Parents, teachers, managers, coaches, and counselors routinely ask some version of: How do I motivate them?
Choice Theory®’s answer is an uncomfortable one: You can’t. Motivation, like happiness, is an inside-out job.
You cannot create another person’s motivation, but you can create conditions that make it easier for them to connect what you want with something they want.
If you’re still trying to motivate your people, you probably didn’t get the memo about internal vs. external motivation.
Internal vs. External Motivation
You can reward, punish, threaten, and incentivize behavior. You might even be able to temporarily change behavior in the direction you want, but you can’t determine what another person wants.
You’re also highly unlikely to create a change of heart, a permanent change in behavior, or a desire to see the benefits of what you’re offering. There’s a huge difference between grudging compliance and internally chosen motivation.
And there’s another thing to consider: your long-term influence. When you repeatedly use external control while disregarding what matters to the other person, you can damage your relationship with them. And without a positive relationship, most people are less likely to listen to what you have to say.
People aren’t unmotivated. They may simply not be motivated toward what you want for them.
Choice Theory Connection
Everyone is motivated by the same five basic needs: Safety & Security, Connection, Significance, Freedom, and Joy. But we don’t all have the same strength of these needs.
This means I may place a high value on Connection while my partner places a high value on Freedom. Unless both of us are also interested in what is best for our relationship, our individual attempts to satisfy our needs can sometimes create conflict between us.
Understanding our needs can also help us stop judging them. In Your Needs Aren’t the Problem, I explore the difference between the need itself and how we choose to satisfy it.
We all have a Quality World. This is where we store mental pictures of the people, things, experiences, beliefs, and situations we want in our lives. Some of those pictures represent things we already have. Others represent things we hope to have. They are there because we believe they will satisfy one or more of our basic needs.
Our behavior is always our best attempt at the time to get something we want so we can satisfy one or more of our needs.
If you are in my Quality World, your happiness may matter to me because the relationship itself is need-satisfying for me. Therefore, I may willingly do something I wouldn’t independently choose because maintaining or strengthening our relationship is also something I want.
I am still internally motivated. You have simply become part of what matters to me.
What You Can Do
You can create conditions that make engagement more likely:
- Build relationship.
- Understand what matters to them.
- Provide meaningful information.
- Connect what you want to something they want.
- Offer choices.
- Remove unnecessary barriers.
Education
Teachers can’t manufacture a student’s desire to learn. That has to come from the student. But they can create conditions in which learning becomes more need-satisfying.
They can connect what they’re teaching to something relevant to students. They can present it in engaging ways. They can involve students in the learning process. They can create enjoyable activities that help bring the point home.
When students want to learn for reasons that matter to them, teachers no longer have to work so hard to create engagement.
Other Applications
As a manager, you can’t make your employees buy into the company agenda. You can, however, build relationships, connect the work to something employees value, provide resources and training, and involve them appropriately in decisions and expectations.
As a change agent, you can’t make your clients want to change. What you can do is build a need-satisfying relationship, provide relevant information, ask self-evaluation questions, and help them expand and evaluate their options.
As a parent, you can’t make your child want to follow the rules, but you can understand what matters to them, explain the reasons for the rules, invite appropriate input, establish boundaries, and consistently allow natural consequences.
As a partner, you can’t make your partner want more time together, but you can become curious about what would make shared time more satisfying for both of you.
When you find yourself wondering, How do I get what I want? you might be more productive asking instead, What might make this something you want too? Then think about how to make yourself an irresistible part of the equation.
Reflection
Think of someone you’ve been trying to motivate. What might change if, instead of asking, “How do I motivate them?” you asked, “What already matters to them?”
