Finding Exercise Motivation Through Your Personal Values
I write a lot about motivation, because finding long-lasting motivation to exercise is perhaps the most important part of your exercise journey.
You can find lasting motivation in your self-identity, in your knowledge, or in pure enjoyment of the activity you’re doing.
In this article, I want to talk about values, and how you can leverage your personal values to find motivation to exercise.
What Are Values?
My husband fasts for 24 hours once every year as part of a religious holiday. He doesn’t eat or drink anything during that time, and he’s joined by many others around the world.
Fasting or giving up certain food is a common part of many religions: Yom Kippur in Judaism, Ramadan in Islam, Lent in Catholicism…
I suspect that if you asked a lot of the people who do those fasts to restrict their eating for other reasons, like sticking to a diet for their health or their waistline, they wouldn’t be able to do it.
So why are people able to give up the food they love, or food altogether, in these religious contexts? It’s because they have deep and meaningful values guiding those decisions.
It’s the same with exercise.
Why do some people manage to get up at the crack of dawn to work out? How do busy people with stressful jobs and lots of personal responsibilities find time to exercise anyway? Why are some people able to push themselves through crazy, grueling ultramarathons or muddy obstacle races?
Values.
Values are the things we think are important in life, and that set our standards of behavior.
Our values are why we prioritize certain things and let others fall away. Whether you realize it or not, your values guide your choices and actions.
You might hit the snooze in the morning instead of getting up for a workout because you value comfort. You might pack your kids’ lunch boxes with nutritious foods each day as a way to express affection or caregiving.
It feels good when you do something that lines up with your values. If you value honesty, you probably feel good about yourself when you tell the truth, even if it costs you something.
If you value success, you might be driven to give up your leisure time to work. That might seem like a big sacrifice to someone else, but to you it feels like the natural thing to do to get what you want.
To Build Motivation To Exercise, First Identify Your Values
With exercise, sometimes it’s obvious how certain values can provide motivation.
If you value health, strength, or wellness, it’s not hard to connect those dots to your workout program.
But what if you value hard work or kindness or family, but you also want to maintain an exercise routine? You might have to get a little creative in connecting the dots.
If you value hard work, pushing yourself through a tough workout might be a way to express that value.
For kindness, you might think about how the feel-good “hope molecules” that exercise releases in your brain can help you feel better about yourself and allow you to be kind to others.
If you value family, you might consider that taking care of your physical and mental health gives you the resources you need to be able to take care of others.
How can you strive every day to live up to your values, and how can exercise allow you to do that?
What If You Struggle With Motivation To Exercise?
If you keep trying and failing to stick with an exercise program, you have some thinking to do about your values.
Forget about the values you think you have, what do your actions say about your true values? Maybe you don’t really value the things you say you do. Or maybe you just value something else more. That’s totally ok, just acknowledge it.
For a long time, I struggled with maintaining my social relationships. I told myself I wanted to have close friendships, but I would go way too long without getting in touch with friends and never be proactive about making plans. I blamed it on the hectic nature of life with young kids, but there are plenty of people with kids who manage to keep close relationships going.
There was obviously a disconnect between what I told myself I valued and what I actually valued. It wasn’t easy to face that. It’s scary and uncomfortable to acknowledge that you may not like some of the values you act on.
I decided I wanted to change. So I set some small goals and started taking actions that aligned with those values. That was sometimes scary and uncomfortable too, but also incredibly rewarding.
Need some help with your goals? Here are some articles (and a FREE eBook) to get you started:
Step-by-Step Goal-Setting eBook
Creating Action Plans To Follow Through On Your Goals
Success Strategies For Achieving Your Goals
Until you really figure out what your values are and how you can take action on the values you want to have, you’ll keep repeating the same cycle over and over again.
The Bottom Line
If you want the benefits of exercise, it’s not enough to work hard at the gym every once in a while. Work hard on uncovering your deep and meaningful values to help you build lasting motivation, and you’ll find that it gets much easier to show up for your workouts.
If you need more help, check out my Strength Training For Anxiety Program. It’s a 12-week workout program, guided by an app so you can do the workouts anytime, anywhere. It also includes lots of valuable (see what I did there 😊) extra features to help you find deep motivation to exercise and improve your mental health at the same time!