Motivating others requires thought

“These kids just aren’t motivated!” The teacher was 100% right!

The teacher I was coaching is an amazing teacher. She loves her students and wants them to be academically successful. She has over 20 years of teaching under her belt and has spent a lot of her personal time and energy to support her students. She is very clear about her expectations for them: she tells them what she expects. She tells her students it’s their choice to do the work and if they want to be successful in life, they have to study, do their school work and go to college!

Our work at Generation Text Online is to provide a social, emotional and psychological framework to school administrators, teachers and their students in order to help students reach their highest academic potential. Our organization offers, professional development, teacher coaching, mentor programs, and classroom curriculum for SEL and for Mental Health. Our consultants also work in Corporate America coaching executives and mid-level managers.

At Generation Text Online, we always begin our training by asking questions of educators. We focus on observing and listening to teachers and administrators to ensure we really understand what it is they are faced with each and every day. As I listened to this teacher explain her expectations to her students I thought of the adults I work with sometimes. My experience in workforce development and corporate culture training, has helped me to understand that this generation has a much shorter attention span and many times long-term expectations being asked of 10 year olds at school can be overwhelming even for adults.

In today’s learning environment there is an enormous amount of educational material to cover and teachers have to carefully plan to ensure their students are adequately prepared for state testing. Each week is carefully mapped out with daily lesson plans. In order for the teacher to feel successful, he/she must have specific expectations for students. Typical expectations include not talking in class, completing homework, participating in class, completing classwork and scoring well on tests.

The teacher I was coaching uses two strategies for motivating students. She uses a reward system for students who meet or exceeded her expectations. When expectations were not met, she assigned consequences to her students such as pointing out their mistakes, telling them she was disappointed in them, lecturing them about the need to do better and even assigning lunch detention and taking away recess or gym.

Neither of these strategies were motivating her students.

In my experience of coaching educators and administrators, the two most commonly used methods to motivate adolescents are rewards and consequences.

So how do we motivate others?

If we want to understand how to motivate a human being, we must look at the science of psychology to understand why certain strategies are effective and why certain strategies are not effective.

Motivation is determined by one’s personal emotions.

Emotions are what determines how individuals feel, think, act, and react. If we want to persuade or motivate someone to do something, we have to consider their emotions.

Study of emotional and mental wellness, allows us to see the connection between emotions and motivation. When you focus on emotions, the task of motivating others is quite simple.

Imagine a teacher or any corporate leader decides to be purposeful in his/her daily interactions. What if that decision (regardless of what anyone says or how they act) was to focus throughout the day on the idea that anyone he/she had an interaction with should be made to feel supported, appreciated, thanked, happy, and empowered?

Encouragement and support are extremely effective in motivating students. At Generation Text Online we often notice adolescents view a difficult task as so overwhelming that unless someone can offer some personal guidance or a step by step explanation, they cannot mentally unblock themselves to get started on a particular task.

Many adolescents do not have the ability to articulate why they can’t get motivated. It’s almost like there is a fog that they can’t see through but they don’t know it is fog- they just can’t see. It is only when an adult offers patience and support, attention, and an inquiry style of communication, can that adult help them. You can’t lecture someone into being motivated. You have to focus on uncovering how they are feeling in order to identify why they are having trouble getting motivated. Sometimes I observe school administrators, teachers and mid-level corporate managers attempt to motivate adolescents or their staff by lecturing about what they need to accomplish. Many times a teacher or a manager’s interactions with others cause negative emotions (even if that was not our intention) and cause mental and emotional shutdown.

When a human being experiences positive feelings it is easy to feel motivated.

If you are teachable and you want to learn how to motivate others, contact us at www.GenerationTextOnline.com for information on a simple framework that will provide you with the mindset, strategies and techniques to motivate others!