Make a habit of motivation

We’ve all described ourselves – or maybe even a colleague or friend – as lacking the motivation to do something at one time or another.

Motivation is the force which drives us to act; if we’re standing in the road and a bus is coming, our motivation for stepping out of the way is the fear of getting run over! Most people don’t struggle with short term motivation for imperative action, but our motivation can wane when the action is not ‘life or death’ or just takes place over a longer time period.

Motivation is important for business leaders, and many of us will have in our mind, or our business plan, goals such as ‘make more money’, ‘expand into more regions’, ‘become the leading organization in your field’. These kind of goals are extrinsic motivators which means that they are related to external sources or concerns. They can be great for kickstarting an ambition, as anyone who has lost weight for a big event or trained for a charity run can tell you! However, these type of motivators only really work in the short term; which again is why many people who lose weight for an event put it all back on again, and running shoes languish at the back of the cupboard after the charity run is over! The key to successful motivation long term is to move from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation which is the internal satisfaction gained by working towards or reaching a goal.

As a business leader, it can be helpful to consider the ‘why’ behind your business goals, to help you find that intrinsic motivation that will help you to stay focused on them long term. Maybe you initially wanted to make more money so that you could buy a bigger house and a fancy supercar (or to afford to put fuel in your normal car, at today’s prices!). Once you have achieved those goals, what is the intrinsic motivation to continue to increase your income? Perhaps you want to feel more secure about the future, and can relax and enjoy your life more with the knowledge that you and your family are financially secure? This would give you the intrinsic motivation to keep driving your business forward.

If your goal is to become the leading organization in your field, the extrinsic motivation for this might have originally been the recognition and status you would get from being considered the best of the best. However, once you have achieved that, perhaps sacrificing many other things to focus on it, how do you stay motivated to remain at the top? Perhaps you derive internal satisfaction from knowing that you are helping society by providing new innovation in your chosen field, making the world a better place, and people’s lives a little easier, brighter, or more fun? This would be the intrinsic motivation you need to carry on doing what you do.

If all this motivation sounds a bit effortful, there is a clever hack to let you shortcut some of these processes. Let’s go back to the bus analogy. When you were a child first learning to cross the road, it’s likely that extrinsic motivation was foremost in your mind as the bus was approaching ‘Oh no, I don’t want to get squashed!’. But over time as you grew into an adult, your actions became more automatic. Now you look both ways when crossing the road, and don’t step out in front of the bus because you have developed an automatic road safety habit! Around 40% of our daily behaviours are these kind of habitual behaviours, and by harnessing the power of habits we can bypass the need for motivation altogether. This can save us time and willpower (which is a finite resource), allowing us to just get on with the job in hand and saving our motivation stores to be used for other tasks.

You can apply habit forming to your regular business tasks in order to create a more streamlined and automatic approach to achieving your goals. For example if your goal is ‘expand into more regions’ you could develop habits such as:

• Spend 10 minutes each day researching potential opportunities in a different region
• Join in with regional business Twitter chats every week
• Check property listings in each region weekly to find potential new sites for expansion
• Email or call one potential new regional business contact per week

Scheduling and tracking these habits is important until they become automatic. You could block ‘habit time’ out in your diary each day, create a tick list to keep track of which habits you have completed each day, or for the example above it might be fun to print out a map at the start of the week and colour in each region as you complete the habits for it! You could even colour code it red, amber, and green depending on how well things are going in that region! By developing habits like this, you will not lose track of your overall goals amongst the day-to-day distractions of running a business, meaning you can save your motivation stores to help you overcome bigger hurdles.

But what happens if you do all of that, and can’t find any intrinsic motivation to achieve your business goals. This might be a sign that you have achieved all you wanted with your business, and that it’s time to move on to fresh challenges. Just make sure you look both ways for buses first.