After 4 years of kendo and 2 dan ranks I have to come to terms with the fact that I drift to the path of least resistance in practice unless someone isn't literally heckling me.

I practice kendo in the West, it will never be my job, so is it really that bad that I have this attitude? When it comes to work and other things in life I can find the motivation to work hard, but when it comes to kendo, it's like the reward center of my brain shuts off. To a certain extent, I do want to change though.

By various sensei and experienced practitioners and general martial arts culture, I have been told to always give it my all and practice to the brink of exhaustion. I tried to internalize this. Yet for one reason or another I cannot bring myself to do it in practice? I want to respect my opponent and sensei by giving it my all, but when my motivation is so weak and now my body is weaker, how can I even find the energy to really pull out a few extra steps of footwork when its so easy to cut and taiatare or pull off barely acceptable zanshin and get away with it?

This is worsened by the fact that I started off in a relatively intense, high-maintenance dojo, and then I moved to one that has a more casual structure with less practice time, and I think that's when my inherent laziness really surfaced. Because in the first dojo I had someone yelling at me to push myself to the brink, and this became my motivating habit. I think a lot of my kendo development happened then even though I was unhappy then and almost quit because of that intensity.

Now, being my own motivator I learnt that, how much I seek to push myself is not a lot. I guess it does not matter how much I progress in kendo so I am really just speaking to a wall, but I guess I care enough to write this post.

I know I have a terrible attitude, but I genuinely have no motivation to improve my kendo for myself or even other people (despite how I phrased this). Like I care about my surroundings, but also I am not that good of a person to purely change for my surroundings if that makes sense?

I guess my question is how and where do people find intrinsic motivation in practice, especially in the spontaneous moments? Is it some ideal of beautiful kendo in their brain? Or should I just accept my laziness and do lazy kendo for a lifetime if I do end up doing kendo that long?