How to get motivated and maintain it

I don’t know about you, but I was in total awe of the intense motivation and total focus shown by competitors at the London 2012 Olympics and Paralympics. I look forward with great relish to Rio 2016.

Like many of you, I too can be highly motivated at times, but I can struggle to maintain it. I find my attention drifts towards other potentially more interesting subjects and my efforts can dissipate if I'm not careful. Thankfully, if my situation resonates with you, there is much you can do about it, so please read on……….

People often say that motivation doesn't last. Well, neither does bathing--that's why we recommend it daily."  Zig Ziglar

Before we go any further

Before we embark on discussing motivation, its origins and how we can leverage it effectively, let’s spend a moment thinking about how we use motivation to achieve things.

Achievement = Potential minus Interferences

Where: "Potential" is our innate ability to do the task at hand and "Interferences" are the various types of crap that get in our way.

So, what if we can identify and remove (or reduce) the interfering crap? The automatic effect is that the likelihood of achieving our goal increases automatically.

What then is “Motivation”, what is the biggest interference, and what can we do about removing it?

First, what is motivation?

Definition “A reason or reasons for acting or behaving in a particular way.”

Here is my personal view on the basis of motivation, how to gain it, and crucially how maintain it: see what you think. I sense my motivation as an internally generated force projecting me towards a particular course of action. Although generated internally, I need an external creative spark from other people, adversity, opportunity or just plain curiosity. My motivation also seems to need a specific direction, attention and focus. Underpinning my motivation is a persistent fascination with an object or goal that requires me to expend energy and occupies significant cognitive capacity. Do you recognise this?

When we're curious and fascinated with something, questions spring apparently unbidden into our conscious minds. This new insight in turn, allows us to influence novel situations in new meaningful ways, that are more likely to move us towards our goal. When we sense progress it adds fuel (motivation), driving us towards the end game.

This raises a couple of issues. First, my motivation requires a novel “something” to pursue. Second, the “something” gives me the direction of travel, along which I navigate. My motivation cannot be forced as it's a quality I allow and nurture, rather than bully. Skilled coaches, mentors and parents have though provided encouragement to help maintain my focus on the goal.

"What keeps me going is not winning, but the quest for reaching potential in myself as a coach and my kids as divers. It's the pursuit of excellence."  Ron O’Brien, USA Olympic Diving Coach

Where did the motivation come from for me to write this post?

Let's take a practical example of how I spark my own creativity and motivation. Of the myriad of potential subjects possible, why did I choose to write about motivation today? Well I considered a dozen ideas before this one, and it’s not that I rejected them out of hand, but they didn't fight hard enough for my attention. Something in particular must have triggered my mind to go in this direction.

I was in a coffee shop, with a hubbub of fractured discourse crackling around me. First, I looked at people's facial expressions for inspiration. I then looked at their clothes and considered the time of day (early morning), and it seemed to me that many were discussing business. Others, like me, were typing away more or less intensely, others were on the phone. I suspected some were there to avoid going to work. Then it struck me, “what motivates each of them to do the specific things they are doing right now in this moment? And off I went fingers flashing (more like labouring) across the keyboard! Occasionally, I would look around me to re-fuel my motivation, to write more about motivation.

"Reading, conversation, environment, culture, heroes, mentors, nature – all are lottery tickets for creativity. Scratch away at them and you’ll find out how big a prize you’ve won."  Twyla Tharp

Now I was really intrigued and becoming increasingly fascinated. I'd found my mojo and was feeling motivated.

So, we are making progress here! Motivation has the quality of a feeling or emotion, and it's a heart-felt quality. We don't think motivated we feel it. Is motivation a mood then? If it were, shouldn't we expect it to fluctuate just like all our other moods, and be affected by similar modifying influences? Motivation’s quality and strength would be affected by internal influences such as our thoughts, emotions, tiredness, or ill health. Our moods are affected by the behaviour of other people, so why not motivation? How often has your general mood been uplifted by a great conversation with a highly optimistic and fully engaged friend, and vice versa?

We learn a valuable lesson here. Building positive conversations into our daily routines is uplifting and a valuable asset in maintaining our motivation. When we feel good we are motivated generally, we are open to suggestions of the possible.

If we already have a target, our only task is to focus our attention upon it. It's well accepted in sports psychology that positive visualisation and positive personal interactions maintain motivational mood and increase performance, even in adversity. So if this strategy is good enough for athletes, then it should be good enough for the rest of us?

Is human motivation hardwired?

Motivation is a fundamental characteristic of all sentient organisms, but most species' fundamental drives are centred on survival and procreation (e.g. finding food, mate and a place to sleep in relative safety). Humans on the other hand, especially in the developed world, tend to replace these primal concerns with more esoteric issues, like securing money, houses and jobs. These are all important, but we can also get irrationally motivated by celebrity and status symbols (Hollywood and the latest iPhone), which have little practical survival value.

Humans are different because we are on a perpetual quest for novelty, to be first, and the best at “something”, anything. Humans are total "novelty junkies" and I suspect that this partly underlies motivation. Compared to our mammalian cousins, our attention span is fleeting, and our modern culture is increasingly conditioning our children to have ever decreasing attention spans, as they seek novelty. Are we addicted to a quest for novelty? Where does this drive come and is it the fuel for our motivations?

The Fuel for motivation

It’s been said, there are only seven tunes and the devil has all the best ones. Yet there are millions of different pieces of music all sounding more or less different. Thousands of songs are released to the world every day, and no matter our age, we all seem addicted, to a greater or lesser extent, to new musical experiences. Some people seek entirely new genres, whilst others are satisfied with listening to a new orchestral arrangement of a favourite symphony. This tells us that the search for novelty and motivation has both intensity and direction.

The physical corollary is that there must be part of the pleasure centre in our brains exquisitely sensitive to change and novelty that is stimulated each time we detect something new. If we get a little pleasure kick every time we experience novelty, it sounds rather like any other kind of pleasure stimulus, and we can become addicted. If we expand this to all kinds of newness it follows that over millennia, there will be a positive selection for individuals who come up with and perfect new ideas, as this satisfies the overall societal demand for novelty.

"Any kind of novelty or excitement drives up dopamine in the brain, and dopamine is associated with romantic love."  Helen Fisher

How has the human novelty/motivation "meme" been selected?

The “what will happen if I do this” mentality of early humans moved us from the stone to the bronze, and then to the iron age, and on to the present blindingly fast period of change. I suspect that the person who discovered how to smelt iron, and those that adapted the technology became very popular with the opposite sex. They were highly regarded by their communities and they could command and acquire wealth and status because of their skills! As all human traits are at some basic level underpinned by genetic variation, the capacity to innovate is also likely partially heritable.

Just as animals and plants live and evolve in a physical environment, our thoughts, behaviours and actions, live in a colossally complex and constantly changing intellectual and social environment. If genes are the currency of the physical environment, ideas are the currency of the socio-intellectual world. These transferable and heritable ideas were first termed as "memes" by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, “The selfish Gene.

Definition: “An element of a culture or system of behaviour passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.”

Some memes are passed down the generations without alteration (e.g. love is vital but cannibalism and incest are taboo). This is a fundamental paradigm for novelty as it says that some novelty is good, but some things shouldn’t change, else bad things will happen (malformed heart or incest). The driving force of neutral variation created by the need to question our world (Why, how, what and when?), and the filter of natural selection imposed by culture and society, are the processes determining the adoption and longevity of particular memes.

Memes also operate in two different but interdependent, interacting and changing environments, our internal minds and the social world of our fellow humans. Not only this, but we all live in different and often overlapping cultures. Each culture acts as a different ecological social niche imposing its particular complex selection pressures. We can exist in many parallel cultures simultaneously (family, friends, work, sport, religion etc.). Our task as we grow up, is to discern these patterns of variation and selection and learn from them, in order to make the selection process less painful and more useful. Just as the drive to procreate is the driving force for passing on genes, motivation is a driving force for the survival of memes and ideas. Memes need strong messages to be passed on.

Quietening our “Inner Saboteurs” to get and stay motivated

Why is it some people appear intensely motivated, whilst others wander around their lives with seemingly little impetus? Why is it we feel motivated one minute and then not the next? I'm convinced it's because we learn to block our own motivation. We find reasons for not doing things. We allow (sometimes look for) other people to belittle our ideas, and we don’t practice the skills of stimulating our motivation regularly enough. Developing motivation takes work, and in adversity it gets even harder.

The most powerful interference to motivation springs from the chatter in our own minds; voices undermining our self-confidence, self-worth, and creating self-limiting assumptions. These are our “Internal saboteurs”. My saboteurs are a synthesis of all of the judgmental voices arising from my parents, brother, friends, teachers, coaches, colleagues and bosses etc.. Don’t get me wrong, these voices are not evil, most of the time they mean well but are misguided, and we should remember their opinions are not wrong all of the time. The point is though, they are a psychological construct, and that cannot be not ME speaking.

“The what if’s and the should have’s will eat your brain.”  John O’Callaghan

I’ve come to realise the key to managing my inner saboteurs is to be more curious all the time, and learn how to notice when they voice their particular arguments (Judgement, Hypervigilance, Pleasing, Fear etc.). Then as objectively as possible I choose to accept, reject or modify them, just as if they were an external critic.

Generally, if we listen too closely to these internal opinions we learn to judge ourselves, the people around us and circumstances through their lenses and they rapidly kill motivation. What they desire is the safety of our inaction. Absorbing all this negativity is really tiring, and it’s little wonder that under such pressure, only the internally strong and resilient maintain motivation unwaveringly. Reassuringly, when we become consciously aware of this torrent of “advice”, we are kind to ourselves, and understand that can we choose not to take their advice, we free ourselves from their shackles. I now think of my internal saboteurs more as a well-meaning, if mostly ill-informed, “focus group”, representing a particular view, who are trying to give me honest but often bad advice!

Re-framing your history and assumptions releases motivation

Your internal saboteurs reflect your history, and just like everyone else’s, it cannot be altered. What though, if you look to view your history a little differently, more objectively and non-judgementally? What if you now say to yourself, “My life is just a series of honest experiments intended to address interesting questions giving various informative outcomes”?

Just because sometimes our desired outcome happens, doesn’t make us inherently better people, and an outcome we didn’t want, doesn’t make us bad people either! It‘s not what happens to us that matters, it’s how we respond to it, that does. When considering our plans, and the motivation required to stick to them, we must also embrace and incorporate uncertainty (remember our internal saboteurs don’t relish change).

Maintaining motivation

Maintaining motivation over a long time isn’t easy; it takes practice and energy, but it's definitely worth the effort. Once we learn to raise our non-judgemental awareness, choose to learn from each life experience, and embrace adaptability, we begin to release the highly competent and powerful person inside us all of us. We are less distracted, live and work more freely, more effectively and enjoyably. Our motivation and focus "superpowers" develop, and almost inevitably we become more effective.

Imagine for a moment what an organisation would be like, if its staff, collaborators, partners and customers, in fact everyone in its ecosystem, lived, worked and contributed to a culture where feeling motivated was the norm? What then might they achieve?

Dr Gary Coulton is founder and CEO of Adaptive Intelligence Consulting, Convenor or the Adaptive Intelligence Collaboration and an Associate Consultant for Denison Europe and KeyHubs.