Self - Motivation and Gratitude

How does one self-motivate? 

This question of motivation consumes a huge amount of my mental energy, for three main reasons: 

1.  My MSc research project centred around the physiological effects of motivation, looking at the link between testosterone, motivation and sports performance. Evidence suggests in trained athletes (both males and females), there is a correlation between testosterone and motivation to train - but what causes what?

2. The ability to self-motivate is just a really excellent skill in training and in life. It gets things done with intensity and focus, with minimal procrastination and angst. 

3. My brother asked me if you could train the "killer instinct"; I thought it was an interesting question and I really didn't have the answer, but I suspect you can by training the right mental skills.

Cultivating Gratitude

What motivates a person is very complex; it is situational, temporal and very unique to that person. There is however a fundamental building block of motivation - and that I believe is gratitude.

My thoughts about this was prompted after my morning run ended up at the foot of a giant 45m Buddha at the top of a hilltop, and of course gratitude is one of the staples of buddhism. It got me thinking about my recently acquired relationship with this, which happened after recovering from two years of illness after a head injury.

The Phra Puttamingmongkol Akenakkiri Buddha 

Any athlete that has ever been ill or injured however briefly, understands the upset at not being able to do the thing you love. There is a well documented psychological effect of illness, so depression unfortunately is a usual (and unsurprising) accompaniment to any illness - all in all, not great times and one I refer to as the "dark night of the soul"! On the upside, when I was able to resume physical activity and integrate back into life again, I swore I would never take anything for granted again and I have stayed true to that. Being able to train, feels like a huge privilege. No matter how bad the session or how tired I am, I feel very lucky and I am very grateful to my body for both recovering and letting me push it (although I do it a bit more carefully these days). I believe it is this mind set that has helped keep my enjoyment of training (no matter how hard); this in turn creates more motivation and a snowball effect for progress. 

I have found gratitude can usually come about in two ways 1) from having a sense of perspective from varied experience 2) cultivating it by practice and repetition. 

It is refreshing to realise that gratitude like any other skill can be acquired. In fact, I like to think happiness is also an acquired skill because it is based on perception not reality, just like most fear. That knowledge is therefore incredibly empowering, because you have quite a fair amount of control over your state of being.

The power of 3,  journaling and practice what you preach!

I am a huge fan of the journal. I tend to write any moment of reflection or idea down, as it consolidates thoughts really well. To "train" gratitude, I find writing down three things at the end of everyday that went well for you and three things that you are grateful for, works a treat. There is always something..even if you have to get creative! The trick however, with building good habits is consistency and repetition, so it does have to be done everyday.

I had to come back to my own advice after experimenting with a set of enormous false eyelashes, which was like having two pigeons sat on my eyes. Good for a drag queen look, not so good for vision or training.  My rather careless removal technique culminated in ripping out about 70% of my natural ones. Eyelash allopecia is certainly an interesting and different look but all I could think of was...thank god for volumising mascara.