Let’s take a look at your New Year’s resolution. Are you still doing it?

If you are, good on you!

If not, that’s totally understandable. Your basis for doing so may have been faulty, or perhaps you just have trouble keeping yourself motivated.

Motivation can be a fickle thing, which is why people generally recommend doing stuff even though you don’t feel like it. Maybe you have to do it for work. Maybe you have a goal to do it and have committed to reach it. Maybe someone’s threatening you with the back end of a very distressed skunk.

In any instance, none of that is very reliable. Circumstances change. So do your motives. With that in mind, how do you motivate yourself to do stuff?

The simple answer is, “You don’t. Just do it anyway.” But that’s not what this article is about.

This article is about how motivating yourself begins with knowing yourself.

Gaining Self-Knowledge

If you don’t know yourself, you’re not in a very good position to be motivating yourself. Therefore, you need to get to know yourself. How do you do that?

Some people take themselves out on dates. Others meditate. Still others talk to themselves as frankly as they would talk to a trusted friend. And yet others see psychiatrists. Any of these can help, but the point is it has to be deliberate.

One way is to inventory yourself.

To start a personal inventory, take a look at a bunch of your life events. Include a solid mix of positive and negative experiences that showcase a wide range of emotions. Don’t worry about every last detail of your life, but try to be as complete as possible. If you’re not thorough, you’ll leave something out, and that something will probably have key information you’re too embarrassed to face. So be thorough.

Once you have a solid list of life experiences, go through each of them one by one and assess the following:

• What were my feelings, thoughts, and beliefs at the time of the event?
• How did I respond to the event?
• How did my response affect others? How did it affect myself?
• What qualities did I show in my response, feelings, beliefs, and so on?

Be brutally honest. Once you get through it, you’ll have a decent idea of what tends to drive you. It may be fear. It may be honor. It may be a yearning desire to own all the cupcakes in the entire world. It’s probably a good mix of things.

If you are completely honest about it, there’s a good chance you won’t like a lot of what you see. It’s important for you to face all that, though. Otherwise, it will fester and drive you mad.

Anyway, once you have a basic idea of what drives you, it’s time to put it into a framework.

Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development

Fortunately, a guy named Lawrence Kohlberg already did this for us. Building on Piaget’s ideas about cognitive development, Kohlberg designated three stages of moral development, each of which has a couple steps within. From the lowest to the highest, they are as follows:

• Pre-conventional: Consisting of fear of punishment or anticipation of reward.
• Conventional: Consisting of conformity with social expectations and duty to uphold the law
• Post-conventional: Consisting of respect for others and upholding abstract universal principles

It’s worth noting that these are based on the cognitive development of children. To adapt them to our purposes, let’s rename each stage as follows:

• Fear
• Reward
• Compliance
• Duty
• Kindness
• Inherent rightness

The last one is seen as the highest since it’s based on universal ethical principles. You do what’s right simply because it is right. In like manner, the first one is the lowest because fear is a terrible thing to be motivated by, and if you’re driven by fear, you have little control over yourself.

Looking at this framework, you can start to see where your own motives may truly lie. It makes it simple to start making a plan to motivate yourself in your daily life.

Applying the Framework

When applying this framework to your motives, it’s again important to be completely honest. You may not like the results, but you’ve got to work with yourself from wherever you are at the moment.

Therefore, if you act out of fear of certain consequences, you’d have a pre-conventional level of morality. As a result, the plans you make to motivate yourself would be most effective if they reflect that. If you try motivating yourself with something higher, it’s not going to work that well.

On a more optimistic note, if your responses to various situations are driven more by adherence to universal principles of goodness, then trying to motivate yourself with fear or rewards isn’t going to work so well. Try to frame your goal as something that is inherently right. Making a list of reasons why it’s such a great thing could help with that. Whenever you get discouraged, look at your list and see if you don’t find some inspiration.

As you apply your current level of moral motivation to your commitments and resolutions, you’ll find you’re much better at getting yourself to do what you need to.

Hopefully your plan doesn’t involve distressed skunks.

Thoughts? Kudos? Insults? Let me know in the comments! Also, you can support further content on Patreon. All proceeds go toward meditation programs for distressed skunks. Really.