Reality is negotiable
Motivation is a seemingly obvious tool in a successful performance arsenal. Who can doubt that motivation is an essential component of any successful enterprise? It seems beyond obvious as a staple of executive coaching psychology.
But is it?
The idea of motivation implicitly points to there being some barrier to overcome.
If there is a barrier to move, a force is required to remove it. The barrier in our minds might be a lack of knowledge or self-esteem, the perceived difficulty of the task, other people who doubt us, the competition, bad luck, or some other undefined form of resistance. What if there were no barrier?
Almost by definition, some activities that we feel are of value have inertia associated with them, and we need a motivational push to start the engine. Something is holding us back, and we need a force to overcome that. We may call that sometimes-elusive force motivation.
What happens if we remove the barrier?
Brussel Sprouts and Chocolate Cake
I have an aversion to Brussels sprouts. They are my least favourite vegetable (that I know of). When I was a child, my parents gave me a speech about how healthy Brussels sprouts were and said that even though I didn’t like the taste, they were packed full of nutrients and would support my health, longevity and other wonderful things I have forgotten after all these years. I wasn’t doubting the value of Brussels sprouts to my health—I just didn’t want to eat them. I had to force myself. One day when I was seven, I went on strike. I wouldn’t eat my Brussels sprouts. Dinner was usually at six and bedtime at seven. I told my parents I was not eating Brussels sprouts anymore. They said I wasn’t leaving the dinner table until I did. At about 10:45 p.m., they conceded defeat and sent me to bed, never to serve or even raise the issue of Brussels sprouts ever again. I did not have the motivation, nor could my parents provide it, to move me to consume Brussels sprouts, which would have unambiguously benefitted my health.
Many people frame things in their lives through the lens of the “Brussels sprout”. They think some behaviour is good for them but just don’t seem to be able to take action. There appears to be some aversion, known or unknown.
To overcome this aversion, they search for “motivation”, which often turns out to be thinly disguised self-bullying.
I love chocolate mud cake. Slightly warm and with a bit of vanilla ice cream. I can eat piece after piece until, an hour later, regret and an aching stomach set in. I don’t need any motivation to get me to have a piece of chocolate mud cake if it is on offer. It’s as if the motivation engine is part of the chocolate cake itself. Rather, I need motivation to stop at one piece. There is no barrier to that activity except an upset stomach down the road.
What if we interacted with the things in life that are of value to us but which we are not taking action on as though they are chocolate cake rather than Brussels sprouts? Or, more specifically, let’s genetically modify the Brussels sprouts so they taste like chocolate cake. The ideal solution.
That sounds all very well, but how do we do that?
I had a coaching client say to me once that they wanted to encourage their child to find out what they were interested in and then to pursue those things with passion. On the surface, it seems to be a fairly conventional, positive approach by a caring and highly functional parent. And it is. However, it may not be a fully optimized approach.
Let’s look at this in a bit more detail. Let’s take an example of a child who is doing something they’re not that interested in. Let’s say it’s a complicated subject in mathematics that doesn’t, on the surface, hold their interest. In this particular situation, the child’s best bet might appear to be just grinning and bearing it with a view of the ultimate outcome—a good mark in that subject, where that might lead them, and what opportunities might come from having a good mark in that subject in the future—to help them manage the inherent difficulty or lack of interest in the subject.
This child might have no choice but to engage with that subject, for whatever reason. One child in this situation might think that yes, this subject is inherently boring or uninteresting compared to art or science, for example, and that’s just a simple fact. Or they might dislike their teacher for whatever reason and switch off the engine because of that.
Another child might have a more abstract thinking process and say, “Okay, I can see how other people may, for whatever reason, be interested in this, but I’m not. So, this just happens to be uninteresting for me”, rather than the subject being uninteresting as an objective fact. Either way, the child is often left with purely a means-to-an-end philosophy, as we mentioned earlier, such as: “I just have to put up with this as best as I can to get the final result, which will help my future.”
But let’s engage with this from a different direction. Imagine that this child has an inspirational teacher who, on the first day of going through this material, says to the class as homework is assigned, “This material we’re studying today is directly linked to how spacecraft are able to take off. These equations are integral to how spacecraft work, and without the equations we’re learning today, the spacecraft wouldn’t take off. So, before you work on any of the homework, I’d like you to watch this YouTube video clip, which explains how this mathematical material is essential to space flight.”
Now imagine this child going home and watching the YouTube video and slowly seeing the linkages between the homework and the space program. It’s quite likely that the child starts to associate this formerly extremely boring material with “space stuff” or the space program and is likely, at the very least, to be a little less bored and a little less negative about this subject than they were earlier. The subjective perception that this material is inherently boring may be changed slightly, if not radically. And with more attentional focus on other aspects of this material, an intrinsic motivation to engage with the material is likely to be nurtured and potentially catch fire.
There is an old story about three bricklayers. The first one is asked, “What are you doing?” He replies, “I’m laying bricks.” The second one is asked, “What are you doing?” He replies, “I’m building a church.” The third bricklayer is asked, “What are you doing?” He replies, “I’m building a place to connect with God.” Thus, our attentional focus on specific aspects of a task, event, or situation can materially affect and influence our experience of it and our willingness to engage with it.
Reality is negotiable and not necessarily fixed on all circumstances. We therefore want to hunt for our own “space programs” in anything we engage with. We are then not dependant on the natural motivation that will be there for only a minority of things we can interact with in the world, which will depend on our personality, our upbringing, our past experiences and other variables. In that case, with this approach, we can transcend all that and develop a natural drive, interest, passion and curiosity about anything and not be dependent on whether the task is naturally linked to something we would be interested in based on our past ideas or experiences.
A personal example
Let’s look at a personal example related to this. I was engaged with a number of online projects for a period of time. In order to move those projects forward, we utilized the services of some well-known companies in digital marketing and associated areas. After many months of engagement, I came to the conclusion that the company I’d chosen wasn’t thinking deeply enough about the project or seeing it at the level I wanted them to, which was due to my deep familiarity with the subject. I endeavoured to rectify this with clearer communication and a narrower brief of tasks.
None of these approaches felt satisfactory. In the end, I decided I would need to acquire a base level of knowledge in the areas I was contracting for so I could set effective goals and standards as well as effectively manage and notice when projects went off track. The initial issue that presented itself was my total lack of natural interest in and inclination toward digital marketing and its associated constructs. I had pre-existing negative associations with this field of endeavour. One approach I could have taken, which would have been a conventional approach, would be to tell myself that even though this material is not interesting and is boring to me inherently, at least it would be for a good cause and the outcomes would be worth the “pain” of the process. That would have been a classic no-pain, no-gain paradigm which nearly every one of my coaching clients over the years subconsciously brings to the table initially.
However, this was not the direction I chose. My end objective was to be able to engage with the process of learning digital marketing, whereby I found it enjoyable, exciting and interesting to the same degree I would engage with tasks and situations which I’m naturally interested in. Initially, this felt like potentially trying to do a mental trick or to use some sort of false positive thinking, etc. However, starting with this objective in mind, I picked the area of digital marketing that I found the least interesting and decided to use that as my first challenge of creating an interesting psychological ecosystem to engage with the learning process. The area that I chose was copy-writing and I engaged with exploring the idea of doing a copy-writing online course that I found, through this new lens. Within an hour, I’d started to see aspects of the reality of doing a copy-writing course that began to spark curiosity, interest and passion. The idea of using words to guide attention, the sequencing of ideas, the pacing of ideas, appealing to a person’s emotion following by appealing to a person’s intellect, to guide them, to share the writer’s world and to excite and motivate them, to engage with the ideas the writer is putting forth – this and dozens of other perspectives began to reveal themselves purely as a result of directing my lens to looking for them. There was not a question about whether I could find these things, but what they actually were. I didn’t ask the question: “Is there any interesting copy-writing I could latch onto?” Which could very well have led to an answer of “no” after a few minutes of no ideas forthcoming. I instead asked the question: “What are the dimensions and aspects of this that I could become passionate about?” And thus a reality that was already there began revealing itself to me, rather than it being some trick to con myself.
Later that day, after dinner, I began to engage with the first lesson in the program and felt zero friction and resistance but curiosity and a growing excitement. This process continued over a number of days until an interesting event occurred. I’d recently bought approximately a dozen new books on psychological concepts that I was very excited to devour. They arrived and I put them all on the kitchen counter in a pile. Looking at them, I felt an almost irresistible urge to devour the first book. After dinner that day, I found myself deciding what I would like to do. It became almost a surprise to me that I walked straight past the pile the books, which were inherently deeply interesting to me and which I’ve had a passion for since adolescence, to go straight to the computer to excitedly engage with the next lesson in the online copy-writing course. Thus, I had initially artificially created an attentional focus in an energising, functional perspective, which had become intrinsic to me quite quickly. The interest in the copy-writing was effortless, and the deep irony that something I had constructed—a reality I’d constructed—had now become even more powerful than my normal intrinsic motivation to read the new books that had just arrived.
Reality is negotiable. Don’t wait for or look for motivation. You don’t need it—you can start now. Like alchemy, you can turn lead into gold at will if you choose. Find your chocolate Brussels sprouts right now.
