We all have times in our life when we are trying to figure out how to motivate someone.
And then after a while we kind of sit back and wonder why we don’t seem to be making any progress. We can probably look in the mirror and say the same about ourselves at times…So what’s the deal? It can be as a parent trying to motivate our children, or as a spouse trying to motivate our spouse, or as a coach trying to motivate a player, or as a boss trying to motivate an employee, or any other number of scenarios.
Usually when we are trying to motivate someone we are trying to CHANGE a behavior in order to produce a result. This is where the challenge lays. You cannot change someone else’s behavior. You can be a change agent, but you cannot make the change…they have to. It is your task to inspire them to change.
Here’s the thing to understand; everyone is already motivated. The question is more, what are they motivated for?
Here is a little video from a training event I did in Karlsruhe, Germany in October of 2011:
