What is motivation?

I’m not up to action vs inaction in my ICA classes yet, but i can’t stop thinking about what motivates us from thinking about something to actually doing it.Why? becasue over winter I have found it extremely hard to get out of bed to meet my friends for our 5:45am thrice-weeky run. It has been so difficult that i hardly ever turned up. The day before a run I would think to myself how great a morning run would be, the evening before I would lay my running clothes out, but when the alarm went off (usually in the form of my 6 month old baby’s cry) more often than not, I would groan, get up, breast feed and stay in my warm PJs. I did have a very good excuse for not running. Our daughter is not a great sleeper and it is not unusual for either my husband or I to be up to her 3 three of 4 times a night. And I was still breastfeeding her at least once over night. But in my heart of hearts, no matter how sleep deprived I was, I knew that if I was REALLY motivated, I could have done it. But why couldnt i convert this to action? I’m sure I’ll find out in action vs inaction, but my gut feeling is that the incentives to run didnt outweight the incentives to stay at home. Losing weight, the endorphin rush, catching up with the people I cared about all lost out to the incentive of staying warm indoors sipping on a cup of tea huddled next to the heater.

But there was a turning point. i set a goal. i wanted to run a half marathon in september. in order to cross the finishers line, I had to train. Apart from going to the gym and attending my group personal training sessions (all during the day and not pre dawn!)I had to do a minimum of 4 long runs to ensure i could run the distance and not get carted off to hospital in an ambulance. And guess what? i did it. i completed my runs, I did the half, and even better, I did the run in exactly the same time i did it before I fell pregnant. I achieved my small goakls, which gave me confidence and drive to achieve my larger goal.

Simultaneous to my wrestling with motivation, I read a fantastic book called “freakonomics”. The two authors have looked at common questions like ” why did the crime rate drop in the 1990s” and by changing the PERSPECTIVE of the research, came up with some compelling answers. The chapter about incentives was particularly interesting. I highly recommend the book, and there is a blog http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/incentives/