In the field of personal development, motivation is key. Our personal motivation to accomplish short, medium or long term goals is based on a mixture of emotions including enjoyment.
This can include the following:
- Fear of failure – many motivated people are ambitious and set themselves challenging goals, fearing the consequences and their feelings after failing to achieve their goal.
- A sense of responsibility – someone has been entrusted with a particular task or project and they feel responsible for getting the job done. Their motivation is based on feelings of duty and what they are doing has benefits to themselves, colleagues and family.
- A sense of enjoyment – this is a very under-rated source of motivation. While we wouldn’t necessarily choose to do work related tasks in our leisure time, enjoying our work, working environment and tasks can be a powerful way of achieving better results in business.
If you have ever taken time to stand back and observe what motivates people to participate and do well in anything, you will probably already be aware that enjoyment is a key factor.
People are much more likely to enter into things that they enjoy and are also much more likely to do well at things they enjoy.
Enjoyment is important but not the only source of motivation
Enjoyment is not the only source of motivation. An athlete or elite sports person is often motivated by the desired outcome of doing well or winning. To achieve that goal there are many hours of challenging and difficult training involved in all weathers and sometimes with the dark clouds of injury or niggles hanging over a training session.
Motivation vs enjoyment to achieve goals
Improvements cannot be achieved without enjoying the training process.
In business the same principle can be applied to learning new skills or making improvements to a business process for better results.
The individuals involved must be motivated to learn and enjoy that process.
Where for example, a business needs to improve or achieve better results, the people tasked with these objectives must complete complex tasks like analyzing data, work practices and sometimes have difficult conversation with colleagues. Their enjoyment comes from knowing that this will achieve better outcomes for themselves, colleagues and company.
Needing motivation to do something is not as powerful as enjoying a task to help form good habits for long term results. From that, motivation flows naturally.
Keyturn’s Personal Development programme include modules on Unlocking Team Potential, Unlocking Personal Potential, Making Meetings Work and Conflict Resolution.
Get in touch with Keyturn through our contact page or call us on 01788 815500.
Further reading
Motivation: The Scientific Guide on How to Get and Stay Motivated