What motivates you?

Each of us in our lives made promises to ourselves to do something. And I’m pretty sure every one of us had promises about physical activity. Someone probably promised himself to start running every morning. Seems so simple, doesn’t it? If we have an intention, then this is half the battle. After the intention, we also need to add the action itself. Let’s say you promised yourself to run three times a week and even kept this promise for the first week, but then something went wrong. Why is that?
There can be many answers to this question. But today we will talk with you about a very important thing in our life that helps us keep our promises and often moves us forward. This is motivation ( definition of motivation you can find here).
Motivation is the intensity and direction of effort. Sound easy and simple, right? In reality, it is an incredibly complex concept, very important, that moves amateur sports forward. For amateurs, motivation is much more difficult to understand what motivates them and figure it out compare with pro athletes. Last week in my sports psychology class we were just going through the topic of motivation. It was there that I first learned some things that were obvious to me, but I never thought that they looked the same in science as in my mind. To begin with, I would like to say what I think is critical for a novice runners to understand where does their motivation come from. After all, the main task for novice runners is do sports activities regularly, and usually with amateurs and novice runners, regular training can be achieved only with a clear understanding of the motivation of each individual. The topic of motivation is very complex and deep, but I wanted to share with you two types of motivation internal (more about what is internal motivation you can find here) and external (more about what is external motivation you can find here). It seems to me that understanding what exactly motivates you is critical for enjoying sports. Let’s say all my life I thought that something was wrong with me, because I can run without motivation. I’m not interested in competing with someone and proving something to someone, I just like to run, I thought that since I’m not focused on the opinions of other people, it means something is wrong. Now I understand that mine motivation is internal. It is important for me to do something only for myself. Since I was mainly surrounded by people with external motivation, it seemed to me that something was wrong with me. So, at times there are tasks that you do because you want to do them; this is internal motivation. At other times there are tasks that you do because someone else wants you to do them or rewards you for doing them; this is external motivation.

Of course, not everything is so simple and we all have different types of motivation at different moments of life, but still understanding yourself and your main type of motivation is very important. If you feel that you have more developed external motivation, then you should be inspired by a friend who runs every day. On the contrary, to argue with one of your friends that you will run every day and who is the first to surrender is the loser; and if you have more developed internal motivation, then I advise each time to think that the time of your workout is the time only for you, when you make yourself better. I hope that this information was useful and interesting to you, as the first step towards understanding how to achieve consistency in sports.