Last week I explained that looking at a person’s track record and how they brought people together to create a team would help you identify great leaders. However, you’re probably aware that there have been many people who have a track record, brought a team together but later down the line the impact they were making came to a standstill.
To ensure that this doesn’t happen, we want to look at the simple calculation;
Motivation + Habits = Success
Let’s look at motivation first. This can be grouped into two categories; extrinsic and intrinsic motivation.
- Extrinsic Motivation: To be motivated by reward or to avoid punishment.
- Intrinsic Motivation: To be motivated by something that is personally rewarding to you.
Knowing what motivates people is very important as this is what will help them get on their way to forming good habits. Motivation comes in various forms such as Mastery, Autonomy and Purpose mentioned by Danial Pink in his book ‘Drive’. As well as these, it could be wanting to develop a skill, or possibly just recognition for the task and of course, some are purely motivated by money.
As you can see, there are a few different ways of motivating your leaders. This means that what works for some, may not work for others. Someone motivated by money can be given a bonus, or if they would rather develop a skill they would really appreciate the opportunity to learn how to do it well. Another point to make is that people may also have more than one motivational value so identifying what these are is important.
Why motivation itself will not create success
When we get motivated, we set out on a journey for success, but do we reach the final goal? The reason why more often than not we would fail is because when we rely on pure motivation, eventually our motivation runs out. What happens when we don’t want to do it for more money, or the purpose isn’t there?
Why motivation and habits will create success
The habits we create will help us to the finish line and we need to make sure we maintain these habits, or from a coaching perspective, support people to maintain their habits. You have to consider what is going to be the key habit breakers out there e.g for two hours each morning I can work on X, but if you’ve been taken from this blocked time then the habit has gone. If this habit was shared then it could possibly be avoided to take you away from your two hours, or at least support could be given to give you two hours somewhere else.
If you manage to get the equation of Motivation + Habit = Success correct, you will be successful. It will take time and this is why not everyone is successful.
Having a Life and Performance Coach would help you get motivated. At KAI Teacher, the first area we would look at is helping you understand what motivates you. We would discuss your core values and look at where you may be in regards to your teaching career and where you want to be. We then analyse your strengths and weaknesses and help you develop an overarching goal to achieve over a given period. From there, we would have sessions with key goals broken down into action steps for you to achieve. This would be very beneficial for those who struggle to maintain their habits.
[…] wrote a blog called Motivation + Habits = Success and in this blog I spoke about how we can quite easily become motivated but the difficulty is […]