January 1st arrives with familiar declarations: “This is my year!” “I’m finally going to get serious about training!” “I’m more motivated than ever!” The young fencer posts inspirational quotes on social media, creates detailed training schedules, and attacks their first practice session with infectious enthusiasm.

By February, that same fencer is making excuses about why they missed their third practice in two weeks. The inspirational posts have stopped. The detailed schedule sits abandoned in a notebook. The motivation that felt so powerful and permanent has evaporated.

This pattern repeats itself constantly in competitive athletics, and fencing is no exception. We treat motivation like fuel for a car—something we need to keep the engine running. But motivation behaves more like a sugar rush: intense, energizing, and inevitably followed by a crash that leaves you worse off than when you started.

We have all been in this situation in some area of life. For some it was sport training, for others music, new language, diet, regular gym sessions, yoga – you name it! We all had an initial motivation, as great as it possibly can be, but at the end we failed. The reason is quite simple – motivation alone is insufficient for sustained excellence. In fact, relying primarily on motivation often sabotages long-term development by creating unstable patterns of effort and commitment.

The Major Problem of Relying on Motivation

Motivation feels wonderful. It provides energy, enthusiasm, and optimism about future achievements. When we’re motivated, training feels easy, goals seem achievable, and obstacles appear manageable. The motivated fencer arrives early, stays late, and approaches each lesson with genuine excitement.

This creates a seductive cycle where we begin to believe that motivation is the key to success. We chase motivational experiences—inspiring videos, goal-setting sessions, visualization exercises, pump-up music playlists. We measure our readiness for achievement by how motivated we feel on any given day.

But motivation has a fundamental flaw: it’s external and temporary. It depends on circumstances, emotions, and external validation to sustain itself. When those supporting conditions disappear—as they inevitably do—motivation disappears with them.

Most motivation draws its power from external sources. A fencer might feel motivated after watching an inspiring competition, meeting their fencing idol in a camp, receiving praise from coaches or positive feedback about improvement, setting exciting new goals like making nationals or earning a new rating, succeeding in competition, and even getting influenced by the energy of motivated teammates.

While these experiences can provide valuable energy boosts, they create a dependency on external circumstances for sustained effort. The motivated fencer unconsciously begins waiting for the next motivational hit—the next inspiring moment, the next piece of positive feedback, the next exciting goal.

When external motivation sources become unavailable, effort levels crash. The fencer who depends on coach praise struggles when receiving constructive criticism. The athlete motivated by early success falters when improvement plateaus. The goal-driven competitor loses steam when their target seems distant or unattainable.

From Motivation to Dismissal

For most people motivation progresses through five distinct phases, that repeat themselves with astonishing predictability:

Excitement: Fresh motivation generates intense enthusiasm and effort. Training feels exciting, progress seems rapid, and goals appear easily achievable. This phase typically lasts days to weeks.

Reality: The novelty wears off. Training becomes routine rather than exciting. Progress slows or becomes less visible. The gap between current ability and ultimate goals becomes apparent. Motivation begins to wane.

Struggle: Effort becomes forced rather than natural. Training feels like a chore. Excuses for missing sessions multiply. The motivated mindset feels distant and artificial.

Withdrawal: The fencer stops fighting the declining motivation and reduces effort significantly. Training becomes sporadic. Goals are quietly abandoned or indefinitely postponed.

Recommitment: Something triggers renewed motivation—a competition, a conversation, a moment of inspiration—and the cycle restarts.

Oftentimes, fencers find themselves ashamed of their weakness of declining motivation. And then they resort to recovering “lost time”. For a short while they double down on training, attend every weekend competition, double their lessons and wake up at 6am to go to a gym. For a week or two. Sometimes it results in injury from insufficient recovery and overtraining, but almost always they are emotionally and mentally drained. And through this short spike and subsequent inability to keep going they just confirm their worst fear – they aren’t strong enough to be continuously motivated, like these successful fencers or their fencing idols.

This pattern creates inconsistent training, unreliable effort, and emotional exhaustion from constantly fighting internal resistance. The fencer learns to depend on feeling motivated rather than developing the capacity to train regardless of emotional state. To understand this pattern in fencing, examine your own experience in other areas of your life and be honest with yourself – does this sound familiar?

Why Goals Aren’t Enough

Goal-setting is often presented as the solution to motivation problems. “Set clear, specific goals and your motivation will sustain itself!” But goals carry their own limitations that make them insufficient for long-term development.

Goals can be achieved or missed. What happens to motivation after reaching a major goal? Many athletes experience post-achievement depression when the driving force behind their efforts disappears. Conversely, missing important goals can devastate motivation for extended periods. Talk to most of the world-level fencers and they will tell you their motivation dropped after reaching their goal. It’s hard to constantly think about “what’s next?” Yet, many moved on despite this.

Goals can become irrelevant. Injuries, life changes, or shifting priorities can make goals meaningless. The fencer whose college recruitment goals become unrealistic due to academic struggles must find new sources of drive or risk complete disengagement.

Goals create tunnel vision. Intense focus on specific outcomes can blind fencers to other valuable aspects of their development. The fencer obsessed with earning a particular rating might miss opportunities to improve fundamental skills and more often than not lose the pure joy of fencing and training.

Goals generate pressure. The closer a goal becomes, the more anxiety it often creates. This pressure can actually harm performance and make training feel stressful rather than enjoyable.

The fitness industry perfectly illustrates these goal limitations. Gym memberships spike in January as motivated individuals commit to transformation. By March, most new members have returned to previous habits, often feeling worse about themselves than before they started.

This same pattern affects fencing repeatedly. The beginning of each season brings renewed commitment. Summer training programs start with enthusiastic participation. Competition seasons launch with ambitious goals and training schedules.

But motivation-dependent athletes consistently fail to sustain these efforts once the initial enthusiasm fades. They interpret this as personal weakness rather than recognizing motivation’s inherent limitations as a driving force.

What Actually Works

Sustainable excellence in fencing—or any demanding life pursuit, for that matter—requires moving beyond motivation to more reliable internal drivers:

Systems over goals. Instead of depending on emotional connection to distant outcomes, successful fencers develop systematic approaches to training, preparation, and improvement. They create routines that don’t depend on feeling motivated to execute.

Identity over inspiration. Rather than trying to feel like training, accomplished athletes develop identities that include consistent effort. “I am going to attend every conditioning training” becomes more powerful than “I want to become more explosive.”

Process over passion. While passion can provide energy, focusing on the daily process of improvement creates sustainable momentum. The fencer who finds satisfaction in training itself rather than just competitive results develops more stable motivation patterns.

Discipline over drive. The ability to act regardless of emotional state proves more valuable than intense but inconsistent motivation.

Rather than trying to maintain constant motivation, successful fencers develop dedication that grows stronger with challenges. Their satisfaction comes from effort itself, from feeling their gradual improvement, from connections with their teammates, from how they start to perceive their character development

I can share one example from my own experience. I’ve maintained this blog for nearly 13 years, posting roughly weekly despite it often being grueling work. I’m certain that if I relied only on motivation, I would have quit years ago. The only reason it continues is discipline – the decision that this is simply what I do, regardless of how I feel.

This isn’t to say motivation has no value. Of course motivation is important. It provides energy for starting new initiatives – first you need to be motivated to go to gym, and only then you can develop your discipline. Motivation provides this short term boost to make the first step. It also helps athletes to get excited about training, goals, and achievements. 

The key is using motivation as a tool rather than depending on it as a foundation. Motivation can supplement discipline, but it cannot replace it.

It’s often hard to distinguish between motivation and self-discipline, the boundaries often are blurred. But those fencers who succeed build their sustainable success on their self-discipline and not on blunt reliance on motivation. They develop the capacity to train, compete, and improve regardless of their emotional state on any given day, without being dependent on feeling constantly inspired or excited. And the funny thing is? They experience genuine motivation because they’re not desperately depending on it for basic function.

Motivation gets you started. Discipline gets you going.

Photo by Markus Winkler under free license