Intrinsic Motivation: How to Be Motivated by Doing What You Do

Intrinsic Motivation: How to Get Motivated by Doing What You Do

NNO MATTER WHAT you do, you can be inspired by the work you do. Even if you hate your job, you can learn to love any activity. The key is to create excitement around the experience of doing what you do – intrinsically. This is an inside job.

Performance coach Stefan Falk writes Intrinsic Motivation: Learn to Love Your Job and Succeed Like Never Before to help you do that. We can learn to love any activity by rewiring our brain aim on Interesting Results or FEOs.

The foundation for doing that can be found in the five principles of success that have worked for Falk and others that he shares with them:

Don’t go to work or school, or anywhere else that matters) running on autopilot. For every task you do, have a clear goal for an outcome and a set of tactics to achieve it.
Never stop challenging and competing with yourself. You are the best measure of how much you have learned, improved, and grown.
Consciously create emotional expectations for your work experience and envision yourself meeting or beating them. This is another way of saying that the attitude or mindset with which you approach your work is important.
Review your work every day to make sure you’re making tangible progress that you can rack up and celebrate.
Find and cultivate peers who share your enthusiasm and positivity about work and from whom you can learn.

The ultimate goal of all these principles is develop passion that makes you love what you do. We sabotage ourselves when we make excuses not love our work. Common excuses are too much to do, too much stress, bad relationships, and unfair performance assessments. There are toxic work environments that reflect where you work and not why you hate your job. Falk says, “unless you’re in a bad work environment, where you have to leave, your excuses are obstacles of your own making.”

So, what is the answer to this question? The answer is to learn to master your mind. Falk offers “proven step-by-step tools and methods that make it easier and less energy-consuming for you to master your mind and think and act intentionally in your professional life.”

So you know how to do it Passionate Behavior Focused on Results or FEOs in terms of your normal way of operating at work, you need to understand that your work tasks don’t matter if you love them. What makes a work task or activity worthwhile is the way you think about the result you want to achieve.. The more exciting the result for you, the more time you will spend thinking about how to do the best activity.

What makes this difficult to do is that we often think of work as work and not something we enjoy. And we (and our organizations) are focused activity.

Organizations develop activity-based goals such as “Develop a process for customer complaints,” “Move our data to the cloud,” or “Implement our digital transformation.” The common denominator of almost all company goals is their lack of clear and exciting results. Most professionals are evaluated and rewarded based on whether they perform an activity and not on what they achieve by doing so.

We have the power to think about our work in ways that make it lovable. Every task can be interesting because every task has infinite complexity and can have infinite variations. Of course, that requires us to overcome our reluctance to expend energy on deliberate thought. For example, Falk considers the simple task of asking a colleague for information. We can ask ourselves:

• What do I really need to know, and how do I express it?

• Why is it important for me to know this, and is it the right time?

• Is my partner the right person to ask, or is someone else more appropriate?

• Is there anything I should know about other than talking to this partner?

• If talking to this partner is the best and most efficient way to learn what I need to know, how can I organize the conversation so that I minimize the use of my partner’s time?

• Is there anything I can do to make my partner feel like he got something out of the conversation?

That’s really intentional thinking.

Falk then offers chapters dealing with our work methods arranged from easy, moderate, and difficult to implement. These include:

• Set expectations each day and take home something exciting and interesting to tell your kids

• Stick to a daily theme that excites you

• Create a time budget and track your time each Set your most important goals for each work day

• Set weekly or monthly stretch goals for skill development and effectiveness

• Don’t engage in negative talk

• Develop aspirations for how you want to be perceived

• Make it a habit to ask for feedback

• Don’t avoid difficult people; hug them

• Develop your people into stars

And much more.

Intrinsic motivation happens when you feel challenged. You need to continually increase the complexity and challenge of your work. The way you do your tasks can always be improved, even if you are good at it. To be an intrinsically motivated person, you need to find the moments when you need to challenge yourself rather than doing it on autopilot.

No job, good or bad, matters if you don’t know your mind. That said, a good workplace can make it easier to engage yourself in your work. Above all, you should look for an organization that is “designed so that its people experience a sense of autonomy.”

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