Motivation Overview

Motivation is a fickle thing, so when coaching someone, it's important to understand their motivations and goals. There are two types of motivation: motivating someone to do their job and motivating them to achieve their personal goals. It's crucial to ask questions to help people remember and clarify their motivations. A study found that 41% of people were actively looking for jobs due to a lack of career conversation and coaching. The pandemic caused people's motivations to change, leading to a shift in career aspirations. When coaching someone, it's important to ask about their current situation, ideal state, and future goals to help them reconnect with their motivation. Motivation, even though one of our letters of our model is M in motivator, motivation high level is very, very fickle. You want to be very careful. When you're coaching, remember, everybody has some type of motivation or a goal. Sometimes people even forget what those are or where they want to go, and that's why we need to ask questions. So when you think about motivation, there are two types of motivation. You're motivating someone to the job, yet you're also motivating the person to get where they want to go, and hopefully those two coincide and can work together. So again, we have this framework that we talk about. Don't ever try to motivate until you first understand what motivates. In 2022, a great study was done in the fourth quarter by McKinsey. Very close to when this audio was created, 41% of people were actively looking for jobs due to a lack of career conversation and coaching. Think about that. Four out of every 10 employees. Now why did this occur? Now, there's a lot of reasons why it occurred. Here's an opinion. The pandemic stalled people's careers. We didn't go from, I want to become the VP because I'm a director. We typically, as a director, said, geez, I've got to stay home tomorrow, we're in a hybrid environment, are my kids going to be at school, are they going to be on the internet, do we have enough bandwidth? And people went into, for almost two, maybe three years, a defensive posture, not negatively, positively. And so then all of a sudden, we're coming out of this pandemic and people have changed. Let me give you further evidence of that. There is a company that we've worked with that had what is called an emerging leader program, training people how to become future managers. And after the pandemic, they had obviously stalled the program, 55% of their registered learners opted out. Their motivations had changed. They saw what management went through, it didn't appeal to them. People's motivations change. So when you're coaching someone, ask them, where are you at now? What's your ideal state? Where do you want to end up? What would you be doing? Really be inquisitive because your questions will trigger them to have self-aware and get their mind to explore. See, when people come out of tough times, we get into habits. That's why we as coaches help people revisit, reconnect, reattach to their motivation.