Four Strategies that Build Lasting Motivation (and How to Use Them to Achieve Your Goals)

External rewards (like compliments, fitting into a smaller size, or winning a race) might get a person started but it won't last in the long-term.

It means believing in your ability to perform a task and achieve goals. There are 3 ways to build self-efficacy:

• Ensure early success. When first starting out, choose activities you're certain you can do successfully.
• Watch others succeed in the activity you want to try.  This is particularly effective if the person you're observing is similar to you (friends, neighbors, co-workers).
• Find a supportive voice. Personal trainers and coaches are skilled in giving appropriate encouragement, as are good friends (usually).

A fundamentally independent thinker understands that nothing makes a person upset, angry, or depressed; rather, what a person thinks about the world determines how they feel. 

• Emotional reasoning means if a person feels something, they automatically assume it must be fact ("I feel like a loser, so I must be one").
• Predictions of failure: when a person makes predictions using FEAR, or False Evidence Accepted as Real ("I know I'll make a fool of myself in front of everyone in the gym when I try to lift weights, and I'll fail").
• "Mind-reading". A person assumes people are reacting negatively to them when there's no evidence for this assumption.

SMARTER goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Timely, developed Enthusiastically, and attached to Rewards).

SMARTER goals take the guesswork out of routines, so we're more likely to stick to them.

A person commits to a behavioral change and then establishes a "contract" (with a partner, a friend) whereby some consequence (usually a monetary one) results from the person failing to achieve their goal. The idea is that the desire to avoid the consequence helps keep people more committed to success.