Longevity logo

Finding Motivation in Your Health and Wellness Journey

How do you develop motivation in your journey of Health and Wellness?

By Ganesh KuduvaPublished 2 years ago 7 min read
Like
Finding Motivation in Your Health and Wellness Journey
Photo by Justin Veenema on Unsplash

How do you develop motivation in your journey of Health and Wellness?

Many people are going through this state of “How can I keep up the motivation to keep going through my personal transformation with health and wellness?”.

Everyone is starting with something, improving fitness, building strength, building muscles (better shape!), becoming a runner, losing weight and the list goes on.

Everyone sure starts with the right motive.

But what is one thing that stops anyone from progressing?

It is the lack of motivation! Your alarm goes off and you snooze it, wrapping yourself around your bedsheet and later, when you are up, you totally regret what you did. And it keeps on repeating.

So, what can be done?

It is time to understand what can drive motivation in you to pursue your health and wellness transformation goals.

Clarity

Having crystal clear clarity about what you want to do and why you want to do is profoundly important. Without being deeply clear about your intentions is one of the biggest pitfall that you would go through. How could you be clear? We think we need to be clear about our goals to have the limitless motivation to progress in our journey. We think it works linearly. I would not completely agree with that. Sometimes, the clarity is born out of what we do as well.

For example. Let’s say you are all set to become fitter. It needs you to hit the gym for 5 days in a week. In the battle between waking up and hitting the gym and sleeping under the comfort of your bedsheet, you may think motivation should play a role. But I would say that it is what you do matters a lot. If you just shut off your mind and hit the gym for a few weeks, through what you do at the gym, through how you change as a person, through what you feel in yourself, a clarity would be born. That clarity would be far more powerful than the clarity that would arrive by just sitting and thinking about your goals. It will keep giving you the limitless motivation that you always needed to progress and even go above your goals.

Commitment

Asking yourself if you are fully committed is supremely important. You may say “Yes” today, for a week, for a month. And slowly, the commitment will fade away for all unforeseen reasons.

So, how would you build commitment in the process? What are the ways?

Here are some nuggets:

- First, you need to ask yourself how much you value yourself and your goals. The more respect that you have for yourself and your goals, will automatically build commitment to the process. It is like integrity. There is no one to watch if you are doing the right things for you or not. It is you who needs to watch yourself at all times.

- Have a partner to share about your efforts with your goal. Share everything transparently with him/her. Give them authority to ask you questions when you are not really progressing well to your goal. They are called accountability partners.

- When you are on a task, ask yourself often if you are completely into it. If not, ask yourself, why is that the case? What can you do to give yourself fully into the task? When you can answer these questions genuinely, you would uncover the psychology behind what you are doing. You may take help from your mentors, coaches with this if needed. For example, if you are feeling fatigue or tiredness during your workouts at the gym, you can ask yourself or find if your nutrition is in place, sleep is in place, etc.,

Discipline

Discipline means different things to different people. But in a nutshell, if you thought about it deeply, here are the things that you need to get rid of to build discipline in yourself.

- Get rid of that laziness. Laziness is the number one behaviour or a pattern that keeps up from moving forward in our goals. We feel lazy to get up early in the morning (though we are interested!). We feel lazy to read a book (though we are interested!). We feel lazy to lead an initiative or an event (though we are interested!). Why? Because we like to feel great about our dreams. We enjoy visualizations. We enjoy imagining and dreaming about what we want to be. You want to see yourself leaner, fitter. You want to see yourself as a voracious reader. You want to see yourself as a good role-model at home, work or in the community where you live. But how many of you take efforts to be one? What stops you? It is the discipline of doing one or two things consistently with love (more on consistency in the next section!), care and nurturing those habits to see our dream come true.

- Lack of fire and/or energy. We lack the fire to achieve our dreams. How to generate the energy and the fire within us? Keep remembering about your goals and why you wanted to work on your goal. What is the purpose and why did you start on a particular journey with a respective goal? It is okay to change our goals when the time comes and we don’t feel connected with our goals, rather than being unclear with the goal and not doing anything meaningfully to progress with the goal.

Consistency

You keep progressing with your goal with every single day. So, you don’t take rest at all? No, take at least one or two days off in a week. What it does is that it rejuvenates your entire self, not just physical self. You accumulate fatigue in your body through the workouts that you are doing every day. It is very important to give much needed rest to yourself (Notice; I did not say body, but the entire self!).

Even if you miss for a day, do not let that day define who you are. When the alarm goes off for the next day, you talk to yourself.

“The same alarm went off yesterday at the same time and I did not choose to get up and hit the gym. Today also the alarm is going off, and I am tempted to snooze it for another day in a row.

So, what choices do I have?

- I can hit the snooze button and sleep for some more time. By repeating it a few times, I do not make it to the gym.

- I can switch off the alarm, get up, get ready and hit the gym.

- Well, there is one more choice. You choose to snooze the alarm and then do not get good sleep. Your consciousness does not let you get good sleep. It actually cries and begs for your attention. It keeps nagging you to not sleep. Ultimately, you wake up late by not doing both - sleeping or working out in the gym.”

So, what is the best thing to do? Humans are best at following certain rhythms that make it easy for them to follow. It is like creating rules you would commit to follow to bring in the consistency.

- You can tell yourself that you would go to the gym two days in a row and take a day of break. And then two days gym, one day break and repeat this cycle.

- You can tell yourself that you would not miss the Gym over two days in a row and you would not do that more than once in a month.

- To track all these, you need to have a monthly calendar hanging which you can see promptly whenever you are in the house. You mark a big cross on the calendar when you make to the gym. This visualization would keep sending messages to your subconsciousness, which is powerful.

Motivation is overrated while everything else (Clarity, Commitment, Discipline, Consistency) is underrated. If you do all these underrated things well, you don’t need motivation; you are motivation. You become motivation. People would start looking at you for motivation.

I started running in 2010. I never thought I would be an ultramarathoner, health and wellness coach and an author, today. But the journey has given me tremendous clarity, commitment, consistency and discipline and I never had to look for motivation. Things take time for them to become part of your life and being. Have patience and work every single day because it is your dream in making.

Do not look for motivation, be the motivation.

Dream not only to look leaner and fitter, work to become one.

Never forget what you are doing with a little difficulty today would be part of your lifestyle tomorrow.

wellness
Like

About the Creator

Ganesh Kuduva

LinkedIn Top Voice | Founder - Runner Forever | Health & Wellness Coach | Author of BE A RUNNER FOREVER (Available on Amazon) | Corporate H&W Speaker | Follow me for posts on Health and Life Skills (www.runner-forever.com)

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.