” “This is the one you’ve been waiting for”. They go on and on about why THIS program is the secret to your success. We think that if someone tells us to do something (expert or not), that all we have to is listen and do it. Millions of people have found that that is not the case. I have worked with countless numbers of them that tried to use motivation from the outside, but didn’t get very far because they didn’t have any passion for it or any belief that they could ever succeed. So what happens? They fail and it feels like “yet another” situation that they failed in. We all know what that does to the belief factor: now I believe even more strongly that I AM a failure.

The point I am trying to make here is that everyone has limits, but we often decide what they are before we even try to do something. No matter what we do in life, there are things that we are passionate about. The more we do those things, the more we understand our abilities and believe we can succeed in them. If you want to be healthy, you know what you are supposed to do. We have known the difference between healthy and unhealthy for centuries. There isn’t a whole lot that has changed, other than a lot more confusion and complication. In health, just like in any other area of life, we are capable of accomplishing the things we are motivated to do, the things (and results) that we are passionate about and of course things that we believe we can achieve.

Don’t exercise because I told you to, or because you saw a news story about it being good for you. Exercise because you like the way you feel when you are done. Exercise because you like going to the gym in the morning and watching the news on the treadmill. There are millions of good things we get from all of the habits in our lives. At least there should be good things coming from our habits. If you aren’t getting positives from your habits, than why are they your habits? Who’s habits do you have? When you are motivated internally, have a passion for what you are doing and believe that you can do it, you are truly healthy and successful.