What Drives You? The Secrets To Motivating Yourself

"Your own resolution to success is more important than any other one thing." - Abraham Lincoln

Bianca rose to the sound of pigeons cooing and traffic grumbling on the street below. As she yawned and stretched, she thought about what was waiting for her that day.

She felt her motivation slowly drain away with each deadline and commitment that zipped through her thoughts. As Bianca began to wither and wilt internally, she remembered the motivation pills she had purchased last week from the Good Value Pharmacy.

There were yellow pills labelled 'Money', pink pills labelled 'Pride', green pills labelled 'Family', purple pills labelled 'Respect' and some ugly grey pills labelled 'Nagging Advice'. The chemist had told her as he dispensed the pills that some would work for her and some would not... he could never tell in advance which pills would work for which customers. With that advice in mind and a smile on her lips, Bianca reached for the one she knew would be just right for her...

One of the best things you can do for yourself on your journey of self discovery is to work out what drives you. The first step is to identify your values as they provide the fuel for your motivation and the drive behind everything you do in life. If you value something you will always find the motivation and energy to do it. If you don't value something, you will always struggle to find the motivation and energy to do it.

Values

Your values are what are important to you. They are the broad concepts that guide your decisions in life and form the basis of your character. Your values also determine how you spend your time. For example, if your most important value is health, you will spend your time quite differently from someone whose most important value is career or family.

Values also drive all your motivation. You won't pursue a course of action unless it relates to something you value at some level. Identifying your values allows you to kick-start your own motivation, set goals that are appropriate and spend time on things that are important to you.

How Your Values Are Formed

Your values come from a number of sources including your family, friends, religion, school, teachers, country and the media. They are also shaped at any time in your life by significant emotional events such as natural disasters, emotional abuse, global depression or war.

Your values change as you grow and evolve. When you change your values, you will also change some of your beliefs and the way you live life.

How To Identify Your Personal Values

Identifying your personal values helps you to:

• Understand why some issues are a problem for you;
• See why some things motivate you and others don't; and
• Identify and overcome problem areas of your life.

For example, assume you have weight issues. You determine your personal values and find that health and fitness doesn't even rate a mention within your values. You may have found the reason why you are having weight issues, i.e. health and fitness is not something you value. While this remains the case it will be very difficult for you to lose weight and gain a greater level of health and fitness in your life as you will not have any motivation to do so.

You can identify your values by asking yourself:

• What is important to me in relation to my life, career, relationships etc?
• What would cause me to leave my life, career, relationships, etc?

When you have an understanding of your values, it is useful to see how they affect your motivation.

Motivation

Your values drive your motivation. If you set goals that are aligned with your values, you will have the motivation to help you achieve them. If you set goals that are not in line with your values, it will be an uphill struggle to achieve them.

When you understand your values and their impact on how you are currently motivating yourself you will have a wonderful insight into why you achieve the results that you do in life. You will also know how to motivate yourself more effectively in the future.

Motivation comes either from within you (intrinsic motivation) or from an external source (extrinsic motivation).

Extrinsic motivation is provided by some factor external to you. It can take the form of inducements (rewards) or punishments. The rewards can be tangible or intangible (such as praise).

Intrinsic motivation is evident when you engage in an activity for its own sake without any external incentive. It appears from research done by Albert Bandura that if you have more self efficacy (belief in your own abilities to control your environment) you are more highly intrinsically motivated than other people.

As intrinsic motivation is the only one you can take with you and call upon at any time, it is the most important in terms of self motivation.

Intrinsic motivation can be broken down further into 'towards' motivation and 'away from' motivation. 'Towards' motivation is motivation towards something you want and 'away from' motivation is motivation away from something you don't want.

'Away From' Motivation

'Away from' motivation is driven by pain. Pain motivated performance is not pleasant, produces inconsistent results and disappears when the pain is no longer present.

'Away from motivation' does, however, give you a strong initial motivation to move away from the thing you don't want in your life. A problem with using this type of motivation is that you wait until things are bad before you take action to change them. Another problem is that you don't have a target or goal that you are aiming for (just something you are running from) so you don't tend to achieve results.

Sophia uses 'away from' motivation in relation to her weight. As a result she is the classic yo yo dieter. Her process goes like this. Sophia looks in the mirror and sees that she is overweight. She says to herself, 'I don't want to be fat anymore'. She then goes on a diet to ensure she is no longer fat. (She is moving away from being fat). At some point she looks in the mirror and sees that she looks fantastic and is no longer fat. As she is no longer fat, she has just lost the source of her motivation (to no longer be fat). As there is no longer any motivation, she no longer stays on the diet and discards her exercise regime. She will not be motivated to do whatever she needs to stay fit and healthy. At some point in the future she will look in the mirror and again form the judgment that she is fat and the process will start all over again.

When you are motivated away from something that you don't want in life, you tend to focus upon the very thing you don't want and that is what you attract into your life. As examples:

• If you constantly say to yourself, 'I don't want to be broke', your focus is upon being broke and that is where your unconscious mind will aim.
• If you constantly say to yourself, "I don't want to be single", your focus is upon being single and that is where your unconscious mind will aim.

Motivation away from what you don't want can motivate you, but it doesn't do so for long and you can't be sure what results you will achieve. It can give you a fantastic initial boost of energy, but you can never guarantee where you are going to end up as you don't have a firm direction in mind, just a place you want to get away from. If you use away from motivation in your life, you will tend to create a series of crises to keep yourself motivated.

'Towards' Motivation

If you use 'towards motivation' you will take action to move towards your goal and you will achieve them more often than not.

'Towards' motivation is the best way to motivate yourself. When you are motivated towards what you want, you tend to stay consistently motivated until you achieve your goal (provided you desire it enough).

When you are motivated towards what you want, you constantly set and achieve goals each time stretching yourself further. By using motivation towards what you want you give yourself a far greater chance of achieving what you want out of life.

How Do You Know If The Motivation You Use Is 'Towards' Or 'Away From' Motivation?

We now know that values drive your motivation and that motivation can be either towards what you want or away from what you don't want. Now it is time to review your values to discover whether the underlying motivation for each of your values is:

• towards what you want; or
• away from what you don't want.

To determine whether the underlying motivation for each value is 'towards' or 'away from' ask yourself, "Why is that value important to me?" then listen to your self-talk and note what you say to yourself. The clues to whether you are using towards or away from motivation for that value are:

You are probably using 'towards' motivation if you:

• talk about what you do want
• don't use comparisons in your explanation (better than, worse than, more than)

You are probably using 'away from' motivation if you:

• talk about what you don't want
• make comparisons in your explanation or use words such as 'better than', 'more than', 'less than', 'best' etc. (These show you are unhappy with where you currently are)
• use words such as 'must', 'need', 'have to', 'got to' etc

As an example, assume that 'money' was your highest value in relation to your career. You then ask yourself, "Why is the value 'compensation' important to me in relation to my career?"

If your answer is, "Because I want to make a lot of money and live in luxury", the response would indicate 'towards' motivation for this value.

If your answer is, "Because I don't want to be broke and I have to be able to pay my bills", the response would indicate 'away from' motivation for this value.

Your chances of achieving goals relating to 'money' are much greater if you are using towards motivation.

If you find that you have identified 'away from' motivation in relation to any of your values, you will find:

• This area of your life is one where you will experience the most difficulties;
• You will not be achieving the results in this area of your life that you might wish; and
• There are unresolved issues to be cleared away and healed in relation to this area of your life before you will experience the success you desire.

This is wonderful information to have as it identifies areas of your life for you to focus upon.

Problems With Motivation

We all experience problems with motivation at some point. Those times when you just can't seem to find the desire to do things you know you should. The problems can arise because:

• You are low on energy. There are some easy things I'm sure you do when you are feeling 'low' to get your energy back. Remember too that sometimes in life, you need and deserve a rest.
• The thing you are aiming towards is not something you value. (In this case, question whether you should be exerting your energy in that direction); or
• You have a problem with your motivation strategy (see below).

If it is your motivation strategy that is causing you challenges, identify which part of the strategy is causing the problem and then use one of the following techniques to assist you to change it. If you are not motivated because:

• You feel overwhelmed, break the goal down into smaller steps and do them one at a time.
• You are only using 'away from' motivation, identify where you are aiming and focus upon the positive outcomes of attaining it.
• You feel obliged to pursue the goal, either accept the goal is not for you and let it go or focus upon the positive outcomes you will get from achieving the goal.
• You are scared, identify what could go wrong and what you would do if it did.

In Summary

If you understand your values, you will understand what motivates you and why. If you discover whether you are using towards or away from motivation in different areas of your life, you will have answers for why some parts of your life are successful and others are not. If you use one of the above techniques to overcome common motivation problems... and you take action... you should be on your way to success!

Source

Mastering Motivation - Lessons in Creating Forever Change - How to Stay Motivated When You Don't Feel Like It

Self-Trust

What to Do When Motivation Runs Out

Nobody feels motivated permanently, and waiting to feel it before you act is the quiet reason so many good intentions never make it past the second week.

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A Note From the Elite VIP Circle Editorial Team

If you have started something with real excitement, watched that excitement fade within weeks, and quietly assumed something was wrong with you, we want to offer a different explanation: nothing is wrong with you, motivation was simply never built to last on its own, and the people who keep going are not the ones who feel it more often, they are the ones who stopped waiting for it.

Why "Motivation" Is Such a Slippery Word

Ask ten people to define motivation and you will get ten different answers, and it is worth knowing that this is not because any of them are wrong, it is because the word is genuinely being asked to do too much work. For one person it is a feeling that shows up before a run. For another it is simply a reason they have to do something, five children to provide for, a father's heart attack to avoid repeating. Fear can motivate. Vanity can motivate. Hunger can motivate. The word covers all of it, which is part of why it feels so hard to pin down, and why advice about "finding your motivation" so often falls flat, it is trying to locate one thing when what is actually being described is a whole family of different pushes and pulls.

This article is not really about that whole family. It is about the specific kind of motivation people mean when they talk about lasting change, the new habit, the improved health, the different relationship with money or work, and specifically about what happens to that motivation once the initial excitement wears off, which it reliably does.

The Problem With Treating Motivation as a Feeling

For most of us, motivation shows up as an emotional state, a genuine lift, and for a while it works exactly as advertised. You feel it, you act on it, things move. The trouble is that feelings, by their nature, fluctuate, they always have, and when the feeling fades, which it will, the behaviour built entirely on top of it tends to fade with it. This is not a character flaw. It is simply what happens when a changeable thing is asked to be the sole foundation for something that needs to last.

Editorial Insight: Most of us alternate between can't-be-bothered, kinda-motivated and genuinely in the zone, often within the same day. That alternation is not evidence that something is broken in you, it is closer to the default operating condition of being human, which is exactly why building anything lasting on top of it alone rarely works.

This is also, honestly, why most people who start things do not finish them. Not because they lack ambition or willpower in some deep sense, but because the plan was quietly relying on a feeling to stay constant when nothing about feelings works that way. We start the book and get to chapter two. We join the gym and go four times. We change how we eat, for three days. None of that is a personal failing so much as a predictable outcome of the approach.

The Shift That Actually Works: Behaviour Before Feeling

The more useful reframe, and the one this article is really built around, is that motivation works better as a commitment and a choice than as a feeling you wait to arrive. That sounds like a small distinction. In practice it changes almost everything about how you approach a hard day.

The pattern tends to run in an order most people assume is backwards: you choose to act, you act despite not feeling like it, and only afterward does the feeling of motivation actually show up, often within a short amount of time. Acting first is not a trick or a workaround, it reflects something genuinely true about how emotional state tends to follow behaviour at least as often as it precedes it. Change your posture, your pace, your tone, your follow-through, and the internal state has a way of catching up to match it.

Try This: Next time you catch yourself thinking "I can't be bothered today," do the smallest version of the task anyway, just the first two minutes of it, before deciding whether to stop. Notice whether the reluctance is still as strong once you are already moving.

How to Actually Keep Going

Decide before the moment arrives, not during it. Waiting until you are standing in front of the decision, gym bag in hand, alarm going off, to figure out whether you feel like it, hands the whole outcome to whatever mood happens to be passing through that morning. Deciding in advance, the night before, the week before, removes the negotiation entirely, there is nothing left to talk yourself out of in the moment because the moment was already decided.

Act the part before you feel it. Posture, pace, tone, and follow-through can be chosen independently of how you feel, and choosing them tends to shift the feeling that follows. This is not about performing enthusiasm you do not have, it is closer to giving your own state something concrete to catch up to.

Attach the goal to a plan that expects the bad days. Spur of the moment, purely emotional decisions rarely produce change that lasts, because they were never built to survive the inevitable dip. A plan that already accounts for the fact that motivation will run hot and cold is a plan that does not collapse the first time it does.

If perfectionism or over-preparing is part of what keeps a plan stuck at the planning stage, our guide on how to stop overthinking and start moving forward goes deeper into that specific pattern.

Let small, finished things count. A ten-minute version of the task, completed, tends to do more for your follow-through over time than an ambitious version that gets abandoned halfway. Finishing, at any size, is the skill actually being practised here.

Expect the fluctuation instead of being derailed by it. A bad day, a flat week, a stretch where nothing feels exciting, is not evidence the plan has failed. It is simply what the middle of any real change tends to feel like, and knowing that in advance tends to make it far less likely to actually stop you.

Books That Can Support This Practice

Reading is not a requirement for any of the above, but for readers who want a more structured companion, here are two resources from our approved library worth knowing about.

EDITOR’S CHOICEAtomic Habits by James Clear. We recommend this first because it is built entirely around the idea at the centre of this article, that consistent small systems outlast dependence on feeling, and it gives that idea far more practical structure than a single article can. It is best suited to readers who want a concrete system to build, not just a mindset shift, and it complements the "decide before the moment arrives" practice above directly.

SUPPORTING RESOURCEStop Overthinking by Nick Trenton. This one is here for a different reason, for readers whose stalled plans have less to do with lacking motivation and more to do with getting stuck circling a decision before ever acting on it. It suits anyone who recognises the "ten years of planning" pattern in themselves, and it pairs naturally with the point above about deciding before the moment arrives.

What This Looks Like in an Ordinary Week

Picture the morning the alarm goes off and the honest first thought is that you cannot be bothered. The version of this that actually works is rarely a burst of sudden enthusiasm talking you out of that thought, it is getting up anyway, doing the smallest possible version of the plan, and letting the feeling catch up or not, since either way the action already happened. Do that enough times and something genuinely shifts, not because the flat mornings stop coming, they will not, but because you stop needing them to feel a certain way before you are willing to move.

Key Takeaways

• Motivation is a fluctuating emotional state, not a fixed resource you either have or don't
• Behaviour can precede feeling, act first and the motivation often follows, not the other way around
• Deciding in advance removes the in-the-moment negotiation that derails most plans
• Lasting change depends on a plan that already expects the low days, not one that assumes constant enthusiasm
• Small, finished actions build the habit of follow-through more reliably than ambitious, abandoned ones

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do I lose motivation so quickly after starting something new?

Because the initial burst of motivation is an emotional state, and emotional states fluctuate by nature. If the new habit was relying entirely on that feeling staying constant, the habit tends to fade at the same rate the feeling does.

Is it possible to feel motivated all the time?

No, and expecting to is part of what makes the drop feel like failure rather than simply what was always going to happen. Most people move between low-motivation and high-motivation states regularly, sometimes within the same day.

Can you really act motivated before you feel it?

Yes, and for many people this is the more reliable direction. Choosing the behaviour first, posture, pace, follow-through, often shifts the internal state to match it, rather than waiting for the state to arrive on its own first.

What is the single biggest mistake people make with motivation?

Treating it as something to wait for rather than something to decide in advance. Plans made in the moment, based purely on how you happen to feel that day, are the ones most likely to collapse the first time the feeling dips.

Conclusion

Motivation was never going to hold steady on its own, that was never really the problem to solve. The more useful question is not how to feel motivated more often, it is how to keep going on the days you do not, and that turns out to be entirely learnable, through decisions made in advance, small actions that get finished, and a plan honest enough to expect the low days rather than be derailed by them.

Want a Structured Way to Put This Into Practice?

The VIP Performance Playbook walks you through building consistency, confidence, and follow-through into a single, practical system, the natural next step once you have read the theory.

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Les Brown's 15 Minute Morning Motivational Speech!!