Understanding Motivation

Motivation is the psychological drive to engage in a behavior. There are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation.

Intrinsic motivation:

It comes from internal states such as enjoyment or personal satisfaction. For example, if you find joy in exercise, you’ll do it for the joy. Secondly, we need to look at self-efficacy. It is one’s belief that he or she is able to achieving the task. It is important to have high self-efficacy (self-confidence) so that you are able to achieve your goals and tasks.

Extrinsic motivation:

It is the extrinsic factors that drives you to take action(s) such as lowering cholesterol level, losing weight for better health, and so forth.

Finding motivation may not always be the easiest thing especially with intrinsic. Our brains are special gifts. When we tell ourselves something over and over, our brains will register it and start act upon it. Therefore, it is important to tell yourself that, “Yes, I can do it” over and over, you will eventually build self-efficacy and work toward achieving your goals. I highly recommend that in order to build intrinsic motivation, it is important to find out why you are doing what you are doing and why it is important to get it done. For example, if losing weight is your goal and you have hard time finding intrinsic motivation to exercise and eat healthy, then ask yourself, “why is important for me to lose weight? Why do I want to lose weight?” If the answers are vague and not clear, you’ll have harder time sticking to it and having the motivation whether it’s extrinsic or intrinsic to get it done. When your answer is more clear to you, such as, “losing weight is important to me because I want to lower my blood pressure” then you’ll be able to find motivational ways to get up, exercise, and eat healthy because you want to be healthier by lowering your blood pressure.

Another way to find extrinsic motivation is by having support groups from family and friends. It helps a lot when you are in a group of supportive people that will remind you to stay strong and you remind them to keep going. When you are surrounded with positive minds, it will motivate you automatically to keep going and to stay motivated.

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