WORTH ASKING

Heather Mundell writes a blog on career development. Via her life@work I came upon a new blog by veteran bizblogger Curt Rosengren, M.A.P. Creating Meaning, Abundance, and Passion, and read:

A no-brainer part of any system designed to help you maintain your momentum is the simple question, “What motivates me?”

Ahh…motivation…a subject of interest for me recently. This is obviously a great question to pose to one’s self. More to the point of my own interest, this question also underlies the crucial question any motivator needs to ask if they wish to motivate somebody else, “What motivates you?” This too is obvious enough, yet my recent literature review quickly discovered that a lot of cookie-cutter writing on motivation misses this clear starting point completely. In my research it got to the point where I wondered if the various ‘top-down’ advisories really wished to suggest that the motivator simply doesn’t need to know what are the subject’s motivating factors.

It strikes me as useless to speak of wanting to reinforce intrinsic motivation if one doesn’t also take the trouble to learn what motivates the ‘motivatee’ internally.

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