The Psychology of Motivation: How to Help Clients Stay Consistent

Understanding the psychology of motivation is incredibly important for coaching. What if I told you that the most motivated client in your roster is the one most likely to quit? You would probably think I was crazy. Most of us in the health and fitness industry spend half our work hours dealing with motivation, from helping to motivate people to dealing with clients who say they just weren’t motivated for X, Y, or Z. We are conditioned to think that motivated clients are the best clients.

The fitness industry has sold us a lie about motivation. We’ve been taught that our job is to inspire, to pump people up, to get clients “hungry” for their goals. Entire coaching certifications are built around motivational interviewing and finding someone’s “why.” Social media is flooded with motivational quotes and transformation stories designed to spark that fire. The implicit message is clear: if you can just get someone motivated enough, the results will follow.

But this creates a fundamental problem. When motivation becomes the centrepiece of your coaching strategy, you’re building your entire practice on the most unstable variable in human behaviour. You’re constructing a house on sand and wondering why it keeps collapsing.

Motivation is unreliable by design. It’s not supposed to be constant. It fluctuates wildly based on sleep, stress, how someone’s day went, what email they opened first thing in the morning, or whether they had a good commute or a terrible one. The human brain that evolved to survive famines and conserve energy doesn’t care about your fitness goals or your quarterly revenue targets. It’s running ancient software in a modern world, and that software says “save energy whenever possible.”

You can fight against this biology, or you can work with it. Most coaches choose to fight. They send inspirational messages. They record pep talks. They spend half their client calls trying to pump people up for the week ahead. And then they’re genuinely confused when that same intensity fades by Thursday.

But once you understand the psychology of motivation more, you understand that coaching doesn’t need to be like this. We actually don’t want to spend our time focused on motivation, because it isn’t actually the thing that leads to long lasting results.

What does lead to lasting results, you may ask. Systems. Structure. Environmental design. The boring, unsexy work of making behaviours so easy they happen even when motivation is at zero. This is the shift from coach as cheerleader to coach as architect, and it’s the difference between a practice built on constantly rekindling flames and one built on structures that don’t need constant tending.

This article is going to challenge everything you think you know about motivation. We’re going to explore why highly motivated clients are often the most vulnerable. We’re going to look at ancient philosophy, modern behavioural science, and neuroscience to understand what actually drives lasting change. And most importantly, I’m going to give you a framework for building coaching systems that don’t depend on your clients waking up feeling inspired every single day. Because the uncomfortable truth is this is that if your coaching strategy requires your clients to feel motivated most of the time, it’s not a strategy, it’s a hope. And hope is not a plan.

World-class coaches don’t inspire action, they make action inevitable.

TL;DR

Motivation is the worst foundation for coaching because it’s designed to be unreliable; it fluctuates based on sleep, stress, and a thousand other variables outside your control. The clients who start most motivated often quit first because when you build strategy on feelings, you’re building on quicksand. 

Instead of trying to keep clients pumped up, focus on making behaviours so easy that they happen even on low-motivation days. Use the Fogg Behaviour Model: reduce friction, create reliable prompts, and scale behaviours down until they’re almost too easy to fail. Remove obstacles from your client’s environment rather than trying to increase their willpower. 

The goal isn’t to maximise motivation; it’s to build systems that work regardless of how motivated someone feels. Ancient Stoics understood this: we can’t control our feelings, only our actions. Modern neuroscience confirms it: habits form when behaviours move from the effortful prefrontal cortex to the automatic basal ganglia, which takes consistency over time, not intensity of feeling. 

Position before submission. System before motivation. That’s how you build clients who last.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Motivation

Motivation is unreliable by design. It’s not supposed to be constant. It fluctuates wildly based on sleep, stress, how someone’s day went, whether Mercury is in retrograde, and a thousand other variables. You name it, and it probably affects motivation. Motivation is meant to come and go. It’s the spark that gets the fire started, not the logs that keep it burning.

Yet I see newer coaches build their entire strategy around this spark. They send inspirational quotes. They record hype-up voice messages. They spend half their client calls trying to pump people up for the week ahead. And then they’re confused, if not genuinely baffled, when that same client who was “so ready for this” three weeks ago suddenly ghosts them.

Think of it like the myth of Sisyphus, that poor guy pushing the boulder up the mountain only to watch it roll back down. Trying to maintain motivation is exactly that, pushing that boulder up the mountain every single Monday, only to watch it roll back down by Thursday. You’ll spend your entire coaching career pushing that boulder. Or you could build a system that doesn’t require the boulder to be at the top of the mountain in the first place.

The trap is that motivation feels like the right thing to focus on because it’s what your client talks about. “I just need to get motivated again.” “I’ve lost my motivation.” “I’m waiting until I feel more motivated.” So you, being a helpful coach, try to give them what they’re asking for. More motivation. More pep talks. More reasons why they should want this.

Unfortunately, the client who’s most fired up on Day 1 is often the one most likely to quit by Week 3. Because when you build a coaching strategy on the most unstable variable in human behaviour, you’re building on quicksand.

What Motivation Actually Is (And Why It Still Matters)

Before we throw motivation out entirely, let’s understand what we’re actually dealing with. Motivation, at its core, is the desire to do something. It’s the feeling of wanting to take action. And yes, that feeling is real, and it does matter, just not in the way you think.

Motivation breaks down into two distinct types, and understanding the difference will change how you coach.

Intrinsic motivation is when someone does something because it feels inherently rewarding. Your client who genuinely loves the feeling of lifting heavy things? That’s intrinsic. The person who finds meal prep meditative and satisfying? Intrinsic. When someone tells you they feel “off” if they don’t exercise, they’re describing intrinsic motivation. They’re doing it because the activity itself is the reward.

Extrinsic motivation is different. It’s doing something for an outcome, a reward, or to avoid punishment. Training for your wedding photos. Working out because your doctor scared you about your cholesterol. Hitting the gym because you paid for a six-month membership upfront, and you hate wasting money. None of these motivations come from the activity itself, they come from external factors.

Now, extrinsic motivation gets a bad rap in coaching circles. You’ll hear people say you need to find your “internal why” and that external rewards create dependency. And look, there’s truth to that. But in practice, extrinsic motivation is incredibly useful, especially at the beginning. It gets people through the door. It creates the initial momentum that eventually, if you coach them right, can evolve into something more sustainable.

The key is understanding that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation aren’t enemies; they’re teammates. Your client might start working out because of an upcoming beach holiday (extrinsic) and discover they actually love how strength training makes them feel (intrinsic). Or they might love playing basketball (intrinsic) but also appreciate the compliments they get on their physique (extrinsic). Both can coexist. Both can be useful.

But the critical insight that most coaches miss is that the goal isn’t to maximise either type of motivation. The goal is to build a system that works regardless of how motivated your client feels on any given day.

You see, most people don’t actually have a motivation problem. They have a systems problem. Or they want other things more than this thing (i.e. they’ve got a different ordering of priorities). Or they want the outcome but not the actual work. They want to be fit without enjoying training. They want to look like they eat well without actually wanting to cook or meal prep.

And no amount of motivational pep talks will fix that.

The Stoics had this figured out 2,000 years ago. Epictetus, a philosopher who started life as a slave and became one of the most influential thinkers in history, taught something radical: we don’t control our feelings, we control our actions. This is what philosophers call the dichotomy of control.

Epictetus would say that trying to control motivation is like trying to control the weather. You can’t. The weather does what it does. Your emotions do what they do. Motivation rises and falls like the tide. But you can control whether you have an umbrella. You can control whether you go outside. You can control your response to the weather.

The system is your umbrella.

Think about what this means for your coaching. You’re spending all your energy trying to change the weather; trying to make your clients feel motivated, trying to make them want it more, trying to inspire them into action. But the Stoics would tell you that’s a losing battle. You’re focusing on what you can’t control. Instead, focus on what you can control: the actions, the environment, the systems, the structures that work regardless of the emotional weather.

The Framework That Changes Your Coaching Practice

Let me introduce you to something that revolutionised my coaching practice: the Fogg Behaviour Model. Developed by BJ Fogg at Stanford, this model breaks behaviour down into three essential elements:

Motivation: The desire to do something 

Ability: How easy or difficult the behaviour is 

Prompt: The cue that triggers the action

For any behaviour to happen, all three must converge at the same moment. You need some level of motivation, the ability to actually do the thing, and a prompt that reminds you to do it. Take away any one of these elements, and the behaviour doesn’t happen.

Here’s the game-changing part: of these three elements, motivation is by far the worst lever to pull. And yet it’s the one coaches reach for first.

Think about it. Your client is motivated on Monday morning. They’re going to crush their workouts this week. By Thursday evening, they’ve had a terrible day at work, the kids are sick, they slept poorly, and that motivation has evaporated. This is the motivation wave, and every single one of your clients rides it. High on Monday, nonexistent by Thursday.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister showed us why this happens with his research on ego depletion. Willpower, he discovered, is like a muscle, it fatigues with use. Every decision you make, every temptation you resist, every time you force yourself to do something you don’t want to do, you’re depleting a finite resource. This is why your client can white-knuckle it for a few days but can’t sustain it. By Thursday, they’ve made a thousand decisions, resisted a hundred temptations, and the willpower tank is empty. Now, it doesn’t literally deplete, but it does feel like this to your clients. 

A good system removes the need for willpower entirely.

So if motivation is unreliable, where should your focus be? It should be on making behaviours so easy that they happen even when motivation is low. On building prompts that actually work. On creating systems that don’t require your client to feel inspired to execute.

This is the shift from coach as cheerleader to coach as systems architect.

There’s an old military saying that’s perfect here: “Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.” In war, you can have the most brilliant battle plan in the world, but if your troops don’t have food, ammunition, and clear supply lines, you’ll lose. In coaching, amateurs talk motivation, professionals talk systems. The logistics (the when, where, how, the removal of friction, the design of prompts) are what wins wars and builds consistent clients.

Making It So Easy They Can’t Not Do It

We do also need to talk about ability; the “how easy or hard is this?” factor. This is where you have tremendous power as a coach, and it’s where most coaches completely fumble.

When a client tells you they didn’t work out this week, your instinct might be to ask what happened, to problem-solve, to motivate them for next week. But the better question is: was the workout I prescribed actually doable given their real life?

I used to write beautiful, comprehensive workout programs. Four days a week, 60 minutes each session, perfectly periodised. And clients would look at them, feel overwhelmed, do one or two sessions, and then fall off. I thought the problem was their motivation or commitment. The problem was me asking for behaviour that required too much ability, too much time, too much energy, and too much complexity.

Now I shrink behaviours until they’re almost too easy to fail.

Instead of “Complete a 60-minute session,” I’ll start with “Put on your workout clothes.” That’s it. Just get dressed. Sounds ridiculous, right? But what happens when the barrier is that low, is that they actually do it. And once they’re in their workout clothes, more often than not, they think, “Well, I might as well do something.”

But even if all they do is put on the clothes and then go about their day? That’s still a win. Because they’re building the habit of the cue and the action. They’re proving to themselves they can follow through on something. The behaviour is becoming automatic. And automaticity is what we’re really after.

Aristotle taught us that we don’t become virtuous by knowing what virtue is, we become virtuous by practising virtuous acts until they become our character. He called this habituation, and it’s the foundation of his entire ethical system. Well, you don’t become a consistent person by understanding consistency or by feeling motivated to be consistent. You become consistent by consistently doing small things until consistency becomes who you are. The action shapes the identity, not the other way around. This is why we start with putting on workout clothes. The exact workout itself is less relevant, we’re trying to create a person who works out. And that person is built through repeated small actions, not through knowledge or motivation.

The power of scaling down cannot be overstated. You want tiny behaviours that build into habits. Not heroic efforts that require peak motivation to execute.

The Friction You’re Not Seeing

Making behaviours easier isn’t just about scaling them down; it’s also about removing obstacles. I call this friction hunting, and it’s one of the most valuable skills you can develop as a coach. But there’s actually a more sophisticated term for what we’re doing here: choice architecture.

Richard Thaler won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on nudge theory and choice architecture. His insight was revolutionary yet simple: we don’t just make choices in a vacuum, we’re profoundly influenced by how choices are presented to us. The design of the environment matters more than the strength of our willpower.

This is what behavioural economists call choice architecture: designing environments so the right choice is the easy choice, the default choice, the path of least resistance. Your job as a coach isn’t to make your clients want vegetables more or want to work out more (motivation). Your job is to architect their environment so that eating vegetables and working out are easier than not doing those things.

Every behaviour has what economists call transaction costs. This is all the little expenses involved in completing a transaction. Time is a cost. Energy is a cost. Decision-making is a cost. Having to remember something is a cost. Having to prepare is a cost. Having to overcome obstacles is a cost.

Your client has a limited budget of energy and willpower. Your job is to make the behaviours you want as low-cost as possible.

Let’s say your client says they want to work out in the mornings before work. Sounds great. But when you dig deeper, you find out their gym clothes are in a drawer upstairs, their gym is ten minutes out of the way, and they’ve never been a morning person in their entire life. That’s not a new behaviour, that’s an obstacle course. Look at all those transaction costs stacking up.

Your job is to identify and eliminate these friction points. What if they had their workout clothes ready to go straight out of bed? Transaction cost eliminated. What if they did a 15-minute home workout instead? Commute cost eliminated. What if they worked out at lunch when they actually have energy? Circadian rhythm cost eliminated.

I had a client who kept missing his evening workouts. We did all the motivation work, connected to his why, visualised his goals, the whole nine yards. Still missed workouts. Finally, I asked him to walk me through his typical evening. Turns out, he’d come home from work, sit on the couch to “relax for a minute,” and then never get back up. The couch was the friction point.

The solution was actually incredibly straightforward. We put his gym bag in his car and had him go straight to the gym from work without going home first. Suddenly, he was hitting four workouts a week consistently. The motivation hadn’t changed. The choice architecture had. We removed the couch from the decision-making process entirely.

Environmental design is everything. Set up your client’s space for success. If they want to take vitamins daily, the vitamins should be on the counter next to their coffee maker, not in a cabinet somewhere. If they want to meal prep, clear out a shelf in their fridge specifically for prepped meals. If they want to drink more water, put filled water bottles everywhere.

This is what I call creating an Aligned Environment, where the physical space, the prompts, and the ease of action all line up so perfectly that the behaviour becomes almost inevitable. You’re not relying on motivation to overcome friction. You’re eliminating the friction entirely.

Remove friction. Make the right choice the easy choice.

The Missing Piece: Prompts That Actually Work

The third element of behaviour is prompts. This is the cue that reminds your client to do the thing. And most of your clients are relying on the worst prompt possible: remembering to do it.

“I’ll just remember to work out after work.” “I’ll remember to track my food.” “I’ll remember to take my supplements.”

They won’t. Memory is a terrible prompt. Our brains are not designed to remember arbitrary tasks at specific times, especially when we’re busy, stressed, or tired (which is, you know, most of the time). So what makes a good prompt? Consistency and reliability. The prompt needs to happen every time, in the same way, at the same time. And ideally, it should be something your client is already doing.

This is where habit stacking comes in. Instead of creating a brand new prompt from scratch, you anchor the new behaviour to an existing routine. “After I pour my morning coffee, I’ll take my vitamins.” “After I brush my teeth at night, I’ll lay out my workout clothes for tomorrow.” “After I finish my lunch, I’ll take a 10-minute walk.”

The existing behaviour (pouring coffee, brushing teeth, finishing lunch) becomes the prompt for the new behaviour. And because your client already does the existing behaviour consistently, the prompt is reliable.

I teach my clients to design their own prompt systems because (and this is important) you won’t be there to prompt them forever. They need to understand how this works so they can apply it to any behaviour they want to build.

Building Coaching Systems That Don’t Depend on Feelings

Here’s the difference between motivation-dependent coaching and system-dependent coaching:

Motivation-dependent coaching looks like this: Your client is fired up on Sunday night. You’ve just had a great coaching call. They’ve committed to four workouts this week, meal prepping on Monday, and cutting out sugar. By Wednesday, they’re exhausted from work, they skipped their workout, they didn’t meal prep, and they’re stress-eating cookies. They feel guilty. They apologise. You give them a pep talk about staying committed. The cycle repeats. They’ll try and they’ll fail and they’ll feel guilty and they’ll try again and they’ll fail again, until you change the system.

System-dependent coaching looks like this: Your client has a simple routine. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, their alarm goes off at 6:30 AM. Their workout clothes are already laid out. They do a 30-minute workout you’ve written that requires zero equipment and zero decision-making; they just follow the program. After the workout, they make a protein shake (ingredients already prepped in the fridge). They check the box on their habit tracker. On days they’re not motivated, they still do it because the system doesn’t require motivation to execute.

Guess which client is still consistent a year later?

The system-dependent client. Every single time.

Here’s another way to think about it: building systems is like prevention. Giving pep talks is like treatment. You can keep treating the motivation disease every time it flares up, or you can prevent it from being a problem in the first place. Which approach sounds more effective?

The Tools That Make Systems Work

Let me give you some practical tools for building these systems with your clients.

Implementation intentions are stupidly simple and wildly effective. They’re if-then plans that remove decision-making from the equation. “If it’s Monday at 6 PM, then I go to the gym.” “If I finish dinner, then I go for a 15-minute walk.” “If it’s meal prep Sunday, then I cook three dinners.”

The power is in the specificity. Not “I’ll work out this week sometime.” That’s a hope, not a plan. “If it’s Wednesday at 7 AM, then I do my home workout” is a system.

Habit stacking we’ve already covered, but I want to emphasise how powerful this is. Every single one of your clients has existing routines; they just don’t think of them as such. Your job is to help them identify these routines and stack new behaviours onto them. Morning coffee routine? Stack something there. Evening wind-down routine? Stack something there. Already walking the dog? Stack something there.

Tracking systems can be incredibly powerful, but only if they’re designed right. The wrong tracking system creates pressure and guilt. The right tracking system creates accountability without judgment. I’m a big fan of simple check-the-box trackers. Did you do the thing? Yes or no. No performance metrics, no judgment about quality. Just consistency tracking.

But the key insight is that we’re not tracking to measure success. We’re tracking to create awareness and build the habit of tracking itself. The act of opening your tracker app or checking a box is part of the system.

Understanding How Habits Actually Form

Understanding habit formation and the habit loop is incredibly important if we are to understand the psychology of motivation and move away from relying on motivation. The habit loop is: cue, routine, reward. This is fundamental to understanding how behaviours become automatic.

The cue triggers the behaviour. This is your prompt; it is the thing that reminds you to do the thing.

The routine is the behaviour itself. The workout, the meal prep, the walk, whatever.

The reward is what you get from doing the behaviour. This could be intrinsic (the good feeling after exercise) or extrinsic (checking a box, telling your coach you did it, seeing progress).

For a habit to form, you need all three elements. But this takes time. Real time. Not the mythical 21 days you’ve probably heard about. That number came from a plastic surgeon in the 1960s who noticed patients took about 21 days to adjust to their new face. It has nothing to do with habit formation.

Research suggests habit formation takes anywhere from 18 to 254 days, with an average around 66 days. But the real timeline depends on the complexity of the behaviour and the individual. A simple behaviour like drinking a glass of water after waking up might become automatic in a few weeks. A complex behaviour like going to the gym three times a week might take months.

Now here’s where neuroscience gives us a beautiful window into what’s actually happening. Scientists can literally watch habit formation happen in the brain using imaging technology. When you first learn a behaviour, your prefrontal cortex lights up. This is the part of your brain responsible for conscious effort, decision-making, and willpower. It’s the part that’s working hard, burning energy, getting fatigued.

But as the behaviour becomes habitual, something fascinating happens. Activity shifts from the prefrontal cortex to the basal ganglia, a more primitive part of the brain that handles automatic behaviours. The behaviour moves from effortful to automatic. It moves from the conscious mind to the autopilot. This is why a new behaviour feels hard, clunky, like you’re thinking about every step, and then suddenly, weeks or months later, it just feels like what you do. Your brain has literally rewired itself.

This is why your role in shepherding clients through the awkward “not yet automatic” phase is so critical. This is the phase where motivation has worn off, but the habit hasn’t solidified yet. This is where most clients quit. The prefrontal cortex is tired of working so hard, the basal ganglia hasn’t taken over yet, and they’re stuck in this uncomfortable middle ground.

And this is where a good system makes all the difference.

Your client doesn’t need to feel motivated during this phase; they just need to follow the system. The system carries them through the neurological transition until the behaviour becomes automatic. And automaticity is the goal. When a behaviour is automatic, it happens without conscious thought or effort. It doesn’t require motivation. It doesn’t deplete willpower. It just happens.

The Position Before Submission Principle

In Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, there’s a fundamental principle that every white belt learns in their first few weeks: position before submission.

What this means is simple: you don’t go for the flashy finish (the choke, the armbar, the submission that ends the match) until you’ve established a dominant position. If you try to force a submission from a bad position, you’re likely to fail, waste energy, and possibly end up in a worse spot than where you started. But if you patiently establish position (mount, back control, a dominant angle), the submissions start to become available almost naturally.

Trying to motivate your client before building a system is like going for a submission from a bad position. It might work once. You might get lucky. Your client might be so fired up that they push through for a few weeks. But it’s not sustainable. You’re forcing something that doesn’t have the proper foundation.

Establish position first. Build the system. Remove the friction. Create the prompts. Design the environment. Make the behaviours small and achievable. Get your client into a dominant position where consistency is easy, where the path of least resistance is the right path.

Once you’ve established that position and once the system is working, the results will come. The “submissions” (the weight loss, the strength gains, the habit solidification) become almost inevitable. You’re not forcing them. You’re not relying on motivation to muscle them into existence. They emerge naturally from the dominant position you’ve established.

Position before submission. System before motivation. This is the way.

When Motivation Actually Matters (And How to Use It Strategically)

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “So I should never work on motivation at all?” Not quite. Motivation does matter, just not in the way you’ve been using it. I wouldn’t be writing an article on the psychology of motivation if I didn’t think it mattered at all. It clearly does. But it has to be used appropriately.

There are strategic moments when motivation work is not only appropriate but essential. During major transitions, for example. When someone is starting out, returning after a break, or levelling up to a new goal, that’s when you want to do deep motivation work. Connect them to their why. Help them visualise their future self. Explore their values and ensure their goals actually align with what they care about.

When the system breaks down, and it will sometimes, you need to identify whether the problem is the system itself or whether your client needs to reconnect with their purpose. Usually, it’s the system. But occasionally, someone has genuinely lost sight of why they’re doing this in the first place. That’s when motivation work makes sense.

In goal-setting and vision work, motivation is crucial. You want your clients connected to their deeper why. You want them to see the bigger picture. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking this connection, on its own, will sustain them through the day-to-day grind. It won’t.

When you do engage in motivation work, here are some techniques that actually move the needle:

Vision casting: Help your clients connect to their future self in vivid detail. Not just “I want to lose 30 pounds” but “I want to play on the floor with my grandkids without getting winded. I want to hike the Camino de Santiago when I retire. I want to feel strong and capable in my body.” The more specific and emotionally resonant, the better.

Values alignment: This is where Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) offers something very helpful. ACT distinguishes between values and goals. Goals are destinations like lose 30 pounds, run a marathon, fit into those jeans. Values are directions of travel: being healthy, being active, and being present with your family.

So many of your clients are chasing goals that sound good but don’t actually align with what they value. Someone whose core value is family but whose fitness goals require them to be away from home every evening? That’s a misalignment that will sabotage them every time. Help them craft goals that serve their actual values, not goals that sound impressive but conflict with what matters most.

And here’s another crucial insight from ACT: the concept of psychological flexibility. This is the ability to do what matters to you even when uncomfortable thoughts and feelings arise. Even when you’re tired. Even when you’re unmotivated. Even when every fibre of your being is saying “not today.”

This is the skill we’re actually building through systems, not motivation, but the capacity to act independently of motivation. Psychological flexibility is what allows someone to think “I really don’t feel like working out” and then work out anyway, not through white-knuckling or willpower, but because the system makes it easy and the behaviour is becoming automatic.

Progress reflection: Use past wins to fuel forward momentum. “Remember three months ago when you couldn’t do a single push-up? Look at you now.” This isn’t empty cheerleading, it’s helping clients see concrete evidence of their capability.

The motivation interview: Ask better questions. Not “Why do you want to lose weight?” but “What will be different in your life when you’ve lost the weight? How will you feel? What will you be able to do that you can’t do now?” Get specific. Get emotional. Uncover the real drivers.

But after you’ve done this work, and it’s valuable work, you must build a system that doesn’t depend on your client maintaining that motivational high. The vision work gives them direction. The system gets them there.

These tools are very helpful, for those of you who wish to go a bit deeper:

• ACT Hexaflex Assessment Tool
• Wheel of Life Self Assessment Tool
• Triage Values Assessment Tool
• Triage Goals-Values Congruency Tool
• Triage Personal Values & Life Priorities Assessment
• Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Assessment

Separating Thoughts from Actions: The CBT Insight

The insight from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy that thoughts, feelings, and behaviours are connected but not determined by each other is incredibly helpful when you are trying to understand the psychology of motivation more deeply, and especially when you want to wean a client off of using motivation as a driver.

Your client thinks “I don’t feel like working out today.” That thought is real. The feeling is real. But here’s what CBT teaches us: that thought doesn’t have to dictate the behaviour. The feeling is information, not instruction.

Think about how radical this is. We’ve been taught to listen to our feelings, to honour our feelings, to not do things that don’t “feel right.” And there’s wisdom in that for many areas of life. But when it comes to building consistency in health behaviours, this advice is actually counterproductive.

The thought “I don’t feel motivated” is just a thought. It’s data. It’s your brain reporting its current state. But it’s not a command. You don’t have to obey it. The system allows you to acknowledge the thought, “Yeah, I’m not feeling it today”, and then act anyway. Not through gritting your teeth and forcing it, but because the behaviour is so easy and so automatic that it happens regardless of the thought.

This is enormously freeing for clients. So many of them think that the presence of the “I don’t want to” thought means they shouldn’t do it, that they should wait until they feel like it. Teaching them that they can notice the thought and still act is a game-changer.

For a deep understanding, I recommend the following:  

• Using Cognitive Defusion in Your Coaching
• Using Cognitive Restructuring In Your Coaching

When the System Breaks Down (And How to Fix It)

Checking in on motivation without making it the centrepiece of your coaching is still a skill you will have to develop. Understanding the psychology of motivation shouldn’t lead you to ignoring it. I still ask my clients how they’re feeling about their goals. I still want to know if they’re excited, connected, and engaged. But these questions are diagnostic, not prescriptive. I’m gathering information about their internal state so I can adjust the system accordingly, not so I can talk them into feeling more motivated. The difference is crucial. When you ask diagnostic questions, you’re looking for patterns, identifying weak points in the system, understanding what’s working and what isn’t. When you ask prescriptive questions, you’re trying to manufacture a feeling that may or may not come, and then building your strategy around whether it does.

There are red flags that you’re over-relying on motivation, and it’s worth being honest with yourself about whether you’re seeing them. Do most of your coaching conversations centre on feelings rather than systems? Are you sending frequent motivational messages between sessions, the “you’ve got this!” texts, the inspirational quote images, the check-ins that are really just attempts to keep the fire burning? When a client struggles, is your first response to give them reasons to keep going rather than to investigate what broke down in their system? Do you feel like you’re working harder than your client to keep them on track, like you’re pushing that boulder up the mountain for them? Are you surprised when motivated clients fall off, wondering what happened to all that enthusiasm they had just weeks ago? If you’re seeing these patterns, you need to shift your approach. You’re working against the psychology of motivation rather than with it.

So let’s talk about what to do when a client comes to you and says those dreaded words: “I’m just not motivated anymore.” This moment is a test of your coaching philosophy. Your response here will reveal whether you truly understand the psychology of motivation or whether you’re still operating under the old model that treats motivation as something you can conjure through the right words or the right emotional appeal.

First, normalise it. This is not a failure. It’s not a character flaw. It’s not evidence that they don’t really want this. Motivation comes and goes; we’ve established this. The fact that they’re not feeling motivated right now is completely expected and totally normal. Your client isn’t broken. They’re not weak-willed. They’re human, and their brain is functioning exactly as evolution shaped it.

In fact, this is exactly when a good system proves its worth. This is why we built the system in the first place, exactly for moments like this. When your client comes to you saying they’ve lost motivation, what they’re really telling you is “the weather has changed.” And your response shouldn’t be to try to change the weather back. Your response should be to check whether they have the right umbrella.

Here’s your response protocol, the step-by-step approach that will serve you every single time this happens. Don’t panic or give a pep talk. Seriously. Resist the urge. Take a breath. Your client losing motivation is not an emergency. It’s not a crisis that requires immediate intervention. It’s information. It’s data. Treat it as such. The moment you start panicking or launching into a motivational speech, you’ve reinforced the idea that motivation is necessary for action. You’ve made motivation the centre of the conversation again. Don’t do it.

Next, audit the system. This is where you earn your money as a coach. What broke down? Did the workouts become too hard as you progressed them? Did life circumstances change: new job, sick kid, elderly parent needs care, relationship stress? Did the prompt stop working because their morning routine shifted? Is there new friction that wasn’t there before? Gym changed their hours, workout buddy moved away, meal prep containers broke, and they haven’t replaced them? Get specific about what’s not working. Don’t accept vague answers. Dig into the mechanics of their daily life and find where the system is failing them.

Third, make it easier. Never, ever make it harder when someone is struggling. This bears repeating because I see coaches do this all the time. Client is faltering, so they add accountability measures like daily check-ins, food logs, and progress photos. Or they make the program more intense, thinking that if they just raise the stakes, the client will rise to meet them. They won’t. When someone is struggling, the absolute last thing they need is more difficulty, more complexity, or more things to manage. Make the behaviour smaller. Remove friction. Simplify. Strip it back to the bare bones. What’s the absolute minimum version of this behaviour that would still be valuable? Start there.

Fourth, reconnect to purpose only after you’ve simplified. Once you’ve addressed the system breakdown, once you’ve made the behaviour achievable again, then, and only then, you can do some motivation work if it feels relevant. But here’s what you’ll often find: you won’t need to. Once the system is working again, once your client is back to taking consistent action, motivation tends to return naturally. It’s not that the motivation creates the action, it’s that the action creates the motivation. This is the psychology of motivation that nobody talks about: behaviour often precedes feeling, not the other way around.

I had a client who came to me eight weeks into the 12-week program we had her on saying she’d lost all motivation. My old self would have launched into a pep talk about her goals, about how far she’d come, about how she just needed to push through. Instead, I asked what had changed. Not “what’s wrong with you” but “what’s changed in your life?” Turns out, her company had gone through a reorganisation and her job stress had tripled. She was working longer hours, taking on new responsibilities, and dealing with office politics she’d never had to navigate before. She was exhausted all the time, running on fumes, barely keeping her head above water.

So, we didn’t talk about motivation at all. We didn’t discuss her why or visualise her goals or any of that. We rebuilt her system around her new reality. Cut her workouts from four days to two. Shortened them from 60 minutes to 30. Shifted them from evenings (when she was completely fried) to lunch breaks (when she still had some energy and it gave her a mental reset in the middle of her chaotic workdays). Within a week, she was back on track. Within a month, she’d naturally increased her frequency and intensity because she had energy again, and the momentum was there. The system caught her when motivation couldn’t. That’s what systems do.

This brings us to something crucial, which is understanding leverage points. Systems theorist Donella Meadows wrote extensively about leverage points in complex systems. These are places where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything. She discovered through her research that not all interventions are created equal. Some changes require enormous effort for minimal results. You push and push and barely move the needle. Other changes (leverage points) create cascading effects throughout the entire system. You make one small adjustment, and suddenly ten other things improve as a side effect.

In coaching, motivation is a low-leverage intervention. You can spend enormous energy trying to increase someone’s motivation (stuff like having longer conversations, sending more messages, creating vision boards, doing values work) and get minimal, temporary results. The motivation might spike for a day or two, but it fades quickly because you haven’t changed the underlying structure. Making behaviours easier is a high-leverage intervention. A small change in the difficulty of the behaviour can create massive, sustained changes in consistency. And when consistency improves, results improve. When results improve, confidence improves. When confidence improves, identity shifts. When identity shifts, the person becomes someone who “just does this stuff.” All from making one behaviour slightly easier.

Understanding where the leverage points are in your client’s life is what separates good coaches from great ones. You’re not just solving problems, you’re identifying which problems, when solved, will solve ten other problems. You’re looking for the dominoes that, when pushed, knock down an entire chain. This is strategic thinking applied to behaviour change. This is what it means to truly understand the psychology of motivation and behaviour.

That client whose evening workout keeps getting skipped? The leverage point might not be the workout at all. It might be the couch they sit on when they get home. That couch is where they decompress, where they transition from work mode to home mode, where they tell themselves they’ll “just rest for a minute” before working out. But that minute turns into an hour, and then they’re in their comfortable clothes, dinner needs to be made, and the workout gets pushed to tomorrow. Remove the couch from the equation,  have them go straight to the gym from work without stopping home first, and suddenly ten other friction points disappear. They don’t have to resist the temptation to sit. They don’t have to transition from relaxed to active. They don’t have to change clothes twice. They don’t have to make the decision all over again. One change, cascading effects.

Look for the leverage points. Pull the levers that actually move the system. This is the art of coaching; not motivating harder, but thinking smarter about where your interventions will have the most impact.

The Shift That Makes You World-Class

Stop thinking of yourself as a cheerleader and start thinking of yourself as a systems architect. Stop asking “How do I keep my client motivated?” and start asking “How do I make this so easy they’ll do it anyway?” This is the shift that separates world-class coaches from the rest.

The long game here isn’t creating clients who are dependent on you for motivation. The long game is building clients who don’t need constant motivation, or constant coaching, because they’ve internalised how to design behaviours that stick.

This is what world-class coaching looks like. You’re not just changing their body or their fitness level or their nutrition. You’re teaching them how to change their behaviour. You’re giving them a framework they can apply to any area of their life. 

The less you rely on motivation as a coach, the more consistent your clients become. The less you try to inspire action through pep talks and vision boards, the more action actually happens. Because the truth is that the system doesn’t care if you’re tired. The system doesn’t care if you had a bad day. The system doesn’t care if Mercury is in retrograde. The system just works.

World-class coaches don’t inspire action, they make action inevitable.

To put this into action, this week, I want you to audit one client’s program through the lens of the Fogg Behaviour Model. Ask yourself:

• Does this require high motivation to execute, or can they do it on a low-motivation day?
• How many friction points are in their way? What are the transaction costs of each behaviour?
• Are their prompts reliable and consistent, or are they depending on memory?
• Am I coaching systems or am I coaching feelings?
• Where are the leverage points? Where are the small changes that will cascade into big results?

Be honest. You’ll probably find that you’re relying more on motivation than you thought. That’s okay, we all did it, but now you know better. Instead, build systems. Remove friction. Create reliable prompts. Make behaviours so small and easy that they happen even when your client doesn’t feel like it. Design Aligned Environments where the right choice is the easy choice.

System before motivation.

That’s how you build consistency. That’s how you build results. That’s how you become world-class.

For those of you ready to take the next step in professional development, we offer advanced courses like our Nutrition Coach Certification, which is designed to help you guide clients through sustainable, evidence-based nutrition change with confidence, while our Exercise Program Design Course focuses on building effective, individualised training plans that actually work in the real world. Beyond that, we’ve created specialised courses so you can grow in the exact areas that matter most for your journey as a coach.

If you want to keep sharpening your coaching craft, we’ve built a free Content Hub filled with resources for coaches. Inside, you’ll find the Coaches Corner, which has a collection of tools, frameworks, and real-world insights you can start using right away. We also share regular tips and strategies on Instagram and YouTube, so you’ve always got fresh ideas and practical examples at your fingertips. And if you want everything delivered straight to you, the easiest way is to subscribe to our newsletter so you never miss new material.