A key thing for motivation is finding a way to see benefits right away.
Now that we've got people volunteering on GiveGetWin, I've become super sensitive to it. Sometimes we all put in a bit of work to get a new provider/deal up, and it's really exciting -- but for whatever reason, launching it gets pushed back a while.
I see that that sets people's morale and happiness back quite a bit.
It's like, "oh, I did all that work, and nothing came of it" -- whereas that's not really the case, because usually the same work gets used a couple weeks later when we do get underway, but the mind doesn't work like that.
I wasn't sensitive enough to this before, even though it impacts me too. When I see benefits right away, I'm more likely to stay engaged and on-track. When they're very delayed, motivation tends to be lower. This, even if you're aware of the phenomenon and generally try to be far-sighted.
What's the answer? Well, I think Mark Ripptoe figured it out in his excellent book on weight-training "Starting Strength." Ripptoe said, paraphrasing,
"Most people will come to the gym three times in their first week. Then they'll take a week off. Then they'll come one more time, and they won't come again after that."
That's the natural progression he saw -- four visits, no more.
So his goal became to show them significant tangible progress in their first four sessions.
Getting from a sedentary lifestyle into an athletic one might take people six months to a year, but no one wants to wait that long. It's brutal on the motivation.
So Ripptoe's plan was amazingly simple, yet effective: Focus on five core lifts that influence strength throughout the body, assess your maximum ability in the first session on those lifts, and train in a way that you see your maximum lift rise every time -- right away, from the second session on. He wants to get people hooked on the gains that come seeing progress happen.
Any initiatives that are small and compound with time tend to show low results at first -- but you can get get a lot more motivation by seeing some benefit right away. Putting 2.5kg (5 pounds) maximum on a compound lift doesn't make much difference for your overall strength, but it does wonders for your psychology.
"It's working!" You can get addicted to seeing those little incremental changes, if you can make them something you're explicitly paying attention to and tracking. And if you keep seeing your maximum lifts go up, you get stronger and put on muscle mass.
Find a way to see the benefit right away, especially if it's a long-term initiative.