Tag: Purpose

How Does Motivation Work?

Learning how motivation works will help you to accept responsibility for your behaviour, for your actions and positive attitude. In reality motivation comes from a person’s belief, which helps them to achieve their goal. Purpose, Desire, Direction and Dedication are the qualities necessary to experience real motivation.

People motivate themselves by understanding their needs and wants. It could be Tangible Gifts, Rewards or Intangible growth, Appreciation, Recognition and a lot more, as it varies from person to person. How does motivation work in your case? If you Understand how motivation works for you, then your Internal Motivation will drive you to achieve your goals and lead you toward success.

People motivate themselves by inculcating in themselves, the belief responsible for actions and behaviour and creating a vision that helps them to outweigh the challenges that might come before them and accept their responsibilities in life. Lack of motivation brings life to a standstill, failure or fear of failure demotivates people and their pattern of their everyday life. Whilst a motivated person has a spark in their eyes, always looks for new challenges and ways they can improve themselves.

It could be said that real motivation starts from within a person based on how their needs are being consistently met. Without going into a long drawn out explanation of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs I will state some of the conclusions. The most basic of needs stated by Abraham Maslow was the need to survive. Until that need is consistently met the other needs for all practical purposes cease to exist. Once that need is met then the individual is now ready to fulfil the other needs that may exist for themselves. These can be readily determined by their own specific paradigm of life. A person’s paradigm is just the LENSES they tend to consistently see life through. A set of beliefs that colour their experience and interpretation of all that surrounds them. There is no real change until a person’s paradigm changes. But the motivation to make a paradigm change leads us to the next section.

SELF MOTIVATION AND YOU

If you are a person who is disciplined, goal-oriented, organised and instant, it means that you have the skills to motivate yourself. It means that you have a sense of achievement and that’s how motivation actually works. For you to become the person that you are today.

Motivation is temporary and short lived and hence it needs to be strengthened constantly to succeed. Negative thoughts and anxiety come into play and we can become demotivated and dubious about our future. However, just by accepting the challenges to move forward, one can get motivated as you will have the will and commitment to be successful, Accepting the failures, learning it as a lesson in life, helps us to move on to the next stage of success.

CONCLUSION

Self-motivated person knows the trick to get motivated after a disappointment and accepts the next obstacle that comes along. A motivated individual understands his thoughts and emotions, learns how to nurture them into a positive outcome, that keeps them focused on the next goal instead of being Complacent.

Here is a motivational video that will help you set your day – Video

The One Thing

Introduction

My mentor/coach Mark Dalton told me to read a book called ‘The One Thing’ by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan. If Mark tells me to read it I know it is for a reason, so I obtained a copy and having read it I know why he wanted me to read it. This book explains how and why you need to focus on the one thing that can make a difference to your business, life, relationship etc. This is about the focus and not the subject matter of what you want to apply that focus to.

Background

The authors explain that a tiny bit of focus can make a big difference; this is basically explained by the use of domino effect. ‘In 1983. Lorne Whitehead wrote in the American Journal of Physics that he’d discovered that domino falls could not only topple many things, they could also topple bigger things. He described how a single domino is capable of bringing down another domino that is actually 50 percent larger. This is an interesting concept and it was taken up by another physicist who created ‘eight dominoes out of plywood, each of which was 50 percent larger than the one before. The first was a mere two inches, the last almost three feet tall. The resulting domino fall began with a gentle tick and quickly ended ‘with a loud SLAM.’’

A demonstration of this can be seen Here.

What this is trying to convey is that by understanding and focusing on your one thing then you can make a big difference. The book looks at things that get in the way and comes up with a list called ‘The Six Lies Between you and Success’ the list is as follows:

  1. Everything matters equally
  2. Multitasking
  3. A disciplined life
  4. Willpower is always on will-call
  5. A balanced life
  6. Big is bad

The authors then go through each of these six lies and explains why they are lies.

Being a Chartered Quality Professional myself I was delighted to see the Quality Guru Joseph M. Juran mentioned with regard to the 80/20 rule as ‘GM executives invited him to review research on management compensation that followed a formula described by a little known Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto. In the 19th century, Pareto had written a mathematical model for income distribution in Italy that stated 80 percent of the land was owned by 20 percent of the people. Wealth was not evenly distributed. In fact, according to Pareto, it was actually concentrated in a highly predictable way. A pioneer of quality-control management, Juran had noticed that a handful of flaws would usually produce the majority of defects. This imbalance not only rang true to his experience, but he suspected it might be a universal law – and bigger than what Pareto had observed might be bigger than even Pareto had imagined.’ The Pareto principle or the 80/20 rule as it is known by people outside of manufacturing can be applied to your business by using the smallest amount of focused effort or input (20%) to create the biggest return or output (80%). What the book conveys is take your 20% and keep reducing it until you get to the single most important thing, so in effect, you are now looking at a 1/99 rule.

The authors explains that you need a ‘Focusing Question’ to help you to identify your one thing. It does this by the use of a model that gives you four options to frame your question.

 

An example is given on how the model is used to obtain a great question

From this example you have found a great question ‘What can I do to double sales in six months?’ This now needs to be converted into the ‘Focusing Question: “What’s the ONE Thing I can do to double sales in six months such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?”’

There are three possible categories that answers can come in:

  • Doable
  • Stretch
  • Possibility

The authors suggest that you should ignore the first two and concentrate on the third answer as this is what high achievers will look for, so you should too.

The authors have several more models that are useful to help you find and focus on your One Thing which looks at Purpose, Priority, Productivity and Profit. They also suggest three commitments ‘First, you must adopt the mindset of someone seeking mastery. Mastery is a commitment to becoming the best, so to achieve extraordinary results you must embrace the extraordinary effort it represents. Second, you must continually seek the very best ways of doing things. Nothing is more futile than doing your best using an approach that can’t deliver results equal to your effort. And last, you must be willing to be held accountable to do everything you can to achieve your ONE Thing.’

Conclusion

The authors of this book certainly make it clear that you need to find your One Thing to be able to obtain great results. They give you the theory and the tools so that you can understand it and apply it to your business, life etc. It is a clear and easy read that is aimed at practicality rather than academic theory, so it is up to you to take action and apply it to find your One Thing.