How to Keep Motivated When You Think You’re Not Any Good

The better you think you are at an activity, the more likely you are to keep practicing it. But how do you keep going when you’re questioning your ability?

Let’s imagine that you walk past a rock climbing gym on your way home from work every day. You can see see outdoorsy-looking people clambering up the walls like squirrels on trees. And you know that on summer weekends, they pile into cars and drive to the mountains to climb the real rocks.

This is your goal: to be one of them, a rock climber skilled enough to scale cliffs in the great outdoors.

It’ll take a couple days of training per week for many months to get there, because you’ve never rock climbed in your life, indoors or outdoors. You need to build up muscle mass, learn techniques to efficiently traverse the walls, and practice tying knots so you know your ropes will hold you.

How will you motivate yourself in the long term to stick with your practice? How will you avoid giving up when your hands hurt and suspect you’re more rhino than squirrel?

Motivational science offers some tips to keep you persistent. Last month we looked at three powerful motivators: making progress, having autonomy, and connecting to a purpose.

Today, we’re going to talk about the role of perceived competence. It turns out that how good you think you are at an activity affects your interest and persistence.

Think Positive: How You Feel About Your Progress Affects How Much Progress You Make

You signed yourself up for four introductory classes at the rock climbing gym and got your first taste of climbing, successfully reaching the top of several routes.

Now that you’ve flexed your muscles, how do you feel about your rock climbing ability so far, and your athletic ability in general? The answer to this question may predict whether or not you’ll stick with the sport in the long term.

Researchers from two Greek universities surveyed over 800 students who had varying ranges of athletic ability in a longitudinal study. They assessed how competent the students thought they were at sports, and followed up periodically over two years to see who was actually participating in them.

The more competent a student felt in sports, the more likely they were to be playing sports 7 to 14 months later. And, the more likely they were to be interested in athletics in general.

And a study on high school students found a similar correlation between perceived competence and intrinsic motivation, effort, and persistence in sports. Other close relationships between perceived competence and persistence were found in music students and more generally in math and science students.

So how good you think you are at rock climbing makes you more likely to stick with it.

The Power of Practice to Boost Your Competence and Break the Cycle

What makes this relationship interesting is the role of practice.

Perceived competence makes you practice a sport more, and practice makes you better at that sport. This in turn boosts your perceived competence and therefore your motivation to keep playing (which makes you better, and so on).

So practice plays a bidirectional, central role in sustaining your motivation in the long term. It bolsters an underlying drive to keep coming back to the climbing gym week after week, bruise after bruise, fall after fall.

And mentally crediting practice as a root cause of your skills and achievements can help, too.

Research suggests that students who believe their skills come from innate talent (and not practice) are more likely to give up in the face of adversity. For example, if you believe, “rock climbers are good thanks to their born talent,” then you’re more likely to say, “Oh, I didn’t make it to the top of that route. I must not be a good rock climber, and I better quit before I waste my time.”

Meanwhile, students who believe that skills arise from practice, hard work, and preparation are more likely to stick with a tough problem to solve. If you hold this belief, you’ll be more likely to tell yourself, “I didn’t make it to the top of that route. Maybe if I do some yoga to make my upper body more flexible, I’ll be able to reach the farthest hold in 2 weeks.”

So don’t discount the importance of practice.

If your perceived competence is suffering (in other words, you think you suck), then see whether you can suspend that perception for long enough to squeeze in a few more practice sessions. This might build into excellence, and your motivation will be back before you know it.