MOTIVATION is a very mysterious lady

I am often asked, "Where do I get the MOTIVATION to lose weight? Where does it live?"

I can tell you for sure—it does not reside on the first page of the new year’s calendar. In fact, it is usually the first thing to vanish. Why? Maybe it's the abundance of leftovers from Christmas and New Year, coupled with too many lazy days, making it difficult to get going.

The truth is, MOTIVATION is a very mysterious lady. If you're lucky, she may appear out of the blue. Or she may arrive alongside a new love or other life events—fortunate or unfortunate—that give us that long-awaited kick.

But what about the rest of us, lost in daily routines, settled lives, and habits?

When it comes to habit-building or change, structure and identity often lead the way—motivation may follow later, if at all. We must assume it may never show up, yet change is still possible.

The word "habit" is used so often throughout our lives that I think it has lost its original meaning—its essence. A habit is a pathway repeated so many times that you no longer think when doing it again and again.

Do you need MOTIVATION to brush your teeth? You just do it, right? It’s the same with everything you do on autopilot. You can put food on autopilot too. It doesn’t require MOTIVATION—only repetition. Repeat, repeat, repeat, and repeat. You build a new pathway. It takes a few months, but once it's there, you won’t need to think about it anymore.

Start small, start somewhere in the middle, start big. But please, do not start on the first day of the month or a Monday. Let it be a boring, random Wednesday—or start today. Decide which pathway you want to begin with. For example, you could start by adding salad leaves to your meals every day. Not just two leaves—a handful, at least. Do this for a month, and you may notice that, when arranging food on your plate, leaves somehow appear there without a second thought. Easy? Doable? Absolutely.

But here we come back to our mysterious lady MOTIVATION. Will she arrive alongside the health benefits of those leaves? If you need to lose weight, you must make more changes, which will create a stronger impact and can start to motivate you. Once you see the shift—whether in your weight or how you feel—you will want to repeat the behaviours that worked. And then MOTIVATION may finally appear, helping you take even bigger steps. The most important thing here – you need to learn to eat, not to start starving. Any restrictions which make you starve are not going to be sustainable and they will fail to motivate you.

What role does a counsellor play in this? MOTIVATION is not a constant state but a cyclical process that naturally includes rises and falls. Alongside MOTIVATION there are the secondary benefits of your status quo—values that may have been inherited but no longer serve you—and a new identity waiting to be discovered. This process is not less important than creating new habits, that’s why I believe it is essential to do both things at the same time – talk things through and make changes.

Binge days may happen, holidays, birthdays. We are working to create something which lasts for a lifetime, there is no rush. It is not all or nothing. We need to make allowance for time off and for low days.

For the vast majority of people, self-MOTIVATION is incredibly difficult. And even when achieved, it rarely lasts. It’s not a fault in willpower—it’s human design. Otherwise, why would line managers exist?

I have a wealth of theoretical and practical knowledge, yet I still need an external person to help me to achieve my goals. I am not any different to you, I use counsellors, mentors and coachers depending on the goal and challenge I am facing.

Structure and accountability are the stepping stones for building new habits and your new identity. The first few months are crucial. And then we work on how to maintain what you've achieved, how to feed your MOTIVATION and remain accountable.

One day mysterious lady MOTIVATION may knock on your door, you can invite her in to achieve other great goals in your life or create something amazing. And more importantly you already have experience how to please and look after her to keep her interested and stay with you as long as you wish.