Motivation





I'm often told that I am a highly motivated person, or 
that motivation drives me. I've never particularly liked that term as I strongly believe that motivation is just one aspect of why I do things and how I achieve what I set out to do. 
For me the key is to have a number of things in place in order to achieve what you want to. 

1) Aspirations or goals - we all need something to aspire to or to reach for. 

2) Ability - how easy is it for us to reach? How difficult? 

3) Action - what behaviours will we put in place? 

According to Wikipedi:

 Motivation is the experience of desire or aversion (you want something, or want to avoid or escape something). As such, motivation has both an objective aspect (a goal or thing you aspire to) and an internal or subjective aspect (it is you that wants the thing or wants it to go away).

The reason that we shouldn't rely on motivation soley to get us to achieve things is I believe for a number of reasons;

1) Motivation is fickle. It is unreliable. Most people think that motivation is the drive to make change. It quite simply is not. Motivation is like a party friend - great for a night out but not so reliable. 

2) Motivation is complex. Some people talk about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (certainly in schools we do). However, motivation is simply more than that. It is tied up in 3 other things which we forget to include when we are planning our goals - the person (you), the context and the action that you choose (either negative or positive).

3) Motivation has spikes - great for those quick one off things you need to achieve or want to achieve. When it spikes you can do those hard behaviours but these are usually a one off (things such as quitting your job). Motivation spikes mean there is a strong emotion which make sure that we succeed. But it doesn't hang around for long.

4) Motivation fluctuates. Motivation fluctuates day by day, minute by minute, hour by hour. There is only a small amount of motivation that is enduring (or in other words an aspiration). 

5) Motivating towards an abstraction doesn't provide any long lasting results. Therefore motivation is not something that we can rely on to make long term changes. 

However, we can outsmart motivation - but we need to be very specific and clear about how we do this. We need to trick our motivation and we need to set some behaviours in place to do this. 

This is where a valuable coach can support you - help you start to build some habits around how to outsmart motivation and actually change the behaviours so that you can achieve all that you want to. 

Have a think about how you achieve or don't achieve you goals.... are you relying only on motivation? 

Until next week. 


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