How do you stay motivated?

CLINT MAUN: Because it’s apparent that no one else is going to provide the motivation for you [or to you]. In fact, if you look up motivation in the dictionary, you’ll see that it’s an internal want, it’s something you have to take care of yourself. You have to have the ability to handle your own motivation. People always ask me, well, how do I motivate my kids to stay off drugs, do their homework, or go to school? The answer is you can’t. The kid has to motivate themselves. You can provide an environment, resources, and assistance to allow the child to be motivated, but they’re the ones who have to be able to produce their own self-motivation.

How do I motivate my spouse to get up off the couch and do something or get their own food? The answer is you can’t. You can provide opportunities, assistance, consequences, feedback that allow your spouse to understand that it’s their job to get off the couch and do something, but only they can produce the motivation that causes that to happen. How do I motivate myself to get up and go to work? If you’re waiting for somebody else to do it, it’s not going to work. You’re going to have to be able to hit the alarm clock roll out of bed and say, “hi ho, hi ho, off to health care I go.” So with that being said, what it really comes down to if you read the definition of motivation and you talk and you read other materials and listen to other people, it comes down to the ability to develop self-control. And if you can have self-control and you have the ability to, be in charge of your day and in charge of your life and to be able to get the necessary energy and focus that you need. So we like to tell people to always answer four questions about themselves, whether it’s work related, home related, marriage related, hobby related, whatever. And the four questions are, well, I’ll make them work related for this example.

FOUR QUESTIONS

How are you doing on the job? Question number one. Question number two, how do you know that’s how you’re doing? Question number three, last time you messed up on the job? Question number four, how did you know you messed up?

• How are you doing on the job?
• How do you know that’s how you’re doing?
• When’s the last time you messed up?
• How do you know you messed up?

Those four questions will allow you to do a self-quality audit and evaluation of your current motivation. Now unmotivated people on those four questions, when you ask them, how you doing on the job? They go, “okay, alright, pretty good. Fair. Decent. Why? Who wants to know?” Question number two. How do you know that’s how you’re doing? “Haven’t heard anything. No one said anything. Silence is golden. Why? Have you heard something?” Question number three. Last time you messed up on the job? “Oh goodness. Yesterday at 2 o’clock or with Mrs. Anderson in Room 113.” In other words, a very specific answer. Question number four. How do you know you messed up? “I got a call, got an email, there was a note on my door, got called to the boss’s office.” In other words, something or someone told them that that there was an issue.

So the problem with the unmotivated person is that they don’t know when they’re doing it right or when they’re doing it wrong unless somebody else tells them.

Now what does a motivated person sound like? How are you doing on the job? “Okay. Good. Great.” In other words, it sounds just like an unmotivated person. It’ll be a little bit more positive, a little less negative or paranoid. But you can’t distinguish motivated but from unmotivated people by asking them how they’re doing because it has psychological precedent in society to answer with some form of fine. So the second question is the check question on the first one.

How do you know that’s how you’re doing? And motivated people say “because I have two more left to do. I have three more to finish by the end of the day. I’m four ahead of goal. I’m five behind the target, but I’ll catch up.” In other words, a very specific answer that they know what tells them if they’re on track or not. Last time you messed up, motivated people say “2 o’clock yesterday with Miss Anderson in her room on that project.” In other words, a very specific answer. You can’t discriminate motivated from unmotivated people by asking them about their mess ups because that’s how society is set up to let everybody know about their mess ups.

So it doesn’t distinguish. So the audit question is, how do you know you messed up? And motivated people say, “found my own mistake, saw the look on her face, realized the numbers didn’t match, thought about it at night, went back in the next day and fixed it.”

In other words, the difference between motivated and unmotivated people is that motivated people have an operating self-control system in place. They know exactly how they’re doing, right or wrong, good or bad, on an ongoing basis. And unmotivated people don’t have any idea how they’re doing unless somebody or something else tells them.

SELF-CONTROL

So how do you keep a self-control system in place? That becomes the BIG issue, and the answer is you have to have three things in play to have an operating self-control system. Now, back to those four questions for a minute before I give you the three parts of a self-control system. You know, those four questions will determine how you’re doing in your marriage, how you know how you’re doing, last time you messed up, how you know you messed up. They’ll determine how you’re doing in practicing your religious beliefs, raising your children, handling your golf game.

And, you know, it’s interesting. Some people are motivated in one part of their life and not in others. Other people are motivated in all walks of their life. And then, of course, we run into people that aren’t motivated in any part of their life. They’re just kind of wandering through life waiting for the world to tell them how they’re doing. So if you want to be specific to your own motivation, you have to take self-control. Specific to your own motivation, you have to take self-control. And in order to take self-control, it comes down to the ability to have three components for self-control.

SPECIFIC EXPECTATIONS

The first one, you must know your expectations in a situation or a job or whatever. Expectations clearly defined. How can anybody be motivated if they don’t know what it is they’re supposed to do? So if you don’t have clear expectations, your job has changed, your boss has changed, the company has changed, something’s different, you need to sit down with some key people and reclarify your expectations. You’re not going to be okay by operating on an old Xeroxed copy of your job description. You have to have clear specific expectations. You know, it’s interesting. More people know the expectations of the wedding more than they do of the marriage. More people know the expectations of giving birth and organizing the birthing process more than they ever do on how to raise the child.

SELF-MEASUREMENT

The second step or the second component of self-control is you must be able to self-measure against the expectations. You have to quit waiting for other people to give you an evaluation, to do a checklist on you, to give you an update and you must update yourself on how you’re doing against the expectations. If I have a project to get done, am I on time? Did I complete it against the items of a great checklist for a great project? If I have a specific task to complete that I completed on time against the right ways to do it? If I had a meeting to run, did I run the meeting against the ways that we were supposed to run meetings with the great outcomes that we were supposed to using the meeting rules that we knew we had to use to run a great meeting? So the first step is you must have clear specific expectations defined. Number two, you must set up your own self-measurement system to check yourself. Run a checklist on yourself. Complete an update evaluation on yourself. Complete a weekly, daily or monthly audit of your own work. Quit waiting for somebody else to tell you.

CONTROL RESOURCES

And then third, you must be able to control the resources to get the job done. And that means time, money, budget, equipment, supplies. The number one thing you need to be able to have as a resource is access to other humans. The ability to talk with other people that are causing problems—or are in your way or can provide assistance. The ability to access other folks when you need them in a timely basis. Yes. It’s also nice to have the right equipment supplies, you know, and all the other money you need to do your job with the equipment you need, but you need to be realistic about that. If you have a realistic set of resources to do your job, access to the other people you need, the time you need to do it, and you also can couple that with a clear audit of your own success against very defined expectations, you can have self-control. If you can have self-control, you can be motivated. Now, that’s up to you to decide but the first step to determining the ability to stay motivated for people in this very tough profession of health care is to decide that I’m in charge of my own motivation. I can develop a self-control system. I can have the three parts, expectations, self-measurement and resource control at my disposal to be able to be motivated today and throughout the rest of the week and the month.