More often than not in the past, I had worked on jobsites with co-workers who claimed they had lost their motivation. In this fast-paced world where time waits for no man, it is not a convenience most of us can afford, but sometimes, unfortunately, it does happen.
So, where does motivation come from? And if it leaves how can we get it back?
Recently listening to a Freakonomics podcast on how to be more productive, I heard an interesting portion on self-motivation. Not only is it highly important in our personal lives, but is often listed as a trait desired by employers.
How do we better develop this much-needed life skill?
Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit, is interviewed during the podcast. In it he offers eight key tools or skills for being more productive, and explained his ideas on where self-motivation stems from.
“We trigger self-motivation by making choices that make us feel in control. The act of asserting ourselves and taking control helps trigger the parts of our neurology where self-motivation resides.”
Digging deeper into the subject of inspiring motivation in ourselves, Duhigg went on to explain how the foundation may reside in what’s known as the locus of control. We either have an internal locus of control, which means we believe we control our own fate, or an external locus of control, which means we think things just happen to us and we’re powerless.
To illustrate his point, Duhigg cited an experiment. In it the results showed when teachers told students they’re really smart and they did well on a test because they’re really smart. That approach actually triggers our external locus of control, because most people don’t believe they have any influence over how smart they are. It’s either something you’re born with or you’re not, said Duhigg.
On the other hand, when teachers told students, “you did great on this exam, you must have worked really hard,’ it reinforces an internal locus of control, because we all know we choose how hard we work.
Self-motivation and motivation in general hinges on believing we are in control of our own life, summarized Duhigg.
The other seven key traits in Duhigg’s list of being more productive are:
Focus – we train ourselves how to pay attention to the right things and ignore distractions by building mental models, which means we essentially narrate to ourselves what’s going on as it goes on around us.
Goal setting – Everyone actually needs two different kinds of goals. You need a stretch goal, a big ambition, but also pair it with a specific plan on how to get started tomorrow morning.
Decision making – People who make the best decisions tend to think probabilistically. They envision multiple, often contradictory, futures and then try to figure out which one is more likely to occur.
Innovation – The most creative environments are ones that allow people to take clichés and mix them together in new ways. And the people who have their feet in many different worlds know which ideas can click together in a novel combination.
Absorbing data – Sometimes the best way to learn is to make information harder to absorb. This is known in psychology as disfluency. The harder we have to work to understand an idea or to process a piece of information, the stickier it becomes in our brain.
Managing others – The best managers put responsibility for solving a problem with the person who’s closest to that problem, because that’s how you tap into everyone’s unique expertise.
Teams – Who is on the team matters much, much less than how a team interacts.
Although most of the above are geared more towards workplace productivity, it isn’t unheard of to transfer their usefulness into the personal realm.
In the end, losing motivation happens to most of us at times, but maybe with the right information as arrows in our quiver we have the opportunity to better hit the bull’s eye of our goals and life aspirations. Knowing where our motivation goes and how to get it back, it becomes one of our eight life skills in becoming a more productive member of society.
It always feels great to get things done and I’m sure a large majority of us would agree being highly motivated at all time, is something most of us would not say no to.
