How to find motivation when it’s gone on vacations

Ever felt at work that you are stuck in first or second gear or you are on those days when your motivation is idling. Well, it’s normal. No one can sustain 290 (give or take) days a year at full throttle. If you can you are either alien, on crack cocaine or you are my partner Lauren. For the rest of us humans (or non-addicted individuals) when boredom or stagnation strike there’s an easy formula to counter that and remain productive. Find what’s your adrenaline fix. Motivation doesn’t come from outside, although external events can trigger motivation. Motivation emanates from within. So if you don’t find it, no one will do it for you.

What motivate me is:

Ideas

New projects (tightly related to point one)

Crisis situations (or any fire that needs to be put out)

Knowing what makes your heart rate go faster is the solution and finding out what that is, is easier than the formula: pay attention to yourself, be introspective. Throughout the day we all experience a wide range of emotions (faint or strong). Identifying those emotions and singling them out will get you halfway through the process.

The second step consists in analogizing that situation to past experiences and linking that to your tasks, duties and/or responsibilities. Which ones awake in you similar feelings? Got it? You’re good to go. Still nothing? Then you either need to keep thinking or look for a new job. In my case, when I have nothing to do I think about things I could change, create or develop. Sometimes it will be something too unrealistic to implement in real life and will end up as just an idea, sometimes it’s something that can be trimmed to match it. [See this article I wrote an year ago]

The other driver for motivation is a factor that will vary depending on your personality type. These drivers can be either useful or detrimental to your performance, depending on how you decide to use them. They come in two different flavors (which are the two sides of the same token):

self exigency

self depreciation

The first one is tied to a powerful Super-ego. If you don’t want to deal with Freud let’s just say that it’s for people that want conformism to stay away from them, critical with their performance and who feel a need to excel.

The second one is related to an Ego that feels underpowered when faced with the Super-ego. Non-freudian version: people who are insecure and tend to feel inferior when comparing themselves to others.

Both are very related, but we are not going there today. If you belong to the first group,  that feeling that you could have done better (even after a receiving a waterfall of compliments) or that you are not giving a %110 is what’s in store for you. And it’s unavoidable. If you belong to the latter, the feeling that you are doing everything wrong and that Mike in the cubicle next to you is always fantastic (and you look like an untrained monkey in a spaceship) is then your paradigmatic example of what goes on in your head.

If you paid attention (specially to the words in italic) you’ll realize that both groups have a similar content in their axioms but slightly changed in the way they are laid out. That is due to the way our Ego interacts with our Super-ego and Id. It’s just variations in the same type of unconscious dynamics.

Back to being pragmatic, finding the harmonic way to connect steps 1 & 2 (finding your adrenaline fix and linking it to your job) with the second driver (your personality type) will equal to the conclusion of this post.

Once you found what makes you tick at work will enable you to switch gears as desired. You’ll feel motivated and self-empowered. This outcome applies to both personality types. It’s a loophole of the mind.

There’s one caveat though, there’s no recipe to connect the dots. This one is up to you, because it only applies to you.

This article does not pretend to englobe Motivation, that would be too presumptuous. It is just a quick way to practically find it when it’s lost or dormant. Feel free to add your grain of sand in the comments section.

Image credit Steve’s Stories

Technorati Tags: find, formula, Freud, how to, motivation, productivity, Work

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