There’s a picture of “rising” that does a lot of damage: the dramatic comeback, the total transformation, the highlight reel. Real rising is quieter than that. It’s getting up when you didn’t want to, answering a text you’ve avoided, choosing water, going outside for five minutes, saying “I need help.”

Day four of World Resiliency Week 2026 is Rise, the turn in the pulse where noticing and feeling become doing. If you have ever wondered how to get motivated when you simply don’t feel like it, today is about that, and the answer is smaller than you would think.

Rise is a choice, and you can make it small

Rise is not about fixing everything at once. It is about one choice in the direction you want to go. You don’t have to feel motivated or strong to make it. You just have to make it small enough to actually do.

How to get motivated, in one small step

There is solid ground under this. The behaviour scientist BJ Fogg and the writer James Clear have both shown how tiny, repeated actions, far from being too small to matter, are what build lasting change over time. A one percent improvement looks like nothing on the day and like a great deal over months. A small step forward is not a consolation prize. It is the mechanism.

So the Rise tool is deliberately tiny: pick the smallest move that takes you a step towards the version of you that is rested, grounded and connected, and do only that.

Action can come before the motivation

A lot of us wait to feel ready before we act. It often works the other way around. In the treatment of low mood, an approach called behavioural activation rests on a simple finding: doing a small, meaningful action can lift how you feel, rather than waiting to feel better before you do anything. The action comes first, and the motivation tends to follow.

That is good news on a flat day. So if you are asking how to get motivated, the honest answer is that you usually don’t, not first. You do the one small thing, and the motivation tends to arrive after.

You already have a say

Underneath Rise is the idea of agency, the sense that what you do makes a difference. The psychologist Albert Bandura spent a career showing that this belief, what he called self-efficacy, grows from small successes. Every time you do the thing you said you would, even a tiny thing, you build a little more evidence that you can shape what happens next.

One small step today

Today’s challenge is the Rise Action. Do one small thing today that is a step towards the version of you that is grounded, rested and connected. Then share it, even if it feels tiny, especially if it feels tiny. Try: “Today I rose by ___. Small moves count.” Post it with #Rise and #WorldResiliencyWeek.

More tools, and the rest of the week, are at World Resiliency Day:
https://worldresiliencyday.com.au/

Tomorrow is the last day, where we look back at the week and at what keeps the pulse going after it ends.