Using Your Heroes and Heroines to help hurdle the Motivation Gap

Whilst we all would like to ‘Just do it’ when it comes to exercise and healthy eating, most of us struggle after the initial enthusiasm wears off and our outcome goals are still a long way of in the future. Here are some ideas beyond the usual build it into your daily or weekly habits.

In our house we have slogans like; “suck it up buttercup”, “you’re not made of sugar” and “put your big girl pants on”.  When things are getting tough this tongue in cheek humour works really well. I think this is because you are both acknowledging that something has become hard and at the same time you are dealing with it. Both are necessary elements.

Another tactic I increasingly deploy is reminding myself that what I face is pretty trivial in comparison to my idols. If Jasmin Paris can get out before work in a nasty, dark, Scottish winter to chase her dreams, I can spend 30 minutes with my weights when I’d rather not.

I also use a ploy from Simon Marshall’s excellent book ‘The Brave Athlete’, which involves pretending you are someone else, “Fake it till you feel it”.  I started doing this long before I read the book, when training to be a ski instructor. At the top of every run my mantra was; ‘ski like an instructor’. Somehow it mostly worked and I’d ski off smooth and confidently with the nervous newbie firmly shoved to the back of my brain. Now my alter ego is Laura Croft in a fight. There’s just something no-nonsense, badass about all that kicking and grunting.  Heroines need not be real; they just have to have some attributes that you aspire to. All round toughness works for me. What attributes do you admire or want? The more personal these are to you, the better. We all admire the 97 year-old runners and Masters athletes, but unless you operate in that world they might not be as useful in being your motivational heroes and heroines.

Incidentally, if you ask an AI image generator for a 50 year-old Lara Croft you just get more sunken cheeks and an overall more chiselled look