If you are someone who has been struggling with getting your motivation levels to exactly where you’d like them to be then you are in the right place! A useful thing to know is that there is, within your brain, something called your ‘values’. Values are related to how you think and not so much what you think so it’s more like how your brain is set up so we all have different values and they’ve been shaped by the lives that you have lived so far. Your friends, family and school shape and influence your values.

If you have a really high value for fairness then if you see someone being unfairly treated then that value for fairness is going to kick in and make you want to take some action around what you’ve seen going on that appeared to be unfair. If you have a low value for education then you might find yourself really disengaging from that for quite some time. Chances are though that value is probably going to come back again in the future.

We have all of these different things that we value most in our lives and our behaviours are kind of driven to serve those values so motivation is a value too but this one is set up in a way in which you either have motivation just to serve yourself or you have the motivation to serve others or you may have the motivation to serve yourself and others. It’s useful to identify which one of those three options appeals to you directly because if you find yourself one-day lacking motivation and needing to get it back knowing whether you’re doing whatever it is that you should be doing for your own purposes, for serving others or for serving both yourself and others is a good way to get yourself motivated again. 

If we take something like homework and you did not want to do it. If you are someone who is motivated by yourself only so you’re only motivated for your own selfish reasons which is absolutely fine some of us are then you need to have a conversation with yourself about why doing homework would be good for you. If in your beliefs you kind of feel like ‘I don’t know why I’ve got to do this just to like to keep my teacher happy’ then that’s going to be about using your motivation to serve others.

If you’re someone who needs motivation for yourself, believing that doing homework is good for others but not for you isn’t going to motivate you to do it. If you are someone who needs the motivation to serve yourself, I’m talking about motivation to serve you for your own benefit, then you need to sort out how doing that homework is really good just for you, like the person it benefits most is you.

Let’s say that you are motivated by others and we’ve got the same scenario you’ve got some homework to do and for whatever reason, you cannot find the strength within your soul to do it. You need to be having a conversation with yourself about how doing this homework is going to benefit others. If you just think ‘well if I don’t do it I’m going to be dropping myself in it here’ is when you meet it gets effective that’s going to be about yourself but we know that for you motivation has to be serving others in order for you to get motivated so in that instance the conversation needs to be about how does doing this homework how is it good for other people, how does it serve others?

It may serve others if you think ‘I go to university and do the degree I want to do and then I can change the world and the whole world’s going to be better because of me and that’s is me serving others’. If you are self-serving to yourself and others in that same scenario where you don’t want to do your homework you need to have a conversation with yourself about how doing this homework is going to be good for you but also good for others and that will be your key to getting remote evaded when you aren’t demotivated.

The very first thing is to identify what normally motivates you, doing stuff for yourself doing stuff for others or doing stuff that is for yourself and also has benefit to others. When you know what kind of a person you are you can then start to craft your own ingredients and internal conversations to be able to motivate yourself in the way that you need to get motivated. If you are someone who is mainly motivated to do things just because it serves you and it feels good for you then you need to have a conversation around how you do that with the thing that you don’t want to do.

If you are someone who is mainly motivated by doing things for other people, by serving the greater good, then you need to have a conversation with yourself about how doing this thing is ultimately going to be good for others. If you are both self and others equally then you have a conversation about how doing this thing that you don’t currently want to do is going to be good for you but it’s also going to have a positive effect on other people too and this is quite simply a way for you to be able to manage your own emotional motivational state and to have a little bit of a quick hack into like pulling the strings in your own brain and giving yourself the motivation that you want and need at the times that you want and need it.

By Gemma Bailey

www.childtherapisthertfordshire.nlp4kids.org