In my past post, I started to explore the concept of motivation and called attention to why being motivated isn’t always a good thing.
In thinking about my personal and professional lives over the past decade - particularly as it relates to the concept of motivation - I’ve learned the concept of motivation cannot, and perhaps should not, be discussed without a keen focus on the “goal” or objective. In my opinion, you cannot be motivated to do something if you aren’t sure what you’re motivated for, and goals don’t become real unless someone is actively doing something to make sure they are realized.
Of course, this sounds obvious, right? In my opinion, it becomes less obvious when there is misalignment between the two. The purpose of this post is to further explain this connection, highlight the risks when there is misalignment, and illustrate what it means to have “ideal” alignment.
I think achievement of a goal or objective comes down to five things:
- Understanding what it is that you want and why.
- Understanding the pathways to bring you towards that goal.
- Introducing appropriate motivators to push you towards your goal.
- Periodically ensuring the motivators are working appropriately or need to be replaced.
- Advance towards a place where supplemental motivators are not required.
Let’s use an example to walk through this process.
Let’s say that you are trying to lose weight. In order to keep you moving in the right direction, you share your goal with your family and friends. After all, you may need them to help you stay on track. And of course, there are many other “motivators” including rewards that you give yourself for reaching milestones in your weight loss journey. Collectively, this is what I call a motivation framework or motivation support system. In most cases, having a support system is a good idea.
If your goal is aligned with your values and mission, you’ll find that your motivation level and your ability to reach your goal feeds upon its own successes. Because your mind is not bound within a self-justification cycle (“I want to lose weight because …”) the energy pathways between mind and body are in alignment and you can ultimately achieve a state of “flow”. By achieving this state of being, your need for supplemental motivators decreases rapidly and you become further empowered to take on greater challenges (i.e. “I lost ten pounds, but I feel good enough to lose another ten!”).
If however, your wish to lose weight is indirectly connected to your values and purpose, a number of things can start to happen. First, your support structure may start to “overrun” your initial desire - i.e. your motivation support group may end up being more motivated than you are! When and if this occurs, you may find that your own motivation starts to plummet and you end up doing less than before. This downward spiral can proceed even further when your support system begins to run out of energy (i.e. they are no longer providing any motivational support) and/or begins to show its disappointment that you are not reaching your goal (showing evidence that perhaps your support structure wasn’t the right choice to begin with).
As you can start to imagine, this single disconnect between goal identification and values/mission has the potential to negatively influence other aspects of your life - i.e. “If I can’t lose ten pounds with support, how can I do anything?”
In order to have true alignment between goal and motivation, I think one needs to pay close attention to the following:
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Understand what it is that you want. Keep in mind that this can be a moving target - that’s okay. If your desires change, ensure that your motivation and motivation support structure changes as well. If your goals are changing frequently, it might be appropriate to revisit your values and mission.
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Make sure that your motivation does not require constant support. If it does, it’s possible that don’t want to achieve the goal in the first place. Along similar lines, if you are tackling the right goal and have the right motivation framework in place, you’ll find that your pursuit of the goal will be natural and the need for motivational support will be much less.
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You are human. Waning feelings of motivation are normal and may not require significant changes to your goal or support structure. Instead, you may need to look elsewhere to understand these feelings.
In my opinion, the ideal state is having a goal that is directly linked to your core being and ultimately drives you. It’s the catalyst and energy source for all action. Without this source, your source for motivation will always need “supplemental power sources” (at least to some extent). I think that achievement of the farthest end of this motivation maturity scale is the identification and pursuit of a goal that is ultimately self-powered.
In my next post within this series, I’ll spend more time focusing on the human aspect of motivation and goal attainment - this is ultimately where I’ll introduce the next area of “recalibration” which is persistence.