Motivating Yourself & Others

Motivating yourself is one thing, but having to motivate others is particularly tricky. That saying about leading a horse to water but not being able to make the horse drink becomes especially true when you have to deal with another person’s personal or emotional challenges.

My knee jerk reaction is to say that you can’t force others to do what you think they should be doing. You can work on your own goals, critical tasks, work related commitments. Remember something, don’t make a colleague’s job your own, the stress of trying to juggle their work as well as your own may be more harmful to you than you think, it may even affect your health. Motivating someone does not mean doing things for others because they just don’t want to do it themselves. If the person needs assistance due to lack of knowledge or experience by all means help them by guiding them, teaching them.

However, if the person you are try to motivate is your spouse / partner / child, the challenge of motivating another person becomes personal. Their success will more than likely be interlinked with yours, their failure too.

There are things you can try to help them, and as a result yourself too. If it is your spouse, do you know them well enough to know what makes them excited? Do they enjoy one particular thing that could create a chain reaction in the right direction?

One example of this could be fitness, does your significant other enjoy time in the gym? Does it excite them? Encourage that, when they learn something new about how to best work that stubborn calf muscle, listen and encourage further learning. Why you ask? If they feel accomplished at working that muscle and realise they can learn and improve that skill, it will spill over to other interests, while at the same time motivating them to keep going and not just sit back feeling defeated and hopeless.

Same thing applies to most interests really, if you feel success in one thing it spills over to other things in your life. Try completing a project you have been avoiding for quite some time, you will be surprised at how much you complete after that because of the chain reaction you started with one project.