tl;dr: Strong aversions don't always originate from strong feelings (see Ugh fields). It's useful to measure the strength of an aversion by how effectively it averts your thoughts/behavior instead of how saliently you can feel it, or even remember feeling it. If there's a low cost behaviour that you somehow always "end up not doing", there's evidence for a mechanism steering you away from it. Try to find it, and defy it.

Story

Right after writing Break your habits: be more empirical, someone asked me to a live music show, and I declined, with some explanation about being busy. This felt a little forced, and I realized: I always decline live music shows. This counts as a habit. The interesting thing was that I declined them for many different, unrelated reasons. This was evidence for something more systemic, because it would be a coincidence if random, unrelated reasons always came up to prevent me from attending live music.

So I asked myself if I really disliked live music. Emotions returned: "Not really. It's not awesome, but it's not terrible." Now, there was a time when I would have stopped thinking there. My time is valuable, and mediocrity is enough to stop me from doing anything, right?

But wait... is it? Is it enough to always stop me? If it was only mediocre, and not terrible, than surely on one of the many occasions I could have seen live music, there would have been sufficient justification to go... a particularly good composer, a particularly interesting group of people go with, a particular need to get out and do something different... but no, somehow I always didn't go.

And that's when I realized I probably had an aversion to live music: some brain mechanism that consistently and effectively averted me from seeing it, and in this case, not something I could feel. In particular, it wasn't accompanied by any sense of "Ugh". So since I couldn't feel the aversion, I took an outside view to ask what could have caused it, if it indeed exists...

Related To:  Incremental Progress and the Valley, Silver Chairs, Paternalism, and Akrasia, How a pathological procrastinator can lose weight

Akrasia can strike anywhere, but one place it doesn't seem to strike too often or too severely, assuming you are employed, is in the work place.  You may not want to do something, and it might take considerable willpower to perform a task, but unless you want to get fired you can't always play Solitaire.  The reason is clear to most working folks:  you have to do your job to keep it, and not keeping your job is often worse than performing an undesirable task, so you suck it up and find the willpower to make it through the day.  So one question we might ask is, how can we take this motivational method and put it to our own use?

First, let's look at the mechanics of the method.  You have to perform a task and some exterior entity will pay you unless you fail utterly to perform the task.  Notice that this is quite different from working for prizes, where you receive pay in exchange for performing a particular task.  Financially they may appear the same, but from the inside of the human mind they are quite different.  In the former case you are motivated by a potential loss, whereas in the later you are motivated by a potential gain.  Since losses carry more weight than gains, in general the former model will provide more motivation than the latter, keeping in mind that loss aversion is a statistical property of human thought and there may be exceptions.