YOU CAN’T RELY ON MOTIVATION Or How To Find The Right Motivation To Help You Finally Achieve Your Health Goals Catherine Dean is a Nutrition & Lifestyle Coach supporting women feel better, have more energy and ditch diets. Her approach to health and wellbeing isn’t about quick fixes or fad diets. It’s about helping you to create healthy habits that fit around your busy life, make a real difference and, most importantly, last in the long term. Struggling to make your New Year’s resolutions stick? You’re definitely not alone. There is even an official day for letting go of resolutions that aren’t working for you. It’s called Quitter’s Day and it usually takes place on the second Sunday in January. If you’re finding it difficult to stay motivated and your New Year’s resolutions are already a distant memory, it’s not that you lack discipline. It’s not
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because you’re lacking in willpower. It’s much more likely that you haven’t found a strong enough reason why. When it comes to creating new habits, motivation isn’t everything. Want to create new habits that last beyond? Relying on motivation alone probably won’t be enough. You may already know that motivation can be unreliable, unpredictable and erratic. Not the strongest foundation for creating lasting change. Motivation does matter though. While we may not be able to rely on motivation alone we do need a reason to keep us going when things get challenging.
Finding Your Why? Let’s say weight loss is your goal. Before you get started, it’s important to know why you want to lose weight. If your focus is on how you want to look or other people’s opinions of you, it probably won’t be enough to keep you going in the long-term. There are two types of motivation, extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation comes from outside sources and intrinsic motivation is where your motivation comes from within you. I’ve also heard these called fear-based and loved-based motivations, which is the definition I’m going to use in this article.
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