The myth of getting motivated

"Motivate me!"
   Some of my clients know of a change they want to make in their behaviors, relationships, thoughts, or ways of managing feelings, but ask "how can I get motivated to change?" 
   There are three related and often-confused concepts here:  Incentive,  Motivation, and "Should's" (often disguised as "goals"). 
     "I know I should exercise... I know I should work harder... I know I should be more supportive... I know I should get out of the house instead of brooding..."  I sometimes tell my clients that my office has a No-Should policy.  The main impact of these statements is often that we feel bad, incompetent, discouraged, knowing that we're not doing what we know is good for us.  "Shoulds" are shaming, not motivating.  For some people, shame can motivate change, just as anger can do so.  For people who are depressed, strongly anxious, or otherwise stuck in unhealthy habits of mind, behavior, and relating, these feelings of shame or anger at one's current state don't feel a "kick in the pants" of motivation, they only feel kicked while they're down. 
    "Incentive", I'm defining as: the payoff for changing, or the penalty for not changing.  Incentives don't work very well as motivators for any entrenched mental health problem.  The fact that life would be easier and more peaceful if you stopped your addictive or avoidant or vengeful behaviors doesn't make you magically able to do so, in fact doesn't do much to make you want to change. It can be easier to stick with the short-term reward of avoiding discomfort even if there is a potential payoff for change.  Avoiding punishment does not lead to increased positive behaviors.  Payoffs do sometimes increase desired behaviors, but are often ineffective in the long run, especially if the involve the efforts of well-intentioned people to reward your improved behaviors, because they don't usually build intrinsic motivation, the desire to change for my own sake. 
   "Motivation," in the sense meant by my clients seeking this feeling in psychotherapy, I'm defining as:  the the anticipatory excitement about carrying out an upcoming change or action.
     While it is true that having an incentive to change can help get you started, the emotion we call "motivation" doesn't usually show up until we are already having some success that feels good. Motivation is sometimes felt in a moment of insight when a change makes sense, when we've had a perspective shift; I've had clients leave sessions excited by a new way of thinking about their actions that leads directly to changes in their actions.  But in most cases, like the one we started with here where they change is obvious but seems foreboding, emotion isn't an emotion we can create out of faith that change will work; it is something that comes from already taking action and finding out what works.  Motivation comes more often from momentum than from contemplation.  
    Waiting for motivation, ironically, delays action, and thus delays your chance to feel that great feeling of motivation.  Find a small change in your pattern of behavior that you can rehearse mentally and then carry out.  Plan for how you'll manage the forces that will pull you back into your current habits, reactions, sequences of thought and action.  Then just get started first even though you're not feeling it yet; motivation will come later.  
     There's a reason they say "Fake it 'till you make it." You can act confident and later acquire confidence; similarly, you can act in other new ways and then acquire motivation to continue.  To get started, you can use incentives, incremental change, habit analysis as in the book The Power of Habit.  However you start, don't wait around for motivation to come first; be committed enough to change that you'll start even if it feels hard, uncomfortable, unnatural, almost not worth the effort.  Then, once you're started, if you want a bit of that motivation feeling, pay attention to your success, not just the road far ahead.  Then keep rolling, keep building momentum.  
     Enjoy the change after it happens, rather than expecting to always feel excited before you start.  Want an emotion to feel before you start?  How about anger, just enough anger at the way things are, to motivate you to act.  Anger can even emerge from depression; that irritability can be channeled into change.  Or anxiety, just enough worrying about the future to get you to strategize.  Or love, just enough to commit you to something outside of your current stuck state.  But motivation:  if the excitement isn't there at the beginning, it might come later, or you might not need it at all, you may simply change, and keep things going in a new way, because it works better.