Where do you find your motivation?

Ah... just returning from 3 weeks vacation. What a blessing to be able to get away with the family? But who stole my motivation. Jet lag. Freedom. Family reunions. They can all make the office a hard place to return to as happy as I am to be back.

This reminded me of an article I read a month or two ago about motivation.

Perhaps you can burn 500 calories on the treadmill before you give up for the day. With a personal coach, though, you could do 700. The trainer gets you to exert more effort.

You wake up on a Monday morning after a long hard weekend of misbehaving. You have a splitting headache. You can easily call in sick, no one will freak out. But then you remember that there's a $500 bonus at stake if you keep your attendance perfect. You make the effort because someone else is bribing you.

On the playground, it's tempting to rip into a kid who stole the swing from you. You're about to whack him, but then you see your mom watching. With a great deal of effort, you walk away.

Effort's ephemeral, hard to measure and incredibly difficult to deliver on a regular basis. So we hire a trainer or a coach or a boss and give up our freedom and our upside for someone to whip us into shape. 

But then he asks

Has it become a crutch? Are you addicted to a taskmaster, to someone else's to do list, to short term external rewards that sell your long-term plans short? 

There have been some interesting studies with children that indicate that this behaviorist approach can be really counter productive in the long run. That using rewards or threats backfires. That it's much better to search long and hard for those internal motivations if you want any sort of lasting change to occur.

How do you motivate yourself? What about with your spirituality? I think this is one of the problems of self-help and health and wealth theology. It's essentially using behaviorist psychology to manipulate faith development. It works great in the short run. Packed churches. Enthusiastic converts. But what happens when the reward doesn't come. Or worse, when it does and the demand is there for an even bigger one next time?

I struggle with this a bit in my own life because I know the short term manipulations really do produce fast results. How do you motivate yourself?