Personal motivation: how to recognise and communicate it

Knowing how to identify and recognise the motivational levers that guide our own choices and behaviour and that of our interlocutors is fundamental to growing ourselves and making others grow. The ability to know how to touch the right motivational lever is crucial to be able to open the doors of an effective communication with others, through the choice of the correct language.

Motivation at work

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The labour market, over the last two years, has been characterised by a phenomenon that does not seem to be stopping and that has accelerated sharply in the post covid period: a boom of voluntary resignations by young people who suddenly decided to leave their jobs to change their lives, after having stopped to reflect – no doubt due to the long pandemic – on their role within the organisation and the purpose of their work. Very often, however, without finding an answer. And it is precisely this inability to recognise their true motivation that often sends them into crisis and leads them to make rash choices. Motivation is, in fact, a fundamental aspect in the process of change, it gives reasons for individual choices, strongly influences behaviour and becomes the key word on which the life – professional and personal – of each of us hinges. This is why knowing how to identify and recognise the motivations that guide our own and our interlocutors’ choices and behaviour is fundamental: to feel good about ourselves and at work. We talked about this with Diego Ingrassia, Executive Coach, CEO and Partner of I&G Management, who for over a year has been collaborating with Leonardo Assicurazioni on training issues in the field of emotional skills.

Personal motivation: do you know what it is?

“Motivation is the purchase of the will to do right away (timing is a determining factor, to understand whether a person is motivated or not), behind the drive of shared values,’ Ingrassia explains. It is no coincidence that I used the term buy, because motivation has a relational dynamic that is very much linked to business dynamics: it means being able to intercept the other person’s need, it means understanding what motivational lever moves him, to propose an idea, a project to him through his key. With an absolutely ethical, non-manipulative approach, i.e. aimed not simply at selling a product, but at being able to understand the interlocutor’s need in order to offer him a solution that satisfies him. This is particularly relevant in a consulting business. Touching the motivational lever of the other means having the curiosity to understand what moves him. We do not all have the same motivational levers.

We are all motivated: but by what? The six motivational levers

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“Many people do not know how to answer the question of what their motivation is, just as many managers do not know whether their people are motivated or not. In reality we are all motivated, the important thing is to find out by what. We often know very clearly what we do not want, but not so clearly what we do want. Chekhov said: ‘On birth certificates it is written where and when one comes into the world but the reason and purpose is never specified’.

According to the German educationalist Edward Spranger there are six motivational levers that drive us to act.

• The theoretical motivation expresses the desire to increase one’s knowledge and the fear of passing oneself off as incompetent.
• The utilitarian motivation, the desire to obtain concrete benefits and the fear of wasting resources.
• The individualistic motivation seeks leadership, visibility, prestige and fears anonymity, being one of the many.
• The aesthetic motivation indicates the need for harmony on a relational level and in life situations; it shuns conflict and tense situations.
• The social motivation embodies the desire to be of help to others and the fear of passing as selfish and indifferent.
• And finally the traditional motivation that expresses the desire for consistency and the fear of not being in the right line of values.

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. They are our trademark, what characterises us and accompanies us for the rest of our lives, and ultimately the values we try to pass on to our children. We all have one prevailing motivational lever that governs our lives and two others that help us make decisions. Three of the six are low. However, we often lack a method to understand which ones they might be. What is needed, therefore, is first of all a literacy process from an emotional and motivational point of view – we should start at an early age, at school – to learn to recognise motivations through language and then to be able to adapt our language to the value system of the person in front of us in order to communicate more effectively. In fact, people use language that is the result of their value system, so knowing how to recognise the words that people use and knowing how to place them within a motivational panel, makes all the difference’

How to recognise the motivations of others? The importance of words

“Philip Dick, author of science fiction novels such as Blade Runner, said that “reality is only a point of view and the most important tool to govern it is the control of words”.
If we want to open an effective communication channel with our interlocutor, we have to leverage his motivational levers, using the language he is most familiar with and aligning our choice of words to his lexical world. To do this, we need to know which indicators mirror his value system and the words he uses most frequently. Decoding the motivational levers of others thus allows us to open the doors of the relationship, to discover the real interests and desires of those in front of us and to package language with ‘the other’s words’. As the Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, ‘The limits of the world are the limits of my language’. When we describe things by unconsciously using the words we are most familiar with, it is as if we only see the world through our own lens. If, on the other hand, we begin to adapt to the language of others’ motivational levers, we broaden our view of the world and arrive at what Marcel Proust called the true voyage of discovery: not to seek new lands, but to have new eyes. The appropriate use of motivation, both for ourselves and for others, helps us to gain different perspectives. The goal is to become more aware of the interlocutor’s reference value system and based on this choose how to personalise the message you want to convey’.

Happiness in small things

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Of course,’ Ingrassia concludes, ‘we must also ‘dispel’ the myth of the spasmodic pursuit of happiness, which was even included as an inalienable human right in the 1776 Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. In reality, happiness is not a goal to be achieved once and for all, but something to be sought in all the little things of everyday life. Those who are permanently in search of happiness risk depression because they will never find it. Through awareness of our motivations, we can succeed in finding a purpose even in the small everyday things, in private life as well as at work. By having the patience to wait for results to come and with a little spirit of sacrifice, which is often lost as a value today’.

Interview by Francesca Pavesi 30 June 2022, Leonardo Assicurazioni