Motivator

Motivation has as many applications as it has sources. Motivation to go to the gym for instance. It can come from the scale, an intervention about your diet coke addiction, or wanting to be a happy healthy individual for years to come.

Motivation at work leads to the desired results for your supervisor and leadership. Work motivation comes from a variety of sources as well. Money, a promotion, excellence, or even the mission of your company are all good motivations. Making significant difference in the world can be an amazing motivator for many.

Your supervisor uses these motivators when they really need you to do something. They need something done and you are the person to do it. Your supervisor comes to you and pushes hard on the motivation button. They will quote the company’s mission and vision, offer you a raise, or promotion. Whatever your motivator is, they hit it, and hit it hard.

The major issue comes when your motivator is a negative motivator. Like the donkey motivated by a carrot on the stick, your supervisor or leadership come to you. They are not offering you more carrots, they have to motivate you by threatening to take the carrot away.

Good leaders try anything they can to motivate you. Good companies do anything they can to avoid negative motivators. And good employees never let it get that far. Good teammates get the task, project, or deliverable done because it is the right thing to do.

Motivated teammates are achieving results. Only in exceptional circumstances are they motivated an external motivator. Negative motivators are rarely used with good teammates, everyone has their bad days.

What motivates you? How do you stay motivated and deliver results even when you do not feel like it? How often does your supervisor use your motivators to motivate you? When was the last time your leadership used a positive motivator for you? When was the last time your leadership used a negative motivator for you?

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Accomplished a Start

I did it! I did an entire month of writing and blogging. I did not miss a day. This isn’t really a huge deal for some. For me it is a bit of an accomplishment. I don’t often feel like I carry through all of my goals to fruition. I will usually give up, make excuses, or chicken out. 

Not this time!

This time I carried it all the way through. I left no stone unturned. I went all the way and didn’t even half-bake anything. I’m not terribly proud of every post. However, I definitely learned quite a bit about myself as a writer and a person. I look forward to the next year, continuing to write and grow as a person. I feel like I can actually achieve these goals and I’m not making lofty goals for myself that I cannot achieve. In the coming year, I look to continue to write. I’ll be posting much less, two or three times a week seems sustainable.

Most importantly, I was successful at something and I did a pretty decent job. This whole last month of writing wasn’t just to fill 30 days with useless blog posts, there are enough of those on the internet, it truly was to write about, process, and discuss what has been going on inside of me and get it all out. Accomplishing something makes me feel good about the coming year. I feel like I might be able to accomplish something more and be successful at something else. 

Proudly,

–JT

Epic Failure

If revenge is a dish best served cold; then, failure is a dish best not served at all. At least that is how I’ve operated in my life up till now. Any time I apply myself to something I succeed. Maybe I’m not the best at it in the world, but I would at least succeed. I would decide “task xyz” is worth my time and effort, pour my heart and soul into it, and I would be a success. 

The part of this equation I’ve never dealt with is when I pour myself into a task or working to achieve a goal and then I fail. Not in the sense of I came in second place in a competition. More in the sense of, the goal was totally and utterly unachieved. 

This summer I encountered one of these “unachieved goals.” This is part of the reason I’m falling apart. I’ve never encountered failure of this proportion before and I have no healthy way of encouraging myself to get back on the horse. When a failure of this proportion is built on a foundation of self doubt and issues with my dad and all of a sudden, I have the perfect recipe for an angry depression. 

Now I have to figure out a healthy way to stop these things from destroying me. I have to figure out how to get myself back on the horse. Some sort of motivation maybe? I am truly clueless. I am looking into myself and every time I turn the page to the, “How To Motivate Yourself” chapter it is as if the whole thing is written in hieroglyphics. 

I don’t know how to motivate myself past failure besides to tell myself to just keep going. This method only works for so long with me. There will be more to this. I am not giving up on this, I just don’t know what more to do.

What do you do when you encounter failure?