Motivation Changes Nothing

Hi friend,

In 2002, three psychologists in Britain, Sarah Milne, Sheina Orbell and Paschal Sheeran, took 248 university students and set out to get them exercising.

They divided them into three groups. The first was asked only to keep a record of how much exercise they did over the following fortnight.

The second was given reading material built to motivate them: the damage inactivity does to a young body, the risk of heart disease later in life, and all the reasons they were perfectly capable of doing something about it. It worked, in the sense that these students came away saying they intended to exercise more than the first group did.

The third group read the same material. Then they were handed one extra sheet of paper and asked to finish a sentence stating the day, the time and the place where they would do at least twenty minutes of hard exercise in the coming week.

That was the whole difference between them.

When the fortnight was over, the researchers counted who had exercised at least once.

In the group that only kept a record, 38 percent had.

In the group that had been motivated, 35 percent had.

In the group that wrote the sentence, 91 percent had.

Look at the middle number before the last one. The students who had been given every reason to exercise, and who told the researchers they fully meant to, did slightly worse than the students who had been given nothing at all. The motivation took hold. It raised their intentions and changed their answers on the questionnaire, and when the week came it did not move their legs.

The sentence did.Psychologists call that sentence an implementation intention, a term coined by the German psychologist Peter Gollwitzer in the early 1990s, and the exercise study is only the best known of hundreds of tests.

In 2006, Gollwitzer and Sheeran pooled 94 of them, covering everything from taking vitamins to finishing assignments to turning up for medical screenings, and found a consistent and sizeable effect. A larger review in 2024 examined more than six hundred.

The format fits on the back of a receipt:

When [situation], I will [action] at [place].

What it does is move the decision. Most of what you intend to do is left to be settled in the moment, by the version of you who is standing there at six in the evening, tired, with his phone in his hand and a dozen reasonable alternatives on offer. He negotiates. He asks himself how he feels, and he usually feels like doing something else.

The sentence takes that negotiation away from him. The decision was made days earlier by a man who was calm, and all that is left for the tired one is to recognise the moment when it arrives and follow the instruction.

This is why the motivated group failed. Motivation is a feeling, and feelings get consulted at the moment of action, which is the worst possible moment to consult anything. A plan with a time and a place does not care how you feel when the time comes.

Here is how to write one properly, because most people who try it write sentences too vague to work.

Name a situation you will recognise. When I get home from work is a cue. Sometime this week is a wish. The sentence depends on the cue, because your mind is watching for a trigger, and a date range gives it nothing to watch for.

Name an action small enough to start without thinking. I will open the document and write the first paragraph beats I will work on the project, because the first can be done and the second can only be contemplated.

Name the place. It sounds trivial and it is not. I have let plans slide for exactly this reason, knowing when I would do something and never having decided where, so that when the moment arrived, the first thing I had to do was make another decision, and I lost it.

Then write a second sentence for whatever is most likely to stop you. If I get home and feel too tired, then I will put my shoes on and do the first ten minutes. The obstacle is coming regardless, and you may as well meet it with an instruction already in hand instead of a debate.

The method has a limit, and the researchers are careful to state it. These plans do not manufacture a goal from nothing. A man who has no wish to exercise will write a poor sentence and ignore it. What the method closes is the gap between wanting something and doing it, which for most ambitious people is the only gap that matters, since they have never been short of wanting.

So before you close this, take a minute and write three.

One for your body, one for your work, and one for the thing you have been meaning to start for a month. Day, time, place, action. Put them somewhere you will see them tomorrow.

The students in that third group were no more disciplined than the others and no more motivated. What they had was a decision already made, and a place they knew they would be standing when the moment came.

Until next time
Lorenc - Founder of Success Skill