Around the corner is a new decade. It is the season for New Year’s resolutions, restarts, and the time to once again promise ourselves we will cheerfully pursue the path to positive change. Maybe it is one too many holiday cookie-comas, but by the new year, we feel motivated! Gyms are packed and we stock our grocery carts full of vegetables and lean meats. Some of us dry out and lay off the alcohol, sugar, and dairy for the month of January.
Then January ends. By mid-February, our motivation has officially pulled off an Irish goodbye.
Why is motivation so fleeting? Even with the sincerest intentions, many of us can only coast on motivation for a short while. Motivation is slippery, fickle. It comes and goes as it pleases. It often requires an extrinsic lure, a fixed deadline or specific reason like a wedding, a big birthday, or a vacation that involves bathing suits. It is thin, short-lived, and disappears after the deadline passes. It is high maintenance and requires a why, an explanation for our daily choices.
Forget motivation. We don’t need it. Discipline is the change-maker. It is concrete and reliable. It doesn’t care why we do something, just that we do it. All we have to do is tell ourselves that I am the type of person who…(insert life habit here) gets up early, doesn’t hit snooze, goes to the gym four days a week, doesn’t complain. Once we remove the daily decision-making, the waffling in the purgatory of maybes, we have cultivated discipline. We no longer wait around for motivation to text us back. We decided, unequivocally, and that’s that.
As we roll into the new year, don’t trust your shiny new goals in the unreliable hands of motivation. If you feel motivated, great. But if we create habits with discipline, at least we still have success when motivation slinks away. By June, instead of being the person who gave up alcohol that one time in January, we are the early-riser, the consistent athlete, the non-complainer. Motivation can go sucker someone else.
