I’ve often heard this question, “How do I stay motivated?” This is usually not a useful question to ask, as it frames all problems of action as “motivation problems.” If you see something as a motivation problem, you need to get some of this “motivation” stuff to fix it, which usually means performing some technique of ego-inflation. This level of solution is like saying that the key to all unwanted emotions is to force a smile. While forcing a smile might be useful in some contexts, it’s hardly an elegant solution to the problems of unhappiness! Like happiness, motivation is the kind of thing that occurs naturally when all of you is aligned with your outcome, not something that you “do” directly.

The key to answering “how do I stay motivated?” is first to ask some more questions. If we simply take on some motivational strategy without getting more information, the solution will almost always make things worse. There are usually very good reasons for a lack of motivation that should be directly addressed if we want effective solutions to life’s problems.

I used to work in tech support in college. Some non-techie people were amazed at how I could figure out solutions to computer problems, and figured that I had some encyclopedic knowledge of all things technology. In fact, I had a terrible memory and little training, but I was willing to push buttons and try things until a solution emerged, or until I had spent quite a bit of time on it and it seemed unfixable (not unlike this hilarious comic from xkcd).

Similarly, people often tell me that coaching conversations with me are helpful, but I don’t necessarily have a robust theory of why people are broken or much official training, just some time pushing buttons and seeing what happens (as well as lots of independent study of methods of personal change). It would be hubris to say that I already know the answer to your motivation problem in advance, but in this article I’ll give you a bit of the heuristics that I use to solve such problems, using frameworks from the field of Neurolinguistic Programming (the Jedi side, not the Dark Side). That said, if these things aren’t of much help to you, then feel free to reject them!

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