What Nobody Tells You About Motivation
When it comes to motivation, success, and performance we can completely miss it. Worse yet, we abandon what’s possible by grinding past a lot of our happiness and joy by failing to connect with meaningful and productive work.
This is no way to learn to love your Mondays.
It’s not that our work is meaningless either, it’s just at some level we fail to connect with the greater good. We don’t ask the question, what’s it all for? And in not doing that, we drain the vitality of our work and reduce our callings to a series of to-dos.
Psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski and Barry Schwartz used 14 years of data detailing the motivations and outcomes of over 10,000 cadets at the elite West Point Military Academy. They found that it’s the internal or intrinsic motivation that leads to success.
Let me explain. internal or intrinsic motivation comes from within and instead of working for a reward you work to accomplish something for the importance of doing it. Basically, you do what you do because you can’t help but do it. It brings joy and deep levels of satisfaction.
In essence, you become who God has created you to be...
But how do you and I tap into our inner genius? How do we become our best selves and gain momentum in life? I humbly offer you three game-changing ideas that will help you connect deeply with your work.
Know Your Strengths: This is the beginning point for us to tap into our inner genius. Everyone has talents and strengths but few can actually name them. In order to gain momentum in life, you need to gain clarity of what’s right in you and learn to put that part to work every day.
Know Your Self: Once you know and trust your strengths, study them. Becoming self-actualized helps you to minimize weaknesses while emphasizing what you’re best at. Strengths learned and applied will lead towards clarifying your personal patterns of high performance.
Be YOU: Probably the most important part of the process. Once you’ve done the work of knowing your strengths and understanding yourself it’s time for the most difficult challenge of all. Being authentically you. My mentor Lee Queen once told me, “God doesn’t make junk.” Lee was smart. Self-trust at this level will make an incredible difference in your success.
In the end, the psychologist are proving that the most effective motivational strategy is to tap into your own intrinsic motivations. This is done by a simple yet profound three-step process of knowing your strengths, becoming progressively more self-aware and being you. Knowing what really works is half the battle towards loving what you do...and loving your Mondays.