I was talking to a successful, driven business owner and he asked me about motivation.
This surprised me, because he didn’t seem to need external motivation. He said he was having a hard time buckling down to tackle a particular piece of work. As a master at not doing what I should be doing, I could empathize. He was continuing to work very hard in his business. So hard in fact, that the first thought was that he needed a break in his business, but on digging more, that wasn’t it.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t motivated in his business, but that he wasn’t motivated to do that particular task set.
As Seth Godin says, we talk about writer’s block, but not about talker’s block or brick layer’s block. That’s because the problem isn’t that we can’t write, but that the block is a symptom of something else. Steven Pressfield calls it the Resistance. We resist doing the work.
It could be fear that our work will be ridiculed, or we think it may be ineffective and we will have wasted time, or we have a sense that this work is not addressing the real problems.
It’s easier to call it a lack of motivation than to dig in to find out what is really going on. Lack of motivation can be addressed with pithy slogans and pep talks.
This business owner needed to dig into why he felt this task would the best way to get his intended outcome. He may even have to dig deeper into why that particular outcome is important and if the chosen strategy with resulting task set is the right way to address it.
You don’t need a motivational motto to force you to do the work. When you find yourself reluctant to move ahead with a task set you have assigned yourself, dig in to find out what the resistance is and address that.
