Читать книгу Mastering Motivation: Motivating Yourself and Others With NLP - Damian Inc. Hamill - Страница 4

You may be reading this eBook for a number of reasons. Perhaps you are an individual who wants to be able to get more motivated to do stuff generally. It may be that there is a particular task or project or opportunity at hand that you want to increase your motivation levels to achieve.

Alternatively, you may be interested in discovering skills to motivate others – as a manager, parent, coach, team leader, HR professional or the like. Whatever your interest, I believe that this eBook will give you a new way to understand motivation and a structure to explore and evolve some of the factors that we believe are critical in appreciating this precious state.

Yes, you read that correctly. I described motivation as a ‘precious state’.

I say this for two reasons – firstly because motivation is, in my opinion, precious – it is of enormous value when used correctly. In a moment, we will look at some research that confirms this.

Secondly, I describe it as a ‘state’ as it is an experience, or an awareness of oneself at a particular point in time. When we use the word ‘motivation’ we talk about it as a ‘thing’ – something that can simply be bought, or collected or manufactured like some sort of commodity. I want to encourage you instead to think of motivation as an experience or awareness that emerges for a person or group when the correct conditions are present. It cannot be reliably bought, bullied, seduced or otherwise coerced into existence. Later on we will be exploring what those conditions for the spontaneous and natural emergence of motivation may be.

But first of all – why is motivation important?

Well, at a very personal level, motivation feels good. It is enjoyable to experience the energy, the congruence, the flow and the commitment that we have when we are motivated to do something. It’s generally, not always, a pleasant state to be in. We feel alive, invigorated and more fully human.

The more cynical might say:

“So what? That all sounds a bit ‘New Agey’, ambiguous or fluffy to me. People in a work environment, for example, are paid to be there, to do a job and that should be all the motivation they need. If they feel good, that’s a bonus, but no-one is entitled to more than a day’s pay for a day’s work.”

We would suggest that such a perspective is perhaps not the full picture and certainly isn’t going to bring out the best in people. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that, contrary to what many people perceive, in many circumstances financial rewards simply do not work as the sole means of motivating people – indeed they may have the opposite effect. Motivation is a much more complicated phenomenon and understanding it well, rather than relying on corralling a bunch of paid recruits, pays clear dividends at the bottom line.

In 2007/08 the consultancy firm, Towers Perrin, carried out a study looking at 90,000 staff in companies in 18 countries around the world. Their research concluded that on average:

•20% of staff in any company were what they termed ‘Fully Engaged’ – that is not only doing their job but doing it willingly, happily, with commitment and ready to go the extra mile.

•40% of staff were what they termed ‘Enrolled’ – that is they did their job perfectly adequately but did not display the additional commitment of the Fully Engaged group.

•38% of the staff were what Tower Perrin categorised at ‘Disenchanted’ or ‘Disengaged’ – present in body but not in spirit and exhibiting no enthusiasm whatsoever for their work and doing the minimum possible.

We can perhaps assume that the remaining 2% were so demoralised that they were comatose and unable even to fill in their survey!

The fascinating thing is that these measures of engagement clearly and directly correlated with hard-nosed measures of corporate performance. This same study showed that the organisations with the highest levels of engagement showed an average increase in Operating Income of 19%, a 28% increase in Earnings Per Share (EPS) and 90% of the staff declared themselves happy to remain with the company. Contrast this with the organisations with the lowest engagement levels who showed a 32% drop in Operating Income, an 11% decline in EPS and a full 50% of staff wanting to leave for alternative employment!

If we look at the labels Towers Perrin used – ‘Fully Engaged’, ‘Enrolled’ and ‘Disenchanted or Disengaged’ - we can see that we are clearly talking about motivation under slightly different names.

This research shows that in human terms, in business terms and in every sense – motivation matters!

So, let’s explore and understand a little more about this enigmatic concept.

Let’s start by considering the origin of the actual word. My trusty online dictionary tells me that ‘motivation’ as a word came into existence around about 1870-1875 and the root of the word is ‘motive. We all probably appreciate that a ‘motive’ is a reason. Consequently, we might say that ‘motivation’ is:

An urge to act, inspired by a reason.

So what could those reasons be?

One of the lenses I will be using to answer that question is Neuro-linguistic Programming, or ‘NLP’ for short. You may have heard of this approach but it’s fine if you haven’t – you will still get useful information out of this eBook. One of the great strengths of NLP is that it gives us skills to look at the structure of experience – how things happen. This is very different from navel gazing and speculating on ‘why’ things happen (although ‘why’ can sometimes be interesting too!).

By being able to look at and identify structure, we can figure out how useful things happen and learn how to make them happen more often, or at the times we want. Alternatively, if we keep getting results in life that we don’t want, we can figure out what we keep doing to cause them to happen (even if we didn’t realise we were actively causing these events) and we can interrupt those patterns.

Effectively, in NLP terms, we move from being At Effect – perceiving ourselves to be victims of events, to being At Cause – aware of our power to actively influence the world around us.

If you already have some knowledge of NLP you may know that there is a concept surrounding motivation in NLP that people have a consistent motivational ‘style’ - either ‘Towards’ or ‘Away From’. This is one of NLP’s ‘Meta-programs’ – a group of high level, unconscious filters that influence how people process information from the world around them and respond to it.

People with a ‘Towards’ motivation style may well exist in a comparably comfortable ‘here and now’ but create representations of even more compelling possibilities that they feel motivated to move towards by taking appropriate action.

Those with an ‘Away From’ motivation style, on the contrary, may be content to sit in the status quo, until or unless something develops that makes them uncomfortable and they then choose to act to move Away From the adverse situation. We have no quibble with this concept at all but we will not be focusing on it because we don’t believe it is anything like the full story. We want to give you something richer.

As we look at the concept of motivation through these NLP filters, we will offer you an opportunity from time to time to pause to reflect and carry out a particular task or activity. This will help you to apply what you learn in the context of an example that is meaningful to you. If you prefer to read straight through first time that is okay as well, but we recommend that you read through this eBook again at a later date in the more interactive manner just described. When we do suggest you carry out an activity, it will be useful for you to have some writing materials to hand to jot down some thoughts and information.

Perhaps now would be a good time to take our first pause to think.

Now, let’s help you consolidate some of these ideas by considering the following …

Activity 1 – Experiencing Your Own State of Motivation: Physiology

Earlier, I described motivation as a ‘State’ - a subjective personal experience that can exist at a particular time. You have probably experienced the state of motivation many times in the past without actually taking the time to really explore it. It was there though. It inspired you to act and you acted – that was all there was to it.

Let’s take a few minutes now for a more considered examination. What I would like you to do is this – think of an occasion when you felt really motivated to do something. It doesn’t matter what context it was – work, school, leisure, a social occasion or whatever – as long as it was an occasion when there was something that was to be done and you felt really “up for it”, committed to getting it done - aligned and congruent.

Got one?

Now, take a moment or two just to really experience that time again - as vividly and as fully as possible, as if it is happening right now.

First of all, I want you to notice your physiology – I mean by that your physical awareness.

•What is your posture like? Upright, slouched, leaning in a particular direction, aligned or off-centre?

•What about your muscles? Are they relaxed? Tense? Somewhere in between?

•Is there a difference in such awareness in different parts of your body? For example, is one place relaxed and another place a focus of greater tension?

•Where is your gaze directed? Ahead of you? Above or below eye level? Off to the left or right or along a centre-line?

•Now notice your breathing – what speed is it? Is it deep or shallow? Whereabouts are you breathing from – low in your abdomen, middle of your chest or higher up in your chest?

•Consider now what sense of energy you have in your body? Do you feel energetic or flat or somewhere in between?

•Is there a sense of movement in your body, as if you are being urged to move in a certain direction? If so, what direction do you feel moved to go in?

Once you have noted all that, let’s explore a little bit more.

Activity 2 – Experiencing Your Own State of Motivation: “Mental Picture”

I asked you to be aware of where your gaze was oriented. Wherever that was, just allow your gaze to go there and allow a mental picture of whatever it was you felt motivated to do come to your mind – just let whatever comes to you visually come to you.

Good.

Now, it doesn’t really matter to me what the content of that mental picture is – what you actually see. What I am interested in is how you see it – the specific qualities or building blocks that make up the picture. I’m going to ask you a few questions about the picture and I’d like you to be curious to explore the image and simply make a note of what the answers are, so please ensure you have your pen and paper to hand.

Here goes…

•When you give your attention to the picture I’d like you to notice whether the picture is in colour or in black and white. Just take a moment or two to notice and write down your answer.

•Now bring the picture to mind again and notice whether it’s three dimensional or flat. Again, just write down the answer.

•For this next question I want you to consider where you are in the picture. Can you see yourself in the event as if you are watching from the outside? Or are you viewing the experience as a participant – in your own skin, so to speak, and watching through your own eyes? Take a moment to check.

•Next, I want you to notice how boundaried or expansive the image is. Is it a full, panoramic vista or does it have a frame or some sort of boundary that confines it?

•Now, let’s think about movement. Is the image a still picture, like a snapshot, or is there movement in it, like a motion picture?

•Notice the distance. How far away from you is the picture? Close? Middle distance? Far off? If you could estimate a rough distance what would it be?

•When you have determined distance think about its location. Is the image directly in front of you or off to the left or right? Is it higher than eye level or down below you? Or a combination of a number of these orientations? For example, above eye level but off to the right.

•Having noticed and noted down those factors, I want you to notice its brightness. Is it a bright image or darker in nature?

•And finally, focus. Is the image sharply focussed or is it blurred, fuzzy or hazy?

Ok, so you should now have a list of the various visual characteristics of the mental picture you have created of a motivating experience.

Activity 3 – Experiencing What Doesn’t Motivate You

Having completed that, we are going to do the same for another experience. Think now of an experience that doesn’t motivate you at all. Something that leaves you cold, that you would really rather not have to do, or something that at one level you want to have happen, to get done, but that you just don’t seem to be able to motivate yourself to do. Once you have such an experience in mind I want you again to go through the same process.

First of all, notice your physiology. What is it like this time? What is your posture like? What is the angle, alignment and orientation of your body? Where does the direction of your gaze naturally go to? What degree of tension or relaxation exists in your body and are there any variations? What speed, depth and location is your breathing? What about a sense of energy or movement? Just notice all of this without needing to judge or analyse.

Again, whatever the example of a demotivating experience you have been using - make a picture of it in your mind’s eye and we will explore the qualities of this picture too.

•Is the picture in colour or in black and white?

•Is it three dimensional or flat?

•Where are you in the picture? Can you see yourself in the event as if you are watching from the outside? Or are you viewing the experience as a participant – in your own skin, so to speak, and watching through your own eyes? Take a moment to check.

•I want you to notice how boundaried or expansive the image is. Is it a full, panoramic vista or does it have a frame or some sort of boundary that confines it?

•Let’s think about movement. Is the image a still picture or is there movement in it, like a motion picture?

•How far away from you is the picture? Close? Middle distance? Far off? If you could estimate a rough distance what would it be?

•Now think about its location. Is the image directly in front of you or off to the left or right? Is it higher than eye level or down below you? Or a combination of a number of these orientations?

•Now, I want you to notice its brightness. Is it a bright image or darker in nature?

•And finally, focus. Is the image sharply focussed or is it blurred, fuzzy or hazy?

If this has gone smoothly we should now have ‘calibrated’ – that is, measured the characteristics – of two very different states – motivated and de-motivated. We have investigated and recorded their physiology and we have explored the qualities of at least the visual aspects of how you represent the experiences in your own mind. There may have been sounds and other sensory awarenesses as well but let’s not be too ambitious for the moment.

Activity 4 – Comparing and Contrasting Your States

Let’s set the two lists side by side and compare them.

What do you notice? Where are they similar and where are they different?

Now, it’s quite likely that there will be differences between the two both in terms of physiology and the mental pictures you made.

First of all, look at the qualities of the mental pictures.

A number of the qualities of the motivating experience are likely to be different from those of the non-compelling one. For example, one experience might be in colour and the other black and white. One picture might be far off in the distance and the other up close. Many of the qualities may be similar and that’s fine, but it’s likely that there will be certain key qualities that are different.

If you have never explored this before this might come as a little bit of a surprise – hopefully a pleasant one – to realise that the way you represent different types of experiences have qualitative differences. It’s also likely that they will be consistent.

In other words, all motivating experiences are likely to have similar qualities to each other for you and all non-motivating or demoralising experiences are likely to be visually ‘coded’ in the same way. In NLP we called these subtle distinctions Sub-modalities.

Now, a question that might just be on your mind is this – if we swapped these ‘sub-modalities’ around, changed the characteristics of the demoralising experience to match those of the motivating experience, would we suddenly find ourselves more motivated?

It’s a good question and the answer is – very possibly. Indeed there are NLP exercises that suggest you do just that. We want to take a slightly more sophisticated approach, however.

We think that physiology and sub-modalities – the two components of any state – can be a useful snapshot of our degree of motivation at any point in time. For this reason it can be interesting to explore them as a form of measurement so to speak.

If we become more enthused about something that didn't used to inspire us, we can expect to find that the sub modalities of that experience change accordingly. However it's often not enough simply to try shifting our mental pictures around in the hope that our motivation will magically increase. Expecting such transformation to reliably happen is like expecting the psychological tail to wag the dog. Even if such a change occurred in the short term, it is unlikely that the sub-modality changes would stick unless some greater, more systemic change had taken place.