Motivation can be described quite simply as the desire to do things or to get things done. It’s the difference between getting up in the early hours to hit the swimming pool on a regular basis or choosing to laze around the house plugged in to a games console or TV. Motivation is the crucial factor in attaining the goals you really want and there is much evidence to suggest that you have considerable influence over your own levels of motivation and self-control.
When you think about your own motivation have you ever considered how much it is affected by factors that can be labeled as external and internal? External factors are things like praise from your line manager or colleagues, securing a deal, hitting your monthly targets, having to meet your mortgage and bills by the end of the month or getting a raise.
Internal factors are things like your own values system, your own personal set of beliefs, your “internal dialog”; that is to say the way that you talk to yourself inside your own head.
In our pressurized world, external factors are becoming less and less dependable as a source of motivational reward. The culture of your company or organization may be driven to focus on the “glass half empty” model in which no achievement is ever good enough. You may have a manager that lacks an appropriate amount of emotional intelligence or ability and only has one model of motivation for you…threat, fear and lack.
It still amazes the number of people promoted into positions of managing and motivating teams that show extremely poor levels of understanding about how people motivate. That’s the danger if you are more reliant on external forces to support and enhance your levels of motivation. You give up responsibility for a significant part of your internal world to other people and become increasingly dependent on them for your sense of success and productivity.
In behavioural terms, external rewards have the effect of narrowing our focus. Hence reward driven behaviour tends to be more effective when tasks are straightforward and require a logical approach governed by simple rules…surely that’s not got a lot to do with relationship building does it? As far as tasks involving even moderate levels of cognitive input, external rewards as a source of motivation have been clearly demonstrated to have the entirely opposite effect and lead to far less creativity and productivity.
This “external locus” of reliance is pretty much a default setting for most of us. It’s a mindset that we seem to absorb from our society, from our education systems and from families but it’s a model of behavioural influence that is fraught with pitfalls and difficulties once rewards exceed a threshold of attainability. Once goals or targets are missed, the associated rewards are not secured and the feedback system begins to falter.
For the courageous, there is another way, but it involves a fair amount of personal work and self-development. It can be a difficult task to shift your external locus of motivation to an internal framework but the benefits can be enormous.
According to Dan Pink in his wonderful TED lecture on the Surprising Science of Motivation
Pink talks about these internal mechanisms centering around three key elements:
Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.
Your internalized system is far less vulnerable to external disappointments and negative impact. This has the benefit that your motivation remains more consistently intact so that your levels of effectiveness are more likely to be sustained or enhanced. You stand a much greater chance of being successful in accomplishing a complex task such as building a sound business relationship if you are motivated by the belief that this is a healthy way to conduct business rather than looking to score another sale.
One important characteristic of people who maintain a healthy internalized system is that they dream big and in detail. Take time to “daydream” about some aspect of your life that you want to achieve or improve and when doing this make sure you notice the detail of your daydream.
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