What might actually motivate you

Motivation strategies are widely assumed to be roughly interchangeable. They aren’t. The strategies that work for a particular client depend on their personality, their history, their shame profile, and their relationship to autonomy. A client who’s been micromanaged their whole life will reject a contract-and-track approach that another client would respond to. A client carrying high secret shame about their problem will rate “tell people in your life” at zero, while another client will rate it as the single most useful lever they have.

This worksheet runs the diagnostic explicitly. Ten common motivation strategies, rated by the client on how likely each is to work for them. The high scores tell you where to start the activation work. The low scores tell you something else, which is often more clinically informative.

A “tell people” rated 1 is reporting shame about the problem the client hasn’t named. A “reward yourself” rated 1 is reporting either anhedonia or a self-punishing belief structure that says they shouldn’t be rewarded. A “schedule a fixed time” rated 1 is reporting either chaotic life circumstances or a strong autonomy reaction to externally imposed structure. A “remember a time you solved a similar problem” rated 1 is reporting either no such time or a recall block worth following up on.

Use it with clients who agree with the plan in session and then don’t follow through. The next-session conversation runs from their own ratings rather than your guesses about what should motivate them.

The clinical move at submission review. Look at the top three rated strategies. Build the next phase of the work around those, not around what you would have guessed. Look at the bottom three. Each one is a clinical question worth raising in session. Why was “be kind to yourself about setbacks” rated 2? Often the answer reveals more about the formulation than the symptom log did.

A pattern to catch: clients who rate everything at 5 or 6. That’s not “all strategies are equally appealing.” That’s usually low engagement with the worksheet itself, or low self-knowledge about what works for them. The follow-up in session is to walk through each strategy concretely and have them rate it again with a specific recent example in mind.

In my-cbt, the worksheet is one of the bundled system templates. Assign it from the case file with a personal message that frames the worksheet as diagnosis rather than prescription. Submissions save with the rating data, and the next session opens by reading the ratings together.