Whether you’re trying to create a consistent exercise routine or follow specific nutritional guidelines. Sticking to your goals is definitely not an easy task. The question becomes why is it so hard to get motivated and then once you get motivated, why is it so hard to stay motivated and what can we do about it? Hey guys, Dustin Williams here and for the best fitness, health and nutritional advice, make sure to subscribe to my channel and hit that little notification bell so that you are notified every time I post a new video every Wednesday. We know that motivation and consistency can be tough in the health and fitness realm, but did you know that there’s an actual formula for behavior change? By the end of this video, I want to make sure that you know exactly what that formula is and how you can apply it to your specific goals.
There’s a doctor named BJ Fogg and he came up with a behavior model and he did this to better understand what drives behavior change. This specific model has three parts to it and all three parts of this have to happen simultaneously in order for behavior change to occur. His belief is that if you didn’t change the behavior, then one of these three pieces were missing from your formula. Here is his formula. It’s B equals im a p. That’s the whole formula, so let’s start to break it down. What do each one of these letters mean and how can we apply it? B stands for behavior change. This is essentially what you are wanting to try to accomplish. This is your goal. Maybe it’s working out consistently. Maybe it’s following a nutritional plan. Maybe it’s you want to start doing mobility drills three times a week. Anything specific that you are wanting to accomplish.
This is the B, this is the behavior change. This is what you are trying to accomplish. Im stands for the motivational part. A stands for the ability, your ability to complete this behavior, change your ability to accomplish what your actual goal is. And then the final one is p, which stands for prompt. This essentially means a prompt or a trigger. Something that happens to move you to accomplish this overall goal. Let’s take this formula and break it down one by one so that you can figure out how you can apply it so that you can accomplish your overall goal. In my example today, I’m going to use that your goal or your B, your behavior changes you’re trying to accomplish is that you want to start tracking your calories. You have a specific nutritional goal, and within that goal it requires you to track your overall calories and that’s the behavior change that you wanna make.
So remember that the tracking of the calories is going to be the B of the equation and behavior change, tracking calories from there. Let’s break it down to the end, which is motivation. Here’s the thing about motivation. It goes up and it comes down and that’s normal and this is the biggest reason why a lot of people fail whenever they are trying to accomplish a behavioral change or meet a goal, is that they want to put all of their focus just on the em, put all their focus on the motivation. Well, we’re not always motivated. There’s things that happen in life that come in that change our level of motivation and just because motivation is low does not mean that you can’t still be moving towards the direction of where you want to go. What we need to be able to understand is focus on that and where are we in this equation?
Is Our motivation level high or it is our motivation level lower and then that will help us to understand what we need to do with the rest of the equation based on where we are at that point in time and motivation. What about your motivation? Do you find that you are always either really, really motivated or not motivated at all? Like maybe you have a really highs and really lows or do you find that maybe it’s a little bit more in the middle, like you’re a little bit more motivated, a little bit less motivated, you find that maybe you don’t have as big swings. Are you having the big swings or the small swings? Let me know below in the comments. Now let’s talk about the a, the ability we have to be able to break down your ability to achieve your goal. So if the goal is to start tracking calories, maybe you’ve never counted calories before, maybe you’ve never used any type of a calorie counting app, you have no idea how to do this is completely new to you at this point.
Your ability to do this is a lot higher. This is hard for you. It’s definitely gonna be a little bit more intense for you because you don’t have quite as easy of an ability to accomplish this as compared to maybe you’ve tracked your calories before. Maybe you did it for years on end and you’re very familiar with the calorie counting apps and how to weigh and measure your food and you just fell out of the habit and now you’re trying to get back into the habit. So at this point, this would be really easy for you. So we have to be able to distinguish if this is something that’s really hard for us to accomplish or really easy for us to accomplish. And the last one in this example is going to be the p, the prompt or the trigger. This can be multiple things.
Again, going back to your goal being counting calories, maybe you tend to just forget to track your food as you’re going. So you set an alarm to go off on your phone three times a day. Whenever you typically eat, one goes off at breakfast, one goes off at lunch, one goes off at dinner to remind you to track what you had. That can be your trigger. That’s your prompt, your having something to remind you. Maybe you have a weekly meeting with a nutritionist or a personal trainer, so then your prompt, your, your trigger is a little bit bigger. You actually have to go somewhere. You have to meet somebody, you have to get on a call. You have to talk to someone and relay everything that you’ve eaten. So you have to make sure that you track it. This is your prompt. This is your trigger.
You know that you have a time to meet someone in appointment and this is prompting you to do your behavior change. Now, here’s where we take all three of these things and we put them together. All three of them need to be working simultaneously and they’re going to change based on a few different factors. So let’s say that your motivation, you’re starting it off most of the time, your motivation is a lot higher whenever you start trying to achieve something. So because your motivation is higher in the beginning, then maybe it’s okay that your ability to accomplish your goal, maybe it’s a lot harder for you. That’s okay because your motivation is high and maybe your trigger, you don’t need as heavy of a trigger. Maybe just an alarm going off a couple of times a day is plenty. You don’t need to meet with a nutritionist to have that accountability because your motivation is so high.
From there, then we have to look at what about whenever motivation is low, when you don’t have the same drive to accomplish the things that you want. This is where we have to start pulling back, making the ability easier and maybe making the trigger a little bit more in tune for you. So in this situation, if you start tracking and then you find that as you go, your motivation is starting to lack a little bit. You’re getting distracted by other things. Then we start to scale back ability. How can we continue to track calories but make it easier? So maybe at this point, even though I wouldn’t recommend to not scale your food and not weigh and measure things, maybe you cut that out because it’s easier. You’re just going to put in what you ate and if the amounts are off, then they’re off, but you’re still tracking the ability is a lot lower.
You haven’t quit, you haven’t given up, you’re still moving in the right direction, and then maybe when motivation is low, that’s whenever you increase the prompt or the trigger. At this point, maybe you have a, you know, somebody that you’re working with as far as a nutritionist or a personal trainer where you have a friend or a family member that you have to check in with on a regular basis to let them know what’s going on, to hold you more accountable in those situations. This is where you really start to learn how to utilize this formula because again, going back to the fact that motivation is going to go up and down, it’s all about staying the course. Even if you’re not always giving 100% because in this world, nobody ever gives 100% all the time even though we want to and what happens is motivation is high.
We’re doing more supposed to, we go through a period of motivation being low and then we quit altogether and if you can understand and recognize that motivation is low and make the ability something easier to accomplish and make the trigger something that maybe holds you a little bit more accountable and still utilizing all three, then it helps keep you in that to create a habit so that whenever motivation comes, hi, you haven’t quit, you’re still moving in that direction. You’re still trying to accomplish the overall goal that you were trying to accomplish in the first place. This is where the overall key of consistency plays a part. Understanding that you’re not going to give 100% all the time and making sure that you just don’t quit. Even if you aren’t giving that 100% which is completely okay. Continue moving in the right direction and you will get where you want to be.
It just may take a little bit more time. So here’s what I want to do for you. I want to go ahead and help out your ability right now. I’ve got a 28 day fat loss meal plan that I want to give to you guys for free. I’m going to put the link down below in the comments. You Click it, you go to the webpage, you download this free 28 day meal plan and it will kind of kickstart you and take the ability out for you. Make it a lot easier so you don’t have to worry about planning. You take out the guesswork. If the overall goal is fat loss, I want to give this to you guys for free to help you out. And if you enjoyed this video, I would really appreciate it if you would smash that like button and subscribe to my channel and I will see you guys in the next video.