The Mindset Shift You Need to Make When You Lack Motivation
When you feel like you lack motivation, the first thing I suggest you try is to shift your mindset away from motivation and towards resilience. Motivation is the energy for action. Resilience is the ability to behave competently when facing adversity.
The spark that creates this energy for action we call motivation comes from the expectation of a reward or punishment. Whether the spark is a result of self-motivation or external motivation doesn’t matter. The spark remains the same. What doesn’t remain the same is how one reacts when that spark doesn’t exist.
The ability to still act in the absence of this spark is what you need when you lack motivation. Moreover, lacking this spark is a form of adversity. Therefore, when you lack motivation, you must stop thinking about creating a spark of energy and instead think about using resilience to fight back against this moment of adversity you are facing. Author Steven Pressfield, in his classic book The War of Art, calls this the fight against “the resistance”. I highly recommend reading this book to help shift your mindset away from motivation towards resilience.
So, the next time you are feeling like you lack motivation, remind yourself that motivation is not a requirement to act. Instead, you can still act without motivation by being resilient and fighting back against “the resistance”.