Effort-Based vs Identity-Based Motivation: Unlocking The Key to Personal Growth
- Eric Beuning
- 16 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Motivation is a challenge for anyone embracing personal growth, as it requires a level of consistency fueled in part by a deeper sense of personal understanding. The last two and a half years after losing my parents and then some have been a healing journey for me. Suffering one loss after another, recalibrating and rebuilding, and living every moment of my life walking toward healthy personal integration.
Part of this process has involved running and weightlifting. Two things that do not come easily when you’re pushing fifty. Yet things that have become a transformative part of this amazing healing journey I’ve nearly completed.
Right now, I’m literally training like Rocky Balboa in Russia, running and lifting in the Minnesota winter, to prepare myself for some massive physical challenges later this summer and fall. Climbing Sleeping Bear Dunes, Hiking Angels Landing, and ascending Yosemite Half Dome are not things you can just get off the couch and do.
I know I have to train hard for them in mind, body, and spirit. Along the way, I've done some deep dives not just within myself but also into the process and science of motivation.
The Value of Consistency
When it comes to the motivation to truly change and embrace personal growth, consistency is key. Without it, you can't come to the threshold where “Effort-Based Motivation” subtly transforms into “Identity-Based Motivation."
Because what matters isn’t how fast you go, how far you go, or how impressive your workout looks from the outside. It’s that you keep showing up.
I know the idea sounds almost insultingly simple. Especially since the modern world is obsessed with optimization, hacks, and miracle programs. Yet one of the ways the power of consistency shows up most is in running.
Getting Your Legs Back
Getting your legs back takes far longer than your ego wants to admit. Far longer than you think it should, and yet the process is absolutely worth it.
When I first started rebuilding my cardiovascular conditioning, I carried the naïve belief that my body would just “remember.” Muscle memory, right? I had run before. I had trained before.
Surely my system would snap back into place after a few weeks of effort. Instead, what I rediscovered was humbling. Fitness doesn’t return as a single, unified upgrade. It happens in stages, uneven and unpredictable.
Muscles adapt at one rate, connective tissues at another, cardiovascular capacity on its own quiet schedule. Balance, coordination, and technique tend to lag behind. Then there are the shins. Shin pain is epic in places, as the muscles and connective tissues at the front of your lower legs have their own personal vendetta against every comeback story.
Just when your lungs start cooperating, and your legs begin to feel capable, your lower legs flare up like they’re protesting your optimism.
This cycle of progress, setback, and adjustment is where most people quietly fall back. Not because they lack discipline or desire, but because the experience feels so inconsistent. Improvement isn’t linear. Effort doesn’t always produce immediate reward. The feedback loop we crave, work hard, feel amazing, rarely cooperates during a rebuild.
What Is Effort Based Motivation?
In the beginning, most of us operate from what psychologists might call effort-based motivation. There is a goal, a target, a version of yourself you’d like to reclaim or construct. Remember my goals earlier: Angel’s Landing, Half Dome, Sleeping Bear Dunes.
Maybe you want to run a certain distance, feel stronger climbing stairs, or simply make peace with your body again. Effort-based motivation is natural and useful. It gets you moving and provides direction. “I’m doing this to achieve X” is a perfectly reasonable starting place.
The problem is that effort-based motivation is fragile because it depends heavily on emotional agreement. When you feel good, effort feels justified. When you feel bad, effort suddenly feels negotiable. Unfortunately, rebuilding fitness is full of feel-bad days. There are days when my legs feel like sandbags, my lungs file a formal complaint, and the couch has its own gravitational pull.
Yet I’ve also learned that if you stay consistent long enough, and that amount of time is usually longer than anyone wants to hear, something interesting begins to happen. It starts being less about the goal experience you set, and more about who you’re becoming. This is where the transition to identity-based motivation comes in.
What Is Identity-Based Motivation?
I recently had this moment, on the ass end of a three-mile run in the frigid morning. Panting like a dog in heat, sweating like the pig who knows he’s dinner, the copper taste of blood in the back of my mouth, pushing through, even though I wanted to fall to my hands and knees.
And I thought, “Why the Hell am I putting myself through all this?”
That thought wasn’t just about the run, it wasn’t just about all the weightroom sessions, it wasn’t just about metabolizing grief, or staying sober for years, or leveling up my mental health, or jamming out the final edits on my upcoming novel.
What I was really asking myself was “Why am I embracing this CONSTANT growth mindset, when no one else cares?”
The answer rose up effortlessly within me. “Because I want to be who I’m becoming.”
It didn’t matter if the woman I’m dating cheered me on, or if my daughter is proud, or if my parents’ souls were watching on from heaven. What mattered was that deep down in my spiritual bone marrow, I recognized that the experience of the challenge only matters to me, and the man I’m becoming.
That I had fallen in love with the process in a way that allowed me to fall in love with myself on a whole new level.
This is the threshold that we all face when we go from “Doing Something” to “Becoming Something” more than what we were before. Where it stops being about what you’re doing in a measured way, and you fall in love with the process of the next-level person you’re becoming.
You see, effort-based motivation revolves around obligation or outcomes. Sometimes it’s a matter of working out because you need to burn off the toxic mental energy of a bad day. You come up with reasons to do it like:
Because I need to.
Because I said I would.
Because I have goals.
These are all effort-based responses. Eventually, however, the answer shifts. It becomes quieter, simpler, and far more stable, and moves into the realm of identity-based motivation that says:
"Because I want the new me."
That subtle, yet profound change of identity-based motivation alters everything, and not in a magical, easy way.
The workouts don’t suddenly become easy.
Discomfort doesn’t vanish.
Your shin muscles do not send apology letters.
What changes is your relationship to effort itself. You are no longer exercising solely to reach an outcome. You’re exercising because the behavior has become tied to who you understand yourself to be.
You start to internalize a different narrative that’s more than just I am someone who trains, or I’m someone who shows up. There’s no app, gadget, or perfectly engineered program that will give you a shortcut to this.
The Neurology of Change
The shift from effort-based motivation to identity-based motivation isn’t just psychological; it’s also neurological. When we operate from effort-based motivation, the brain relies heavily on goal-directed circuits in the prefrontal cortex and striatum, which calculate expected rewards and reinforce behaviors through external validation.
This system is sensitive to fluctuating emotions: if a task feels unpleasant or the anticipated reward seems distant, motivation drops. Over time, repeated effort and consistent practice begin to wire these circuits more deeply, creating the conditions for a transition toward identity-based motivation.
Identity-based motivation engages a broader network, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which encodes self-referential values, and the hippocampus, which integrates experience over time to update one’s internal narrative.
Here, behavior becomes less about external outcomes and more about reinforcing an enduring sense of self. Repeated practice, even when uncomfortable, gradually reshapes neural pathways, allowing actions like running, lifting, or committing to growth-oriented habits to become extensions of identity rather than obligations.
Role of the Anterior Mid-Cingulate Cortex in Motivation
The anterior mid-cingulate cortex (aMCC) plays a critical role in monitoring effort, detecting conflict, and sustaining persistence in challenging tasks. During effort-based motivation, the aMCC signals the “cost” of continued action and weighs it against expected rewards. As motivation shifts toward identity-based processes, the aMCC becomes less reactive to temporary discomfort and more aligned with the value of long-term self-consistency.
Essentially, it helps translate repeated effort into the internalized drive to act according to one’s identity, reinforcing behaviors even in the absence of external reinforcement.
A Natural Change of Focus
Identity shifts are built through accumulated experience. You shut down the distractions, and all the little dopamine hits they give you. Not because you’re forcing yourself out of something, but because those distractions, nights out, partying, playing games on your phone, don’t add to the better person you’re embracing.
Every run you almost skipped but didn’t, every walk you took when motivation was absent, every small, unremarkable decision to continue becomes proof. Your brain updates its self-concept through experience, not intention.
Consistency is how you manufacture that proof. Over time, what other people think about your training fades into background noise. Comparisons lose their grip. None of it carries the same weight as the quiet realization that you can trust yourself.
Eventually, you arrive at a place where effort is no longer something you must constantly justify. It is simply an expression of identity, and it carries a powerful, bone-deep understanding that you can transform yourself into almost anything, so long as I keep showing up.