Happy Friday! Imagine the conversation at the actual water cooler for a second.
Hey Sally, where have you been the last few days?
Oh hi, Ted! I was just at the most inspiring conference ever. I received so many new ideas that I don’t even know where to start!
We’ve all been there. We come home from a great SLA Annual Conference, chapter meeting, or any professional development opportunity, and we run through the mental list of takeaways from the events that we will implement in our professional and personal lives. Feeling energized, we feel that we can take on the world, and there’s nothing that we can’t do.
However, we come back from drinking the Kool-Aid to our rote routines, and the steam trickles out. Whether it takes a couple of days, a week, or a month, it seems evitable.
Am I speaking from personal experience? Of course! While I don’t want to presume that I’m the only one that runs into these roadblocks, I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m not alone. Therefore, I took a moment to look into the issue of motivation and ways to “keep the drive alive” (FYI: don’t use that phrase in a Google search when searching for information specific to work motivation).
Heidi Grant Halvorson, motivational psychologist and contributor on the Harvard Business Review Blog Network, writes that the mind plays a vital role to ensure staying on track with a project. She discusses recent research that two types of mental mindsets, “to-date” thinking and “to-go” thinking, that logically serve to motivate individuals to see goals through to the end. However, the “to-go” thinking mindset actually goes the extra mile with the constant reminder of what’s left to complete the task. Her advice? Focus on the remainder, not what you’ve already accomplished.
It’s the mind that helps us along the way, but what about “performance enhancers” and their effects? I located an article that suggests that I should be the most motivated person ever. Apparently coffee drinkers are among the “most inspired people”, according to a survey of over a thousand people that ranked their sources of motivation. (While the results may be biased, I did find the original blog post and TED video equally interesting.)
On a serious note, I am curious to know: what do you use as inspiration to follow through on your ideas? Do you utilize lists, self-bribery, or rewards for completing a task?
I’ll end with an interesting quote that I stumbled upon in researching this issue. It came from Twitter, of all places. “Motivation is the art of working more with the human brain’s chemical and electrical circuitry – than against it. It’s innate.” (@ellenfweber, aka Dr. Ellen Weber, via BusinessWeek’s Twitter’s Motivation Tips)
