Motivation

When I was young, I wasn't very motivated. I was smart enough to coast by in school with very little effort. I played games, but it was mostly with my siblings, of which I was the eldest, so even though I didn't win every time, the competition was fairly lacking and I would win enough to satisfy myself (although by the time my brother started trying to play DotA competitively, I was mostly playing WoW, and we were not speaking).

That should have changed when I got to university, but I was still a WoW addict, and would rather spend my time gaming, reading or doing anything other than studying. And when I got hard to keep coasting, instead of trying harder and being more diligent, I was treading water, and barely passing most of my classes.

But I did notice a strange thing during my uni years, in that I could push myself to get better at something by telling myself that I was really bad at it. It does sound strange, but the constant self-flagellation meant that there was a part of my brain that was experiencing pain and discomfort when being told, "You're really bad at this. Why are you so bad? Look at that guy, he has the IQ of a cucumber and yet he can still do that better than you, what does that say about you?" So I would push myself to be better, to try and get away from that pain, and get some relief.

I'm starting to realise there are a lot of problems with that kind of motivation. For starters, I don't think it's very good as a long-term strategy. Similar to how you somehow manage to find a burst of strength when you know that you're on the last minute of your run on the treadmill, I feel like my motivational pushes were more like sprints, rather than marathons, and I would often feel compelled to quit after achieving some minor milestone, as it was "good enough". When I was doing a mentoring course at work (to mentor an unemployed person and help them find work), they talked about how there are two different types of motivation - one where you push yourself to avoid a punishment, and one where you push yourself to reach a goal. Those in the first category will only put in as much effort as they can to avoid punishment (which in the case of some of the unemployed people in our group meant they would put in the mandatory job applications to keep the dole - the punishment being losing the dole). Those in the second category will put as much effort as they can to try and reach their goal (which meant they would apply for far more than the mandatory job applications per fortnight - the reward being having a job). I was definitely in the first category.

Secondly, in the event that I continued long enough to become fairly decent at whatever skill I was building, I would start receiving compliments, which would cause cognitive dissonance with what I had been telling myself all along. This usually led to me saying, "No, I'm really not that great at X", which I guess had the upside of making me sound really humble, on the occasion where someone insisted that I am good at it, I would have to keep telling them (and myself), that I was not, or I knew that I'd lose the motivation to keep improving.

Lastly, it's just incredibly demoralising telling yourself that you suck every day. It worked when I was neutral, or happy, but on the days where I really didn't want to get out of bed, it just felt even more crushing having that voice in the back of my mind telling me that I was hopeless, and that I wouldn't ever amount to anything.

For those who have followed my weight loss journey since August 2011, I would like to announce that I have finally reached my goal - which is different from the one I set back then. WiiFit did not really help, and I ended up weighing 68kg two years ago, before finally getting to the weight that I am now.

If you haven't guessed yet, I am very bad at self-motivation, and I think a large part of my weight loss progress was due to the fact that I had someone at work who was constantly motivating me. Every now and again he would ask me how I'm going, and when I made good progress, he would congratulate me, and if I made bad progress, he would help me try and work through what went wrong, and what I could do better. It helped a lot that he had gone through the same thing a year prior.

What didn't help was calling myself fat and lazy. I don't know, I'm starting to wonder if I've done some permanent damage, as when I look at myself in the mirror, I see the same fat person I was a few years ago, but the numbers on the scale have had a mostly downward trend, and some people at work have asked if I have cancer as they think I've lost so much weight.

(As a side note, how are you meant to respond to that?

Ex-teammate: Anna, you've lost so much weight, do you have cancer?

Me: Ummm...no, not that I know of.

Ex-teammate: Oh, we were just wondering!

Me: Oh...It's just the wedding, y'know. Haha. (Luckily, it was only a short elevator ride, only 4 floors))

I'm going to try to stop that negative form of motivation. Even though it's harder, the positive motivation has a stronger effect, and is a lot less damaging on my psyche! As another side note, even though my weight loss isn't motivated by the wedding (although I already bought my dress, and so I need to maintain my current weight to fit in it), I feel like blaming it on the wedding is an easy out, as everyone seems to just accept it. I tried saying that I just wanted to get more fit, and the responses varied from, "Why are you putting in so much effort?" to "Oh, that's a great goal!" The first is a bit off-putting, and sometimes I feel like I am making others feel bad by inadvertently highlighting their unfit lifestyle.