Motivation coaching: does action really come before motivation?

If you've spent any time around coaching or self-help content, you've heard the line: don't wait to feel motivated, just start, motivation will follow the action. It's repeated so often it's treated as settled. I think it's half right, and the half that's missing is the half that actually matters in a coaching room.

In some ways, "just take action" is one of the least useful thing a coach can say to a client. Now, don't get me wrong, there are situations where that is the case but I'm also aware that "forcing yourself to take action" can set people up to force their way through the wrong things for the wrong reasons, and call it discipline. 

Where the mantra is right

The mechanism behind "action first, motivation second" is real. Motivation is often assumed to come before action: feel motivated, then act. In practice, the relationship frequently runs the other way. The first five minutes of a task people were dreading are usually the hardest part, and motivation tends to build once something is already underway, not before it starts.

In fact, re-engaging in meaningful activity, rather than waiting to feel able to, was found to produce improvements in mood and functioning on its own, without requiring the motivation to come first (Jacobson et al., 1996). Waiting to feel ready is, for many people, waiting for a feeling that only shows up once they have already begun. So far, the mantra holds.

Where the mantra breaks down

However, there are limits to this mantra. In my opinion we've also got to ask what the motivation is for.

Self-determination theory distinguishes between autonomous motivation, doing something because it genuinely matters to you, and controlled motivation, doing something out of pressure, obligation, or guilt (Ryan & Deci, 2000). "Just take action" treats these as interchangeable. They aren't. 

A longitudinal study following young adults over eight months found that pursuing goals for controlled reasons made people significantly more likely to experience what researchers call an action crisis, a prolonged state of feeling torn between continuing and giving up, and that these crises were linked to measurable increases in stress hormones and depressive symptoms over time (Holding et al., 2021).

If you just keep forcing yourself: it doesn't hold. Forcing action on a goal that isn't genuinely yours doesn't reliably generate motivation the way the mantra promises. It tends to generate exactly the collapse and the wellbeing cost people are trying to outrun by forcing themselves in the first place.

The mantra works when the underlying goal is autonomously held. It quietly fails, and can do real damage, when it isn't, because it tells people the fix for feeling nothing is to push harder, when the actual problem is that the goal was never theirs.

After years of watching this play out, I don't tell clients to just start and trust the feeling will catch up. I ask first whose goal this actually is and that can be quite a tricky one to figure out. If the answer is genuinely theirs, then yes, structure and small action will do more than waiting for a mood ever will. If the answer is that they've inherited the goal, feel obligated to it, or are chasing it to avoid guilt, then more forced action isn't the fix.

What I see in coaching

What I see having the best results is helping people figure out what is something they intrinsically want to do, this can be very hard and can sometimes take many sessions. Once we start to get clear on what is really important to you, then we  build the small, repeatable structures that don't depend on mood. While it differs between individuals, in my experience, structure built on a goal a client can genuinely stand behind tends to hold.

The aim isn't to override how you feel, and it isn't to blindly trust that action will fix everything either. It's to ask a sharper question than the mantra asks: not just "will I take action," but "is this action in service of something that's actually mine." Get that right, and structure does the rest without needing daily enthusiasm to function. Get it wrong, and no amount of forcing yourself will hold for long.

If this pattern feels familiar, motivation coaching might be a good step. 

References

Holding, A. C., Moore, E., Moore, A., Verner-Filion, J., Ouellet-Morin, I., & Koestner, R. (2021). When goal pursuit gets hairy: A longitudinal goal study examining the role of controlled motivation and action crises in predicting changes in hair cortisol, perceived stress, health, and depression symptoms. Clinical Psychological Science, 9(6), 1214–1221.

Jacobson, N. S., Dobson, K. S., Truax, P. A., Addis, M. E., Koerner, K., Gollan, J. K., Gortner, E., & Prince, S. E. (1996). A component analysis of cognitive-behavioral treatment for depression. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(2), 295–304.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.