I feel like I am picking apart little lies, little misunderstandings, that my brain has collected, and used against me over the last few years. We tackled one a couple of weeks ago: that planning means I will know what the fuck I’m doing, and we’re taking a look at another today.
That motivation is a forward-facing emotion.
So I’ve been running 4-6 mornings a week for the last four weeks. This is a really grand feat for me.
After being over-averagely fit a few years ago, I got injured, covid happened, and I completely lost the knack for exercising. I couldn’t find something that I really loved, and none of the things I loved before seemed to do it for me. Lingering injuries would flare up when I tried to lift weight above my head. Running hurt my feet. Yoga was nice, but it didn’t ever excite me enough to stick.
So I just kept doing something, and then doing nothing. Off and on. Off and on, for years.
Now I appreciate a few-week stint of jogging does not necessarily a life change make, but I have realised that one of the main things that keeps me putting my trainers back on, is the fact that I put them on yesterday.
Which makes motivation, or at least the way that I understood motivation, a total lie.
Similarly to assuming that more planning = better prepared, I also assumed that motivation was gathered FOR something. A forward facing emotion.
This week I’m noticing that it’s actually in reverse: I have motivation because I have already done it. I am not looking to something, I am looking back.
And here’s where the sneakiness of my brain truly reveals itself.
The combination of these two lies is the perfect recipe for not doing anything.
Planning keeps me in learning mode. Tricking myself into thinking that I am accumulating the knowledge to eventually start.
And believing that motivation is a forward-facing emotion keeps me waiting for the moment when it will all come together. The moment when I’m ready. When I get the rush of ‘now’ flow through my veins.
But it won’t ever come.
The presence of those two stories, those two lies, mean that it won’t ever come.
I know that I’m not talking about anything particularly groundbreaking here. People have been discussing the reasons why we hold ourselves back for decades, and emphasising the importance of just starting. This is not revelatory advice.
But if I know anything, I know that we only get things when we get them.
Knowing and knowing are two very different things - and I believe that we can only achieve the latter when we filter something through our own lived experience. When a thought drifts down through our limbs, is actualised through movement, it takes on a different meaning. We understand it, as it specifically applies to us.
So I share my well-trodden paths of self-discovery, not because I believe I am saying something new (thankfully I shed such grandiose standards for myself a while ago), but because these words might add themselves to a stack of others accumulating in your mind. And they might, just might, provide the tipping point that causes one of your own sneaky lies to fall.