I bet you don’t have a motivation problem, Reader.

I know, I know it FEELS like one. But think about it honestly.

Motivation shows up for you sometimes. Some days you want to do the thing. Some weeks you’re really into it.

So it’s not exactly missing.

And “I have no motivation” is almost never literally true either. What’s actually going on is competing motivation. You’re motivated to rest. To finish the work thing. To not be sore tomorrow. To sit down for twenty minutes because you’ve been going since six in the morning. And that is all happening in a big secret battle.

What’s missing is the ability to REGULATE IT.

To create some when there isn’t any and to keep it going when it starts to fade.

That’s a skill and it’s learnable. (And think about where you actually learned anything about motivation. Pop culture and TikTok, probably. Or an 80s PE teacher yelling at you to want it more. Maybe a coach who was great at getting a locker room fired up and had never read a word of behavior change science.)

That’s the whole lesson most of us got.

First, what motivation actually is. It’s a process that guides goal directed behavior. A process. IT IS NOT a “fleeting” feeling that arrives and definitely not a personality trait that only some people were born with.

Which matters a lot if what you want is to exercise more often, get stronger, build bone, hold onto what you’ve got as you age, or get out of pain.

Because every one of those things takes more time than we probably expect.

Muscle takes weeks. Tendon and connective tissue take months. Bone takes longer than that. Pain you’ve had for years doesn’t just disappear because you went to PT 2-3X / week for 6 weeks.

All of those only respond to work that keeps happening.

So the thing that actually decides whether you get any of it is not the program. It’s whether the behavior survives long enough for your body to adapt to it. I could write you the best plan of your life and it does nothing if it only happens in the weeks you feel like it.

And on a timeline that long, your motivation is guaranteed to run out at some point. Not maybe. It absolutely positively WILL. So either you learn how to create it or you’re betting a year of results on a feeling holding steady, and feelings don’t do that.

This is the part I spend the most time on with clients and it’s what the prep work for 2 weeks before the Back to Impact challenge are built around.

[Get on the waitlist here →]​

Free 60 minute training in your inbox in about two minutes, plus the prep between now and October 13.

Regulating it comes down to two things.

1. The first is noticing. Where is this coming from right now? From inside you, because you care about the thing, or from outside you, because someone’s expecting it or a deadline is coming? Both work. I bet you may have not spent enough time self reflecting to really know which one is running the show more.
2. The second is doing something about it. Having actual strategies you can pull out when the motivation isn’t there.

For a real life example: You feel unmotivated. But you’ve learned that once your shoes are on, you almost always end up doing it. So the goal stops being “work out” and becomes “put your shoes on.” That’s a strategy.

Now the question I want you to sit with.

On a scale of 0 to 10, how many strategies do you have?

Most people have one or two and didn’t pick them on purpose. What we usually do instead is go looking for THE tactic. One video, one trick, one thing that will fix it. It may have worked once. Then next time it doesn’t, so we go looking for a new one.

So what you really need is a toolbox vs the next shiny new tool. It’s much easier to build something with twelve tools than with one, and that’s true whether you’re building a shed or a behavior.

Building that toolbox is exactly what the prep work is for. Doors open September 28.

[Get on the waitlist here →]​

And here’s the harder part that may be kinda triggering…

Do you know what actually works on you?

Do you pay attention to what creates motivation for you and what kills it? Do you know which goals actually feel like yours vs the ones you think you should want?

We live in a world built to point your attention outward. At everyone else’s life, everyone else’s routine, everyone else’s before and after. Very few of us spend real time looking at our own.

Regulating motivation depends almost entirely on how well you know yourself. If you’ve never paid attention, there’s nothing to work with.

But once you can see what’s happening in your own brain, you can adjust it. It’s subtle and it’s mostly hidden, which is why it feels impossible but it isn’t impossible.

Here’s how this shows up with pain and rehab, which is where I see it most.

Something hurts. You go to PT. You do the things. You feel better. And you know, you genuinely know, there’s more you should be doing on your own to keep it that way.

And you don’t do it.

That’s not laziness. That’s an unregulated process. Nothing is generating motivation for something that isn’t urgent anymore.

The honest part is this: almost everything worth having requires doing work you don’t enjoy. Not sometimes. Regularly. That’s true of your body, your career, your relationships, all of it. Waiting to want it is how years go by.

Back to Impact opens September 28, and the challenge itself starts October 13.

The three weeks in between are prep, and the prep is all about this. Because let’s be honest, if you don’t know how to do this part, following any plan to help your body be able to handle more load and stress and impact is going to be really tough.

That’s why I’m NOT handing you a program and hoping. We build this first.

[Get on the waitlist here →]​

Free 60 minute training right away, the prep work between now and October 13, and first access when doors open September 28.

Dr. Shannon

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