Preface: It’s difficult to increase employee motivation when we don’t know how to motivate ourselves to achieve our own goals. A steady theme in this blog is about motivating ourselves to do those things that we want to do, but are finding it difficult to actually get done. (See, for example, How to achieve your goals despite yourself.) The article below by Marshall Goldsmith attracted my attention because he has an interesting take on how we can motivate ourselves — by harnessing our “mojo” or positive spirit. Learning to do this will decrease our stress at work and increase our potential for joy, or at least satisfaction.
I know from experience that knowing how to kick up my enthusiasm has saved me from many a dull and boring activity. Doing this, though, requires a conscious decision. If I don’t decide to move past my inertia, I am stuck half-heartedly doing a dreaded task with a pit in my stomach. When I can follow Marshall Goldsmith’s advice, the work just flows. The article below is reproduced here with his permission.
A Journey into Personality Self-Discovery (Vol. 2)
by Marshall Goldsmith • March 22, 2011
Bloomberg Businessweek
Readers who remember the first installment of this two-part article should know that there is a further concept with significant impact on your day-to-day energy and performance. It promotes a greater sense of ownership and job satisfaction.
Ask yourself: “Given a set of circumstances, how can I not only make the situation more palatable but also transform via my positive spirit?” This constitutes “mojo”—a type of magic charm. It’s that positive spirit toward one’s activities that originates from the inside and radiates to the outside.
Your mojo is not fixed or limited in quantity at birth, such that “when it’s gone, it’s gone.” It is renewable. Each person governs how it gets renewed. Mojo changes with different activities and circumstances over time.
The goal in renewing mojo is two-fold: First, you want to choose activities that more naturally maximize it. Second, you should generate as much of it as possible, regardless of the activity. On the inside, high mojo results in personal excitement about the activity in which you are engaged at the moment. As it radiates to the outside, which it will, you will spread positive energy to everyone around you.
Assess What You Put Into Activities
The first aspect investigates what you bring to a certain activity in personal or professional pursuits. This includes enthusiasm and energy, knowledge and know-how, skills, confidence, genuineness, and authenticity. Obviously, you bring differing levels of these attributes depending on the activity. For some activities, you might bring high amounts of several of these attributes; for other activities, you might bring lesser amounts.
The second aspect deals with what a certain activity brings to you. An activity can impart both short-term and long-term returns. For the short term, an activity can be stimulating and rewarding and promote personal happiness. In the long-term, an activity can provide meaning and help you to learn and grow. Overall, an activity can engender a sense that it was a valuable use of time, promoting feelings of gratitude.
As with your inputs, the short- and long-term returns differ by activity. Some activities might have either a short- or long-term impact, whereas others may bring about both.
Ideally your day is filled with activities that score high on most of the above inputs and returns. Over time, if you know which activities bring you happiness and meaning and which don’t, you want to manage your life so that you engage in more of those activities that bring up your mo and minimize or eliminate altogether those that don’t.
Coping With Low-Return Activities
But life is not ideal. The reality is that we all have to do things we don’t like sometimes. However, we’re not stuck. Here are some quick suggestions for how you might engage, retain, or regain mo, even while you’re engaged in the most mundane activities.
1. Validate that the activity must be done or must be done as you are currently doing it—or both. If it is an unnecessary task, stop and focus on a high-mojo activity. Don’t assume that just because it’s being done that it’s important and must continue. On the second point, if you have options for changing it to any degree, see the next suggestion.
2. Brainstorm ideas for reframing or redefining the activity to more closely align it with what reflects your positive spirit. That might increase the short- or long-term returns. If you can simply add a little fun to the activity, the short-term stimulation might be worth it. If you can learn something new or find a deeper meaning in the process, then you’ve gained long-term value.
3. Identify actions for enriching what you bring to the activity. Perhaps training or coaching would enhance your knowledge or skills. This, in turn, could build greater self-confidence. Increased confidence could drive enthusiasm and create energy.
4. Rehearse expectations from the activity. Perhaps the activity, though not presently stimulating, is providing a long-term opportunity for growth. Conversely, an activity may not offer any long-term meaning, though it brings happiness and stimulation in the present. The attendant value of an activity, either in the short or long term, may not be obvious. Have a talk with yourself and deliberately focus on the value proposition as it pertains to you.
Life is much too short to simply tolerate living. Continually pursue some aspect of self-discovery, as we talked about earlier. Take responsibility for forging a new path that fits better with your personality make-up. If that seems unlikely—and that is the reality for most of us—take responsibility for being more effective in your current situation.
As simple as it may sound, increasing your effectiveness can help you elicit a more positive response from others. Finally, take action to discover and enhance your own happiness and meaning—through new pursuits, by reframing current activities, by extending what you bring to the situation, or by finding hidden value. In so doing, you will experience more positive associations with others and a richer, more satisfying life in general.
Marshall Goldsmith is a world authority at helping successful leaders grow by achieving positive, lasting behavioral change in themselves, their people, and their teams. In November 2009, he was ranked as one of the field’s 15 most influential business thinkers in a study involving 35,000 respondents that was published by The Times of London and Forbes. Dr. Goldsmith’s books have sold over a million copies and have been translated into more than 25 languages. His best selling books include What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (also a Longman Award Winner for business book of the year) and his most recent, MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back If You Lose It.
Reproduced with permission of Marshall Goldsmith
Filed under: achieving your goals • conscious use of self • making positive changes
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Personalities have a lot to do with motivating somebody with all that work that is to be done. Sure you have to assess yourself but to be a great person, it’s not about learning the way others learn through a formal school. Sometimes you have to look for some mistakes of people. Because from there you get to learn the most remarkable of lessons in life.
Wellsaid! We can learn thru others mistakes as well as successes if we are open to it
Great points in this article. I got here researching “goals” for an ADDerWorld blog series, but am delighted to find some much needed fodder for a different and more difficult series I’m putting together for my main blog. I am especially intrigued by the “Coping With Low-Return Activities” content.
As an ADD Coach and trainer, my expertise is with individuals with Executive Functioning Dysregulation (and those who love them and/or support them). A great many of “my” readers struggle with what, in my field, is called “Activation.” Deficient activation is more likely to be behind what is often mistakenly assumed to be “procrastination” in the EFD community than insufficient “motivation.”
• ACTIVATION is the process that gets you up and DO-ing, distinct from what inspires you to WANT to be up and doing (which is the motivation piece of the action and follow-through puzzle).
• MOTIVATION is a dopamine-driven process. Dopaminergic system dysregulation is common in attentional spectrum disorders, and is certainly problematic, but activation struggles are a BEAR!
• Activation requires complex cooperation between the dopaminergic system and epinephrine/norepinephrine regulation (“adrenaline” modulation. if you will): an oversupply produces a state that can be compared to performance anxiety; undersupplied, you simply can’t inspire (force!?) yourself to get off the dime.
• When the problem is activation, “tough love” strategies will only make things tougher and motivational pep talks will backfire.
It’s difficult for those who rarely experience a glitch in their activation neurochemistry to understand that there ARE individuals for whom NO motivation would be sufficient to tip the inertia/action balance without examination of and efforts to handle additional mitigating factors. Activation is an area where appropriate ADD Coaching technique can really help — through a process I refer to as “externalizing prefrontal cortex intensive tasks.”
Your article underscores the importance of encouraging anyone struggling with activation to look at it through the lens of “low return activities,” administering a sort-of “anti-rumination booster shot.” This lens provides a familiar model to help explain why activation is sometimes a great deal more difficult than “usual,” without resorting to the more common conflicts/blocks/resistance paradigm,rarely a successful activation mobilization strategy. Good stuff here! You provide some great “talking points” – thanks!
By the way, since cortisol interferes with activation neurochemistry, activation is an area where workers under chronic stress commonly struggle as well — and what workers do NOT cycle in and out of that state these days? It is sometimes even MORE difficult for those with workplace situation/state-specific *temporary* glitches (still brain-based) to understand or accept what’s going on – a necessary first step toward returning to effective action.
There are even fewer resources available to help “occasional victims” that don’t come from the “overcoming procrastination” or “motivation” model. Activation is a concept that few line or human resource managers are equipped to deal with, even among the rarer few who are aware of its exiseance, much less its impact.
Awareness that activation glitches can be a legitimate source of lack of action, with sufficient understanding to be able to offer a cogent explanation and a couple of tips and tricks, can be a HUGE help getting good employees whose performance seems to be “slipping” back on track. It’s neurological, not psychological.
Reducing – ideally countering – negative self-talk always makes activation easier. It reduces otherwise “run-away” neurochemical production that exacerbates performance anxiety and decimates performance (i.e., normalizing the situation beats “What’s WRONG with me?” and “Why can’t I do this?” rumination with a stick!)
The activation/inertia continuum is a dense topic, and little has been written about it from a functioning perspective. Please forgive my attempts to introduce in “cliff notes” fashion, quickly cutting and paste-ing content currently sprinkled among posts in draft. I am in the process of “unpacking” the concept and introducing the major players in a series of articles on activation and action. Although most are still in various stages of [in]completion, the first one of the series (ABOUT Activation) is available on ADDasmm now.
Jean and/or Marshall: I would appreciate input from either or both of you that might help me put together a more widely applicable resource – questions/comments/feedback would be gratefully received, either here or in the comments section under the Activation articles on ADDasmm. If either of you has content that further illuminates this concept and would like to contribute as a guest blogger, BRING IT ON!
xx,
mgh (Madelyn Griffith-Haynie, SCAC, MCC – blogging at ADDandSoMuchMore and ADDerWorld – dot com!)