MOTIVATING GIVES ENERGY TO CHANGE

“PSYCHOLOGY OF EMOTIONS” column by Diego Ingrassia – “The practice of coaching in the age of stress”
for PSICOLOGIA CONTEMPORANEA – Stress – no. 269, September-October 2018 – GIUNTI EDITORE

If you want to build a ship, don’t gather your men together to give them orders, to explain every detail, to show them where to find everything. If you want to build a ship, make the desire for the sea arise in the hearts of your men. There is a lot of wisdom and also strategic thinking in these words of Saint-Exupéry, an excellent starting point for addressing the topic of motivation.

We usually think of motivations as the ‘petrol’ of our actions, what gives us the drive, but they represent so much more.
Our motivations represent our desires, our values, our parameters of judgement, the lenses through which we view the world.
The choices we make in life. Why leave a prestigious and perhaps well-paid job for a place that has no such characteristics? Why might what makes sense and is important to us seem superfluous or of little value to someone else? Why do we experience some situations as conflicting, when other people value those same situations quite differently? If we think about it, these are some of the most important topics we address duringcoaching sessions.

The answer is that things that may seem absurd in the eyes of others find precise meaning when observed through the lens of our motivations, and it is precisely through this lens that we must listen and understand the representation of the world of those in front of us. Our motivations are formed as we grow up, they are influenced by the upbringing we received, the environment we grew up in, the school we attended and the friendships we had.
Strong experiences, capable of leaving a mark destined to be consolidated: “motivational levers” that will accompany us for the rest of our lives, a sort of trademark characteristic of each person. Qualities that we will try to pass on to our children, in the knowledge that they will be able to set the right direction for their lives. Values that we will look for in the people with whom we will form strong relationships.
But they will also be the source of conflicts when faced with people who will be unwilling to recognise these values or who will even trample them underfoot. Reflections that help us broaden our view of motivations: entities that are not easily negotiable, a condensation of our deepest desires, our expectations, sometimes our fears.

The 6 MOTIVATIONAL LEVIES.

According to Eduard Spranger there are 6 motivational levers: theoretical, utilitarian, individualistic, aesthetic, social, traditional.
Theoretical motivation expresses the desire to increase one’s knowledge and the fear of passing oneself off as incompetent.
Utilitarian motivation, the desire to gain concrete benefits and the fear of wasting resources.
Individualistic motivation seeks leadership, visibility, prestige and fears anonymity: being one of many.
Aesthetic motivation indicates the need for harmony in relationships and in life situations; it shuns conflict and tense situations.
Social motivation embodies the desire to be helpful to others and the fear of coming across as selfish and indifferent.
Lastly, traditional motivation expresses the desire for consistency and the fear of not being in the right value groove. Touching the right motivational lever is one of the simplest, and at the same time powerful, ways of getting in tune with our interlocutor’s ‘world view’.
In order for feedback to trigger a process of change and growth, it has to touch his motivational levers, otherwise it will be perceived as something extraneous or unimportant.

Philip K. Dick, the famous science fiction novelist who inspired the cult film Blade Runner, argued that ‘reality is only a point of view, and the most powerful tool to manipulate it is the control of words’.
Many studies on strategic communication have investigated this aspect and Spranger’s model, applied to communication, can also become an important tool for our work.

Our motivational levers, as we have seen, are intimately linked to our strongest values, and so we are used to taking it for granted that what motivates us must also motivate others – which not only does not work, but risks leading us to make glaring mistakes.
When communicating to an audience of people, in order to be effective and get the message across to everyone, we have to try to use a rather broad spectrum of motivational levers; when we are in front of a single person, on the other hand, it is important to get in tune with his or her values.

The ability to touch the right motivational lever is crucial in order to open doors that might otherwise remain inexorably closed.
In private life we often go with people with whom we share motivations and values, while in professional life this is almost never possible.
The only thing we can do is to recognise and respect the motivational levers of our interlocutors, even if they differ from our own.

How do we recognise the motivations of others?.
A famous sentence by Ludwig Wittgenstein can give us inspiration: ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world’.
We build our vocabulary around our values; the words we use and that return often, like a leitmotif, in our speeches, are a valuable clue to understanding the worldview of the person in front of us, their values and desires, levers that will drive their motivation. The key competence to be developed is therefore listening.
Decisive in this respect is the starting mindset: in order to develop this important competence we must be able to trace the frame of reference of our interlocutor and not take it for granted that it coincides with our own. Listening in order to fully understand the real needs, the implicit and unstated premises.

When a manager states that professional growth is important to him, what does he mean? Is he talking about economic growth? Of role? Of competence? Of responsibility? For each of us the word ‘growth’ has an obvious meaning, it indicates a precise direction, it is therefore essential to be able to understand what the idea of growth represents in the world view of our interlocutor.

The most useful tool for discovering the levers of the latter are evidently the questions, and in particular the open-ended questions addressed to the future: “What do you expect?”, “How do you see yourself in a year’s time?”, “What needs to happen to be able to say ‘I made the right choice’?”.
Questions, however, are only a tool, they cannot be the starting point. The starting point is an exploratory attitude, a curious mind interested in understanding the world through the lens of one’s interlocutor.
Something similar to what Marcel Proust imagined before he wrote that ‘The true voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in having new eyes’.