How to Get and Stay Motivated – Begin with Your Desire

This is Part One in the series 10 Steps to Fitness Success.

When it comes to exercising and eating healthier, all too often we exercise as a reaction to not feeling fit enough, healthy enough, skinny enough, without taking time to consider the big picture. In other words, what we actually want versus what we don’t.

What would happen if we started to exercise and take care of our bodies from a place of desire?

Some would take the attitude that healthy eating and exercise are so vital that it doesn’t matter WHY we exercise, so much as that we do it. But I would argue that it is that very LACK of a strong and heartfelt WHY that causes us to fall off the wagon and to give up on our goals.

Goals without a heartfelt purpose are empty. Tweet this

A wrote an article awhile back about what to do when you’ve achieved a goal, in which I mention the paralysis I felt when I became valedictorian of my high school. The interesting thing about that particular goal and achievement in my life is that it didn’t fill me up with a sense of a accomplishment because it was NOT connected enough to my true desires. Instead, it was a goal that came from a place of fear and insecurity.

When I was in high school, I was pursuing my dream of becoming a professional dancer by taking classes 6 days a week after school. My parents always strongly encouraged me to have something to fall back on, which led me to believe (falsely) that if I didn’t get perfect grades, my parents would take me out of dance classes.

My grades were something I felt I could be IN CONTROL of. It was an area of my life where completing things and working harder could yield GUARANTEED results. Meanwhile, I was constantly reminded of how HARD it was to “make it” as a performer, how my thighs were too big, how I was too short, how I wasn’t thin enough, how I started getting serious too late. The list goes on and on …

I allowed this NOISE to take over my psyche and protected myself by adding unnecessary focus to things that wouldn’t matter months or years later. And wouldn’t you know that during second semester of my senior year, once class standing had already been finalized, I got a B. Hmm … tells you a lot about what I truly cared about!

So what does this have to do with setting fitness goals and plans?

Have you ever resolved to exercise more often and done it for a few days, a few weeks, a few months and then stopped?

Perhaps you’ve even beaten yourself up after your resolve weakened?

You couldn’t figure out why staying committed to your plan was so hard.

Perhaps you decided to try another type of exercise or a different diet, only to peter off with that one too?

While it is possible that the diet or the exercise plan was faulty (which I will get to later in this series), it is my opinion that most of the time our failure to follow-through stems from not motivating ourselves from our own strong authentic desires. We instead connect to others’ beliefs about what we should DO, LOOK like, and FEEL like.

You may be thinking right now … that’s silly, of course I know why I exercise. It’s to have a toned body. It’s to lose weight. It’s to keep my back from hurting.

But chances are if you are still reading here, that is NOT enough FOR YOU.

Now are you wondering, what else is there? Isn’t that the POINT of eating well and exercising? To some degree yes, but if that were all there was to it, you would already feel like you were at the peak of your fitness and health.

So how do I get tapped into what I really want?

Do this exercise that I have my fitness coaching clients do first … prior to setting any goals. It will get you moving your body from a place of joy and love rather than from SHOULDs and MUSTs.

Do you have a clearer sense on what you really want for your body, how you want to feel and what you enjoy the most? Share your epiphanies in the comments below.

In Part Two of 10 Steps to Fitness Success, I’ll discuss how to measure and re-measure where you are RIGHT NOW!