Exploding the Myths of Motivation
By Dan Bobinski
Perhaps you’ve accused someone of lacking motivation, or
maybe you’ve heard someone else use that phrase. The problem
is it’s bad psychology: People do not lack motivation. So if
we’re ever going to help people who are perceived to be
lacking in motivation, we’ll need to explode this old
myth.
Allow me to elaborate. The word motivation literally means
“a reason to move,” and pretty much every move we make
has a reason behind it. We eat when we’re hungry. We drink
when we’re thirsty. Hunger and thirst are basic motivations
for everyone. They are reasons to move.
So what’s going on when we know we’re supposed to
act, but we don’t? For example’s sake, let’s
consider an outside sales rep who finds it hard to make cold calls.
This person does not lack motivation to cold call—she knows
she needs sales or she’ll starve. Therefore, she certainly
has motivation.
But if her sales manager adheres to the myth that she’s
not motivated, he’ll probably try all sorts of methods to
increase her motivation. These techniques may work, but only short
term. Moreover, these methods usually result in job burn-out.
Let’s explode the motivation myth with the help of a
word picture. Let’s equate motivation with a tire. It’s
a certain size that seems to fit our sales rep, and it moves her
along in the direction she wants to go; In this case, making
sales.
But when our sales rep turns to go down “Cold
Call” lane, she encounters a rather large obstacle that the
tire won’t go over, and she stops.
Her boss sees she’s not moving, so he sends her to an
exciting workshop where she learns to “pump up” her
motivation. The next day she’s very enthusiastic and pumps up
her tire so huge she makes it over the obstacle with no problem,
and she continues down Cold Call lane. This makes everyone
happy.
But the enthusiasm from her workshop lasts only a few days,
and by the end of the week all the extra air has leaked out of her
tire and its back to its normal size.
Unfortunately, the obstacle on Cold Call lane is still
there.
On Monday she tries pumping up her tire, but the excitement
from the workshop is gone. She’s back to her normal self.
Frustrated, her boss tells her she lacks motivation. He even thinks
about letting her go.
Perhaps this sounds familiar, but I have a question: Why
should anyone waste their energy artificially inflating their
motivation day after day?
The energy it takes to pump up one’s motivation to
unnatural levels would get a much better return on investment if it
were used elsewhere.
The good thing we can explode this motivation myth and find a
better alternative.
Going back to our analogy, if our sales rep were to figure out
how to remove the obstacle in her way, her natural level of
motivation would be more than sufficient to get her down that road.
(Wouldn’t it be great if her boss saw it that way, too?)
Again, people are not held back by a lack of motivation, but by the
presence of obstacles.
In reality, most obstacles we face are within us. Many are
fear-based, and for that reason we don’t enjoy facing them.
After all, we don’t often like admitting we have a
fear.
It was for this reason that Dennis R. Rader and I wrote the
book Living Toad Free. In that book we used a Toad as a metaphor
for an obstacle. This has huge psychological advantages. First,
we’re bigger than Toads. That gives us an edge right off the
bat.
Second, by looking at any internal obstacle as an external
Toad, we gain a clearer perspective of what might be done to remove
it. Something like a fear inside of us is intangible and has no
borders, so we don’t know how to get our mind around it, let
alone our hands. But if we view fear as a Toad, we not only
separate ourselves from it but we can see ways to get past
it.
Bottom line: Everyone has motivation—their own reasons
for moving. What slows people down or stops them altogether is not
lack of motivation, but the presence of obstacles. Rather than
waste energy artificially inflating their motivation, people do
much better if they identify the obstacles and figure out how to
get rid of them.
And it’s perfectly okay to ask for help. Especially if you find some really big Toads.
