Who Cares About Motivation?
Increase your motivation for any task by linking it to what you really care about.
What you care about is the motive behind every action you take. When you care about something, you do what is necessary to acquire, maintain or protect it.
To increase motivation in the classroom or in the workplace, get students and workers to care more about their work instead of telling them to try harder. They won’t try harder until they care more.
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You are aware of many of the things you care about. To take care of your health, you make conscious decisions every day to look after it. You commit to daily exercise, a balanced died, and regular check-ups. |
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If someone were to ask you why you jog every day or have a tutor, you would say you do it because you care about your health or your education.
These are forms of intrinsic or personal motivation because feeling healthy and learning are things you enjoy. The activity itself is its own reward.
Rewards such as prizes or money are forms of extrinsic motivators. They lie outside of you, but they can still motivate you to improve your performance when you find your work boring or unpleasant. For many college students, the reward for a boring summer job is the education it buys them.
There are other things are important to you but often you are unaware of them. Feeling superior to others, being liked, or needing to have your way all the time are examples.
Because you are often unaware of just how important these values are to you, they lie in the background and direct your life without your permission. They are the reasons why you sometimes can’t say what the motive was behind some of your actions.
But at the core of these unseen motives lie powerful conversations you have with yourself. They are powerful because they generate emotions and moods that control what you can and cannot do.
Sometimes you can trace a lack of motivation back to these conversations. They are the ones that tell you that you can't learn something or that the results of your effort will not be worth much.
These conversations are the beliefs or interpretations you invent to make sense of what is going on in your life. They tell you how to react to events. When they are reasonable and based on facts, they guide you toward successful outcomes.
But when they are unreasonable and lack supporting evidence, they blind you to what else is going on, limit your opportunities, lock you into monotonous routines, and often cause untold sadness and hardship.
How about you? What are the silent conversations that run your life without your permission? What is so important in your life that it drives you to do or say things you later regret? Is it always having to be first, or to” win” every discussion, or to show others that you are in charge?
Is it needing to have everyone agree with you?
Effective Communication Coaching helps you identify what you care about and how to motivate yourself to take care of it.
