One mistake we often make about motivation is to think that it is about knowledge. For example, in working with children and young people who struggled to keep up with their treatment regimes for diabetes, parents would often ask us if we could show them the adult ward with adults with long term complications of not managing diabetes, such as amputations. The parents had the best of intentions in thinking that if the young people only knew about the consequences in a real life way, they would better manage their diabetes. Unfortunately this failed to take into account that children and young people don’t identify with adults in this way. They are in a period in their lives where they think they are invincible and that adults are very old and nothing like this will happen to them. The parents were trying to increase the children’s knowledge rather than their motivation and so would be unsuccessful. 

Another example is one that is common to most of us. If we think about knowledge we have about healthy eating, drinking enough water, exercising enough, limiting caffeine/sugar/alcohol; we realise that having this knowledge isn’t enough to make all of us do things about this all of the time. There is something missing and the missing thing is often motivation.