CHAPTER

3

Motivation from the Inside Out

Tanya, recently married and in her late thirties, came to me with a familiar problem. She had gained some weight after her marriage (weight she’d dropped for the wedding) and wanted to “get in shape.” But despite a number of attempts, she couldn’t seem to stick with an exercise program. She told me it was a lifelong issue.

We’d just started to talk about her Meaning for exercise, and she’d jumped on the idea of chore. “That’s it exactly,” she agreed. Then she abruptly changed the subject and began complaining about how much it irritated her when her husband went running—especially when he left the house looking positively gleeful about what he was about to do. “He loves it,” she said, shaking her head in disgust. “He’ll even give up other things I know he enjoys, like watching baseball games or meeting his friends, just so he can get in his run. He ran track in school and everything. Exercise is such a natural thing for him. It’s so annoying. I really don’t get it.”

“Let me make sure I understand what you’re saying,” I said. “You resent your husband because he wants to go running, while you feel like exercising is something you have to do.”

“Yes,” she replied, sounding almost guilty.

“You see exercise as something you don’t want to do, or even as your punishment for gaining the weight. Your husband is like a kid with a birthday gift—he can’t wait to open it, right?”

“I guess so,” she said. “Yeah, I never thought about it that way.”

“But what if you could feel gleeful about physical activity too?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything for a moment, and I let the silence hang there so she could think about the question. It was clearly an idea that hadn’t occurred to her before.

“That would be . . . amazing,” she said hesitantly, “but I don’t see how it’s possible. I’m not a runner. I’m not built that way.”

“Running may not be your thing,” I said, “but the gleeful part is definitely possible. Let’s take it one step at a time. You’ve already taken the first step—acknowledging that exercise feels like a negative to you, like a chore. That feeling reflects the Meaning being physically active has for you right now. Believe it or not, we can change that pretty easily.”

“I trust you, Michelle, but I don’t really believe that’s true. I’ve felt this way for the last sixteen years, since college.”

“I know that, Tanya, but once we start to better understand why you feel the way you do, you’ll be surprised how effortless and quick this conversion can be.”

I explained to Tanya that everything we’ve learned about exercise and physical activity through culture, the media, and our past experiences—I’m not good at this, it’s supposed to be fun, I’m being forced to do it, it hurts, it’s humiliating, it will fix my unattractive body—creates our Meaning of exercise and physical activity. “You know from your own life that thinking of exercise as a chore undermines your motivation before you even start,” I said. She nodded, and I continued. “It might help for you to understand how it got to be this way for you.”

Our Past Experience with Exercise Builds Our Meanings

We develop our perceptions and understanding about things over our entire lifetime, based on our own idea of how the world works that we’ve constructed from specific experiences and interactions,¹ especially emotional ones.² Whatever Meaning you ascribe to exercise, for example, is completely unique to you because it has been constructed from your interactions with physical activity.

We form ideas and values about all sorts of things throughout life from our experiences. It’s how we try to make sense of the world. Out of these experiences we develop associations that we generalize and project into the future. For example, consider what “getting a shot” can mean to us. On the surface, it’s just an objective, neutral activity, like exercising. But below the surface, “getting a shot” is embedded with our past knowledge, experiences, and emotions, such as sickness, anxiety, and pain.³ Depending on how negative our experiences have been, just thinking about getting a shot can flood our minds and bodies with strong feelings, like dread or aversion. Even stepping into the doctor’s office can activate and arouse these negative feelings because we associate the office with the shot experience. And if we had a choice, we would avoid getting a shot altogether.

In the same way, we’ve developed Meanings for exercise and physical activity that similarly influence us. Because these Meanings have been built through experience and knowledge, we can change them only by learning new things about exercise and physical activity and having new experiences with being physically active and exercising.

While this is plain common sense, research shows that our past experiences with any behavior strongly influence our perceptions of it, our beliefs about it, our Meaning for it, and ultimately whether we choose to do it or not.⁴ I’ll break this idea down because this is one of the most important points of this whole book and the secret ingredient in my MAPS method:

Our past experiences with exercise, our past reasons for doing it, and what we have learned to believe about it (as children and as adults) combine together to generate our Meaning for exercising and being physically active.

Our Meanings influence our perceptions and feelings about exercising outside of our Awareness.

Because we tend to approach what feels good and avoid what feels bad (unconsciously, outside of our Awareness), our Meaning about physical activity powerfully influences our behavior without our even knowing it.

Many people feel ambivalent about being physically active because of their accumulation of experiences over their lifetime about why they should do it and how it feels. These are often a mix of good and bad: not being chosen for a team, being chided about being overweight by a clinician who prescribed exercise as the remedy, enjoying swimming with friends at camp, being teased in gym class, a spring hike with friends, feeling self-conscious in the gym. All of these diverse experiences form the general Meaning that physical activity has for you—and that forms the basis of your relationship with exercise and physical activity. In general, if your exercise history has been predominantly or especially negative, the Meaning it has for you now also feels negative: It’s a chore. If exercise has been positive for you over time and you’ve chosen to do it because you wanted to, then physical activity is likely to have a positive Meaning for you: It’s a gift you want to give to yourself. Even with early positive experiences and a positive Meaning about sports or physical activity, later negative experiences can affect your Meaning. And because our Meaning of physical activity has been constructed outside of our Awareness, we might not even realize that it exists.

Let’s go back to my talk with Tanya. “Tanya,” I said, “the place I always start with my clients is to help them understand their Meaning of exercise and physical activity through exploring their past experiences and reasons for starting.”

She said:

“It sounds like you started out with very positive Meanings for exercise, right?” I asked. Tanya nodded, listening attentively. “But as a young adult, your feelings that exercise was basically a necessary evil for weight loss crowded out that positivity. And then your Meaning became progressively more negative every time you forced yourself to sign up at the gym. It’s a downward spiral.”

“That sums it up nicely,” said Tanya, starting to laugh despite the doom and gloom of her story. “I do feel like I’m just spiraling down the drain sometimes. So what’s the good news?”

“Tanya, I am delighted to tell you that your situation is not unique, and it’s not irreversible. Early on, your relationship with physical movement was converted from fun that you autonomously chose to do into a vehicle for losing weight, something you feel you should do that you forced yourself to do.”

Tanya sat up straight, clearly startled. “Oh! I get it! It’s like when your mom says ‘Eat your vegetables, they’re good for you. And you can’t leave the table until you finish all of them.’ So then of course you don’t want to touch the veggies, ever. Right? You want to eat snacks before dinner just to prove you can make your own choices.”

“Exactly,” I agreed. “You’ve got it. And there’s some good science behind what you intuitively figured out.”

Self-Determination Theory Supports the Benefits of Owning Our Choices

Would you rather do something because someone in authority tells you that you have to do it or else? Or because you’re enthusiastic and curious about the idea and motivated to try it out?

You probably don’t even have to think about your answer: You’d rather be in charge of your own life decisions. Well, there’s solid science behind why you feel that way, and you can use it to foster your desire and motivation for being physically active. Self-determination theory (SDT) distinguishes between feeling either “controlled” or “autonomous” toward a behavior, and it shows how these differences can affect subsequent motivation and adherence.⁵ According to SDT, an individual who feels controlled toward being physically active—say, being told that she must take a brisk forty-minute walk every day—would consider walking a should. To this person, walking is something she has to do in order to avoid a punishment (such as having to pay higher healthcare premiums), to comply with an external pressure (such as following a doctor’s prescription to lose weight), or just because she thinks it’s “the right way” to exercise. In contrast, an individual who feels autonomous toward walking decides to do it because she wants to do it in the ways that she chooses to do it. This person deeply values her reasons for taking a walk, understands and acts on the benefits she gets from walking, or simply experiences pleasure or feels satisfaction from the process of being physically active.

When we experience autonomy, we feel ownership over our movement and choose activities that are meaningful and feel good to us. We do them on a regular basis, and we keep it up over the long term. A systematic review of SDT and physical activity and exercise found consistent support for a positive relationship between more autonomous forms of motivation and physical activity.⁶ It also found that controlled forms of motivation don’t work as consistently well as autonomous motivation. These findings make sense: When we feel that who we are is driving our decision to start taking regular walks, for example, we have higher-quality motivation—we even feel energized from doing it. We are more likely to keep up the walks, if they reflect our core needs and desires, than we are to go on walks just to comply with the nagging feeling that we should walk, “for our own good.”

Weigh these factors: How many times have you started to exercise because you felt pressured to lose weight or to exercise in “the right way,” and how often have you stuck with it? If you are reading this book, your answer is probably “every time.” That’s likely because the messages that have been directing your exercise choices are pressuring you instead of fueling you.

Take Ownership of Your Exercise

“Why does this keep happening? It’s déjà vu all over again!”

Our old Meanings are embedded and automatic, and they keep putting us in the same familiar but uncomfortable situations: Here we are. Again. These old Meanings belong to us, but they are invisible to us because they were constructed unconsciously through our experiences. Although it often feels as if outside forces must be controlling us, we can take control at any time, changing a chore into a gift and thus altering the whole game.

A new client of mine, Charles, is an accounts manager in his early fifties. Right away, during our first phone session, he told me about how much he resented his personal trainer for pushing him so hard. “He’s like a drill instructor,” said Charles. “I never want to do what he tells me. It reminds me of being back in the Army.”

“But wait,” I said, “didn’t you tell me that you hired him because you knew his regimen would be tough work?”

“Yes,” he admitted, “I told him to push me hard. But it’s torture! Sometimes I hope he’ll cancel. And most times after a session I just have to lie down and tell my family to leave me alone. The next day I can barely move. I don’t even want to have sex with my wife.”

“It sounds pretty awful,” I said. “I can see why you’re fighting it. But let’s look at it another way. Instead of blaming him, let’s go back to why you hired him. Strange as it sounds now, you actually hired him to do just what he’s doing.” The silence was so thick I thought Charles might have quietly hung up. But he was just taking in what I had said.

“Yeah,” he said finally, “that’s true. I guess I did hire him to push me hard. And why not? I mean, I can’t get myself motivated to work out hard enough on my own to make exercise worthwhile. Look, just tell me what I need to know so I can stay motivated to stick with this. My wife and doctor have both been nagging me to take better care of myself.”

Charles seemed reticent to take responsibility for being the origin of the intense workout he resented doing, but he didn’t deny that he had hired his trainer precisely to force him to do a tough workout regimen. He was convinced that’s how you had to do it.

“I’ve worked out hard for six weeks now,” he said. “I’m committed to it, but I hate doing it. It’s exhausting and I dread it. I hired a trainer to push me so I’d lose weight, and I did lose a little, but all the effort I’m putting in is not really getting me the results I need. I don’t want to just drop out and stop exercising, because I’m tired of failing every time I try this damned exercise thing.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Let’s bring it down to specifics. Can you tell me the part of your workout that is the worst for you?”

“That’s easy. I do a four-mile run that sucks. My trainer tells me to sprint up this hill that’s at about mile three, but it’s a killer. I dread every session.”

“You really need to stop butting heads with exercise,” I said. Then I introduced the idea that physical activity can actually be a gift instead of such a chore. Charles snorted.

“To make that transformation,” I continued, “you’re going to need to take charge of your exercise and decide how you want to do it. Make it a gift to yourself.”

“I don’t want to wimp out. Plus I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

“Simple,” I said. “Instead of making yourself sprint up that hill at mile three because you’re supposed to, how about taking charge of how you move and figure out what you want to do and how you want to do it? Maybe you could decide to run more slowly or even walk up the hill instead.”

“But that’s cheating.”

“Just try it once and see how it goes, okay? You’ll still be at the top of the hill.”

“I don’t know,” said Charles. “I don’t want to give up my routine. Then I’ll be back where I started. I’m prediabetic now, whatever that means.”

“Look, Charles, if you are being physically active to comply with some external pressure, maybe even doing it harder than you want because you think you should, you won’t do it for very long. That’s not just you; it’s me, and most everybody else. This is not about being tough enough to handle what your trainer is telling you to do. This is about human nature. People avoid what feels bad and strive toward what feels good.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If you keep exercising in ways that don’t reflect you and your preferences,” I continued, “eventually your motivation will peter out and you’ll stop. Then you’ll miss out on the incredible benefits exercise really has to offer, and your health situation will not likely improve. Plus, research clearly shows that keeping up with exercise is a critical behavior for maintaining weight loss. So sticking with exercise is fundamental to what you, your wife, and your doctor are after. I’m just asking you to think about it in a different way. Believe me, Charles, there’s research showing that this program I’m suggesting really works.”

At our next session, Charles called and told me something that I hadn’t anticipated. I had fully expected him to say that he had stopped running up the hill altogether. Instead, he told me that as he was getting close to the hill and thinking about what he wanted to do, he had a realization: Sprinting up the hill was a gift that he wanted to give himself. I was completely surprised by his choice but really pleased. A week later, at our next session, he told me that he found himself enjoying this personal challenge of pushing himself even harder and that he was sprinting even more on the run. Exerting himself in this way now felt more like a privilege than a chore. And he no longer felt exhausted when he got home.

Talk about a quick yet transformative turnaround! By simply reframing this intense physical workout as his choice instead of a mandate he had to comply with, his sprint became energizing rather than depleting. And it also became a practice he happily kept up. Stories like this never cease to fascinate me, even though I’ve seen time and again the powerful downstream effects on our experience, our energy levels, and much more just from how we frame what we do.

Framing Is Everything: The “Work or Fun” Study

In a study aptly titled “Work or Fun?” researchers were interested in discovering whether framing an activity explicitly as either one or the other would influence people and their self-control.⁷ In essence, they wanted to find out if having the same activity mean different things would influence outcomes.

In a series of experiments, they investigated a handful of issues related to studying the impact of framing the same activity as either work or fun. Although their findings showed that things like individual differences can also influence the outcomes, in general, they found that framing a behavior as work (an obligation) made the experience of engaging in the behavior depleting and caused participants to have more difficulty exerting self-control and finishing the task. In contrast, when the same behavior was framed as an opportunity to have fun, completing the behavior was vitalizing and made subsequent self-control easier.

This study has important implications about how we frame the reason for doing exercise and other health-related activities. If the underlying reason for the behavior feels like something we should do (i.e., the Wrong Why), it leads to a chore-based Meaning, and as a result, it is more likely to make performing the behavior depleting and increases the chance that we will not have the desire or energy to stick with it. We are more likely to sustain behavior like physical activity when we view it as a gift, something that is fun or personally meaningful. Supporting self-determination theory, this research suggests that our experience from doing any behavior is drastically influenced by the frame—the primary reason for doing it, our Why. The Why, in fact, is the foundation of the entire behavioral process.

The Why: The Foundation of Sustainable Behavior Change

The Why we have for adopting a new behavior reflects the end result we hope to achieve (our goal) from changing our behavior. It is more important than you may think.

Research shows that goals energize and direct behavior and are actually the starting point of a behavior change process.⁸ In essence, the specific and primary goals we have for any behavior create the frame through which that behavior is perceived and viewed.⁹ So a behavior like physical activity can be understood only by identifying the specific goals it aims to achieve.¹⁰ A sub-theory of self-determination theory called goal contents theory suggests that your Why, or the outcome you hope for in making a behavior change like becoming more physically active, will determine whether you develop a more autonomous or controlling type of motivation.¹¹ Given that autonomous motivation is much more likely to energize you and fuel long-term behavior change than controlled motivation, it’s crucial to understand which Whys lead to autonomous motivation.

In another of my studies, my colleagues and I investigated the relationships between distinct Whys for exercising and autonomous and controlling forms of motivation.¹² We found that people who exercised with health-related or weight-loss Whys reported on average 30 percent less autonomous motivation and 15 percent more controlling motivation than those participants whose Whys aimed to reduce their daily stress or enhance their well-being.

Our Why, our primary reason for initiating any behavior, influences the subsequent quality of the motivation that we develop. Consider the Why as the source of your fuel. Would you rather fill your car’s tank with optimal, high-quality fuel that will get you to your ultimate destination? Or with off-brand, low-quality fuel that will take you a few miles and then cause your engine to sputter and conk out before you get where you’re going? Clearly, the first choice is the strategic choice, the Right Why.

The Right Whys motivate us because they are relevant to our daily lives and personally meaningful. Compared to the Wrong Whys, which leave us feeling depleted, the Right Whys energize and empower us. When we choose the Right Whys for physical activity, we create our own renewable high-quality fuel inside of ourselves. In Chapter 6, we’ll talk at length about how to discover your Right Whys. For now, I want to tell you about some fascinating new research showing that different Whys for walking also influence our energy levels and how much we eat afterward.

How Our Whys Influence Even How Much We Eat

Do you think that people experience walking differently and eat more afterward depending on their reason for walking? Researchers tackled this question head on in a couple of studies.¹³

The first study was conducted with mostly overweight but otherwise healthy women. All of the participants were provided with maps of the same one-mile outdoor course and were told that they would get lunch after their thirty-minute walk was over. Half of the women were told that their reason for walking (their Why) was to “exercise.” They were encouraged to view it as such and to notice how they felt throughout the walk. The other group was told that they were walking in order to have fun. They were given music to listen to and told to enjoy themselves on the walk.

Afterward, the researchers asked each woman to calculate her mileage and calorie expenditure and to describe her mood. Both groups reported extremely similar mileage and calories burned, but they experienced the walk quite differently. The women who had been walking to exercise said they felt more tired and grumpy than the women who were exercising for fun.

Even more interesting is what happened when the women sat down to a pasta lunch. They could choose between either water or a sugary soda to drink, and between applesauce or chocolate pudding for dessert. The women who had been told that their Why for walking was to exercise took in significantly more calories from soda and pudding than the women whose Why for walking was to have fun.

The researchers conducted a follow-up experiment with both men and women that supported and added to these findings. In this second study, a different set of volunteers were asked to walk one mile. Once again, half of the participants were told that they were walking for exercise, while the others were told that their reason for walking was to take in the view and just have fun. In this second experiment, the researchers did not ask the “fun” group to listen to music as they had done in the first study because they wanted to make sure that it was the fun framing, rather than the music, that influenced the results. This study used candy instead of lunch to measure how much participants consumed. Afterward, in the guise of a thank you, all the participants were given a plastic bag and told they could fill it with as many M&Ms as they wanted. As you’ve probably already surmised, the volunteers from the exercise group poured in twice as many M&Ms as the volunteers who were walking for fun.

These two experiments underscore that how we frame physical activity affects how we feel about it, how depleted we feel, and the ensuing choices we make. The same exertion, spun with a Why for “fun,” prompts happier moods and less gorging on high-calorie foods than a Why for “exercise.”

Our Why is foundational. It has a domino effect on everything that follows: how we feel, how we behave, and our subsequent motivation to make choices that favor self-care and health.

Muddying the Waters: More Motives Are Not More Motivating

At this point in the conversation, clients often tell me, “Okay, Michelle, I get it, you sold me. I want to have the Right Why. I understand that it’s much more motivational. But I still want to lose weight! Why can’t I use physical activity to feel better and also use it for weight loss? Then I’ll have two reasons to exercise instead of one. Won’t that give me more motivation?”

Not really. In fact, research suggests the exact opposite may be true.

Exercising as a way to help you achieve something specific outside of yourself, like losing ten pounds or lowering your cholesterol by fifty points, is an external reason (or extrinsic goal). External reasons are sometimes called instrumental because they are a means to an end. In contrast, exercising because you genuinely want to, because you’ve chosen an activity you enjoy and are looking forward to, is an internal reason (or intrinsic goal) that fuels your core needs and wants: who you are.

When you put these two different motivations together, something strange happens: Multiple motives seem to decrease motivation, not enhance it. I’ve seen this effect in my own research and also noticed it in my work with clients over the years. The ones who try to have a few different kinds of Whys for exercise seem to be distracted by the competing outcomes they’re striving to achieve: Are they exercising for weight loss? To feel better? To get healthy? As they lose focus, motivation goes out the window.

I’ve been fascinated to read the research that supports my observations. Amy Wrzesniewski of Yale University led a study on more than 10,000 cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point to evaluate their professional success over a decade from the impact of having different types of motives for enlisting.¹⁴ Would holding both internal motives (military service is personally meaningful to them) and external motives (prestige, career advancement) for joining the Army be valuable career-wise, or would such motives compete over time? The long time frame allowed Wrzesniewski and her colleagues to identify which cadets became commissioned officers, which extended their officer service beyond the minimum required period, and which were selected for early career promotions.

In each case, they found that having a personally meaningful reason for being in the service predicted the most positive outcomes. But they also found that when the cadets also held external reasons for enlisting, this positive relationship was undermined. These findings support the idea that having both external and internal Whys can undermine persistence and performance over long periods of time.

A very different study, on nutrition and kids, reported a very similar phenomenon.¹⁵ In this case, researchers offered children the same food but gave different children one of three different messages along with the food: (1) It’s yummy (internal); (2) it will make you strong (instrumental, external); or (3) it is yummy and will make you strong (internal and external). They hypothesized that when you make something that is intrinsically pleasant (like a cracker) into something that is also instrumental in some way (a cracker that is also good for you), it will undermine the positive effects from internal, pleasurable benefits. And that is exactly what happened. Kids who were told it was “yummy” and will make you “strong” rated the cracker as less tasty, and they ate less of it, than kids who were told only that it was yummy.

Having more than one primary Why for doing a behavior is thought to “dilute” our motivation.¹⁶ We become less motivated and perceive a specific behavior as less effective in achieving any one goal (or Why) when it aims to achieve more than one. Plus, if we hold two or three different Whys for exercising and feel differently about each of them, it also generates ambivalence. And that’s not good for motivation, either.¹⁷

Marketers understand this perfectly. Consider how the most popular companies market their products to us. They don’t give us three different reasons to buy their product; they brand it with one primary meaning. They know that to really get us hooked and coming back for more, again and again, they need to identify a very strategic, emotionally focused benefit from using their product or service that we’ll focus on and desire to keep having. One make of car, for example, may be “sexy,” while another one is “sporty.” We want one or the other but probably not both. Clearly, marketers are onto something that we can all learn from.

 

In this chapter we learned how central the Why is to our motivation, mood, and even other health-related decisions like eating. In the next chapter, we are going to look at the manner in which our Whys also dictate the specific physical activities we choose and the reasons these choices are critical for our ultimate success.

The Takeaways

• You develop your Meanings for things over your entire lifetime. You are often not explicitly aware of the Meaning behavior has for you.

• You can change your Meaning of a behavior only by having new experiences and learning new things that will enable you to construct a new Meaning. Changing your Meaning for exercise can help you take ownership of it and feel more in control of your physical activity choices.

• Self-determination theory holds that when you experience ownership over what you are doing (autonomy), you choose activities that are meaningful and feel good to you, you are more likely to do them on a regular basis, and you keep them up over the long term, compared to doing them because you think you should.

• How a behavior is framed by the primary reason for doing it impacts how that behavior affects you, including your energy level, your self-control, and even how much you eat.

• The Why is the foundation of the entire behavior change process. The Why you have for adopting a new behavior—your reason for doing it—reflects the end result you hope to achieve from changing your behavior.

• The Right Whys are the motivators of sustainable behavior change because they reflect roles and goals and are very personally compelling. They are energizing and empowering.

• Having multiple motivations (both Wrong Whys and Right Whys) for doing a behavior is actually less motivating. They compete with each other, dilute your motivation, and create ambivalence, undermining your desire to stick with physical activity.