Hey, Athletes! Want to know how to motivate people? Listen in to this week’s Ask Me Anything to listen how!
Episode 10 of Ask Me Anything is Up!
How To Motivate Others
This week’s question is from Cindy! She wants to know how to motivate others, especially when they need it for health reasons. Jerred discusses how data alone won’t motivate people to change; instead we have to find their intrisic motivator in order to help them start.
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Transcript:
Ask Me Anything: How To Motivate Others
[00:00:00] Jerred Moon: Welcome to garage gym athlete. Ask me anything. It’s pretty simple. I’ll be answering questions from the thousands of athletes that follow our daily programming. If you have a question or topic you want submitted, go to Verragio mathy.com/ama let’s get started.
What’s up, ladies and gentlemen, Jared moon here from into three fitness and welcome to a garage gym athlete. Ask me anything this week. We have a question from Cindy. Not going to read the entire question, just gonna kind of paraphrase it. Basically, how do you motivate other people, other human beings to get involved in fitness and to start fitness?
There are some people in who in her life who have some medical. conditions. And she wants to know, like, how do I get them motivated? You know, it’s really important for them to be healthy. And I, and I want to know how to get them motivated. And that’s a question. Unfortunately, I get asked all the time.
It’s something [00:01:00] as a coach that I have studied and researched because getting people to stick to things is the most important part. you know, and, and we’re not just talking about from a coach to athlete perspective, we’re talking about people in your life. And that’s kinda how I’m going to, to answer the question.
And I feel like. There’s always got to be a what’s in it for them that is going to be a little bit different than maybe why you care about fitness or why you want to do things. you know, telling someone they need to be healthy. If they’re not already healthy or they don’t have that practice and they probably just don’t care that much.
Or they’ll say they’ll pay lip service to the idea that, yes, I care, but they’re not doing anything about it. So clearly they don’t actually care about taking. not necessarily taking care of himself, but they don’t care about doing the activity. And I find a lot of times it’s just because it’s extremely overwhelming and there’s too much information really.
Like if you didn’t know where to start right now. You know, we [00:02:00] were talking, you could do, you could do CrossFit, and you could do concurrent training, you could do powerlifting. maybe you should be going to a cycling class. And that’s just the very tip of the iceberg with what should I do in fitness to not get injured and still have fun.
but then we get into nutrition, which is the biggest loaded topic on the planet in this industry is like. Keto versus vegan versus carnivore versus just, you know, everything in moderation and it’s not a big deal. Counting calories versus non macros. There’s so many different ideas and nobody knows the answer.
So anyone out there listening to this like. You can pull up scientific studies on why veganism is the best, and you can do the same for paleo. It’s a really strange world that we live in where science isn’t actually that helpful when it comes to nutrition. And I think that’s because every body individually is different.
And so that is, that’s a lot to unpack for one person. You don’t know where to get started, where to start. There is no [00:03:00] concrete path for any one person to follow because everything can be effective differently for each person. And so you’d really need to break things down, chunk it down to as small as you can.
You can get it. And I typically start with if, and I’m trying to get someone motivated. You know, it’s not approaching, from this, you need to do this because it’s good for you. You know, those things aren’t going to work. And even if they did, it’d be for a short amount of time cause the, that person is not intrinsically motivated.
And that I feel like that’s what you need to figure out with any person in your life who needs to get motivated is you need to find out what intrinsically. Motivates them at a real level. Cause if someone wants to lose 20 or 30 pounds, that’s typically extrinsic motivator. When things get tough, they need to wake up earlier, the workout gets harder.
And in the nutrition, they don’t like it. extrinsic motivators aren’t there to keep you going. You need something really intrinsic. So asking [00:04:00] people why multiple layers deep, I have to go five layers deep with someone like. Why do you think you know fitness or health is important? Was their answer to that question.
Then after you have that answer, but, okay. Why is that important? Why do you think that’s important and just keep going down? You can do this in almost a natural style conversation. Trying to dig to their biggest. Root of why they should be healthy. And you’ll find everyone has like these very different answers when you get all the way down to the root cause or you know why, why anyone’s doing anything?
And it might or might not resonate with you at all, but that’s fine. You just need to help that person uncover their intrinsic motivators. There’s a lot of research on the self determination theory and they say that you need something. that is an intrinsic motivation. But also when you’re talking about actual selection of exercise, it’s something that.
Is, it’s fun for the individual, but it’s also something [00:05:00] that they can develop skills in and get better at. So like walking is a very easy thing. That’s great. If everyone could just go for a walk every single day, it’s awesome. But the reason that’s not motivating for a lot of people is cause one, walking typically is not fun.
And two, there aren’t a lot of skills to develop in walking. you know, you’re not trying to get better every single time you do it. You’re not reading articles and blogs or listening to podcasts about how to become a better Walker. You know, those things aren’t just . Aren’t happening. So though, when you’re talking about exercise selection, you need to get into, okay, what’s fun for them?
Where can they continue to develop skills? But again, it’s specific to that person, not just your idea. So finding that intrinsic motivator for them, helping them with the exercise selection, and then going down to the smallest little thing that you could possibly do to, you know, see change, precipitate change in a, in a human being.
And what I mean by that is. Going all the way back to what I said at the beginning. It’s incredibly health and fitness and nutrition, incredibly overwhelming. You don’t know what to do where to [00:06:00] start, but we do know there might be one or two good habits you can pick up. Typically one is what I recommend.
One habit they could pick up. Now after you’ve gone through this process of finding out why they’re motivated, maybe what gets them going, cause it might be different than what what you do, and then also maybe helping them with exercise selection that’s fun and that they can get better at, but then only giving them one thing to do.
You know, only one thing, not this dramatic. If you got someone motivated, it’s not like, okay, great, we’re going to redo the whole diet. You’re gonna start exercising five or six times a week. Because that di typically doesn’t work for people. You need real behavioral change. And that starts very small. So I mean, it could be a, you know, we’re going to have one healthy meal per day over the next week.
That’s it. We’re not even talking about fitness yet. We’re not talking about the best exercises to do. We’re not talking about the right diet. We’re just talking about, Hey, in this meal, can we get some vegetables and a good, you know, clean source of protein in there and that’s it. That’s what we can do this at least once a week.
And you’re going to have to [00:07:00] slowly build those habits depending on how far, you know, if this is where you want them to be, and they’re all the way over here. Like. You have to start smaller and smaller if they’re here and you just need to get them over a little bit, you could start a little bit bigger than something like that.
But it’s picking up these small little habits, maybe one week at a time, three weeks at a time, and just slowly adding them in there. Cause there is no, other than some like dramatic health cases I’ve seen, you know, of people like getting some bad news about heart health or something and they flip that switch and they’re, all of a sudden this motivated individual.
But you can, you can look at the data. You know, if people who get really motivated for small bowel lose a bunch of weight, you know, they typically gained it all back. Now this might, it would be over the course of years, but they typically gain it all back. And it’s the same with people who have like had heart surgery and, and you know, they, their studies done on, on individuals who, you know, they have a heart problem.
They go in for heart surgery, they need to make all these changes they do for a short amount of time. But if you watch them over enough years, they’ve reverted back to all of their old ways. And that’s [00:08:00] because. Human behavior change is really hard. It takes leadership and it takes really small, a really small dent, one, one at a time to get people to move in a different direction.
So I would say I don’t think that you can truly motivate someone, but you can lead them down the path in a very slow, incremental way that I’ve kind of laid out for you here, especially if you truly care about this person you want to put in the time and effort to do that. I think that you should express to them daily how important it is for them to, you know.
Maintain their health and, and do these things and just nudge them in the right direction. Cause you did mention in your question like, it can’t, it can’t just be lead by example and it’s not, you know, I am, I have a pretty clean diet. I’m, you know, exercise regularly and I, it doesn’t motivate people in my family to do that too.
What it does is it puts me on this pedestal. They think that I’m some sort of like, you know. Robot, you know, like did they don’t associate with like, Oh, that Jared can do that, but I [00:09:00] can’t do that. And so that’s, leading by example is not typically the best way you have to walk people through very slow behavioral change one thing at a time and just never give up in the process.
So hopefully that answers your question and I appreciate you asking. That’s something that I really. Done a lot of research and dove into a lot over the years. if you want to ask a question, you can go to garage and mathlete.com/ama and I will get it answered here on the podcast. If you’re listening to this, please, five star review, positive comment really helps us show out and gets it out to more people.
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I hope you enjoy today’s ask me anything episode. So one more time. If you want to submit a question, topic or idea, you can do so at garage gym, athlete.com/ama and Hey, while you’re there, if you haven’t already, [00:10:00] sign up for garage gym athlete membership, we are the best. Community and programming on the internet.
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