Your inner drive has a big impact on your work

Leader Question: What motivates you?

If you've been paying attention to the world, you've noticed that whether you're a leader or someone on your team, we all have motivations that drive our actions. These motivations can drive us or make us listless. To be successful, we need to understand what motivates us. To be even more successful, we need to understand what motivates our team ;) But how do we find out what really drives us?

Notice! Not all motivation is the same! Intrinsic motivation is the natural tendency to seek challenges and to prove one's abilities. This contrasts with extrinsic motivation, which is aimed at obtaining a reward or acting for other reasons that have nothing directly to do with the task at hand. Once we understand our intrinsic motivation, we know what drives us. For one it's recognition, for another it's overcoming challenges, and for the next it may be helping other people etc.

Alright, but why do we sometimes become listless? Often we think that the reasons are external, but actually the real reason is in our 🧠. We need to inspire our brain to maintain our motivation. We can use various motivational mechanisms to do this, such as curiosity, passion, meaning, and autonomy.

Curiosity is the primary evolutionary driver of our brain. Every brain is curious and wants to learn. When we do something we enjoy, we release dopamine. Dopamine stimulates connectivity in our brain, makes us alert, awakens anticipation, and gives us a pleasant rush. By engaging in things that bring us joy and challenge our brains, we can satisfy our curiosity and get excited.

What gives you pleasure? What excites you? Do you have a hobby that you love? How can you combine this with what you want or need to do anyway?

Passion - Pure joy is often not enough to set us in motion for our goals. It takes additional norepinephrine to get our horsepower on the road. So when we want to motivate ourselves, we select several items from our list of joy and creatively combine them with our goal so that we are motivated to take action. This is how joy becomes passion. We should fuel our passion with positive feedback, praise and celebrate ourselves, and talk about it with others! When our counterpart feels our enthusiasm, it leads to positive feedback. Therefore, listen to your team when they talk about their passion!

Meaning transforms our passion park into 🔥. Because when our actions carry a sense of purpose for others, our focus shifts from an internal focus to an external focus. This leads to a release of dopamine, norepinephrine, and oxytocin. Our amygdala is our emotional response center, meaning it evaluates our actions. The more we do for others, the less reactive our amygdala becomes. Meaningful activities make us more motivated, less anxious, and less prone to depression. Meaning gives your actions a greater dimension because you are not just acting for your own sake, but because through your actions other living beings benefit #mentalsustainability

Autonomy - Each of us has a basic psychological need, to a greater or lesser degree, to experience ourselves as the cause of our own actions! People want to determine themselves what they do and especially how they do it. We do not like to be controlled by others, we like to control ourselves. This is not always possible in business and in the team, so it is even more important to let your team act as autonomously as possible!

Recap: In our hectic 🌎 most of us are so busy doing something that we no longer even think about why we are doing it. But to understand who we really are, we need to understand what motivates us. #isso Even if you think you know exactly what motivates you, we humans aren't very good at really understanding our own behavior. This is because there are so many things going on in our brains that influence our actions. Since we can't comprehend these deeper reasons, we make up stories about why we behave the way we do = rationalization. Instead of accepting that our behavior is irrational, we construct false rational explanations instead. The good news is that you can let go of the false stories we've made up by figuring out our intrinsic motivation.

Our book tip on this: The Motivation Code

Let's do this! 🕺💃