Absolutely you have to know what makes you tick. I too rebel against rules, commands or conventions.
Also you can accept “bad” motivations for doing things if it works for you such as vanity, revenge, ability to beat someone’s ass…
But belief is more important than motivation, according to one of the gym trainers I worked with. He said he got so frustrated with seeing people revert to bad habits. Then he realized that accountability and motivation were not sustainable. Only belief was. A great example he gave of that was when people say they are vegetarian or vegan. It’s an identity and they aren’t struggling to make the eating choices that go with it, they don’t even question them.
This is interesting - though I am not sure what statement or identity would work for me.
“I take care if myself”?
“I am an athelete”?
Very thought provoking though.
It's about more than just self talk though, one of the points that I've always made when coaching someone who wants to incorporate more healthy behaviours into their lifestyle is that priorities are the things you do, not the things you put pressure on yourself to do.
For someone who *is* a runner, running will always come before other things, which means it will displace other things, so if your life is already full of priorities, the only way to muscle exercise in is by will power, which isn't sustainable.
You can't depend on pushing yourself beyond your existing capacity indefinitely to add exercise, you have to make space for it as a real A-level priority. If you don't make space for it, it will stay a B priority, which is the list of things you wish you did, but don't.
So if I
am a runner, them it's because running is
what I do not what I
should be doing.So if you want to promote something from a B priority to an A priority, you have to systematically look for some A priorities that you can denote, at least temporarily to B priorities while you cultivate a new habit.
I will sometimes outsource cooking and cleaning for a period to free up motivation to develop a new healthy habit, I'll let my social life slide for a bit, or focus less on dog training, whatever can be cut to free up increments of motivation while building something else into a habit. Then I reintroduce the temporarily cut tasks and triage which I have space to return and which I don't and how to manage that.
Once it becomes a habit, it
is something I
do, and is much more persistent as a behaviour than if I tried to dogpile it on top of my already full dance card of tasks.
If I want a behaviour to become part of who I am, I have to make space for it, and have to accept letting something else go.
