Another Motivating Thought

On March 5th I wrote a blog entry titled “A Motivating Thought”. When I recently came across a old question/answer writing from a few years back, it seemed relevant to republish:

Question:

“How do you motivate young people?”

Answer:

This is a difficult question -- not because motivating young people is particularly difficult, but because I generally don’t agree with the premise of the question. The premise is that young people come to us in a unique state of “non-motivation” and it’s our challenge to “gas ‘em up.” The truth is that young people are as motivated or as unmotivated as adults are. The real question is: what motivates people? The best place to find that answer is to ask: what motivates you?

The answer is that you are motivated by things to which you attach importance, or things that excite you. A person may find that they have to force themselves out of bed at 7:30 AM each morning in order to drag their weary body to their routine factory job. Yet, the very next day, they are able to leap out of bed at 4:00 AM with boundless energy in order to go on an anticipated fishing trip. Motivation is not a commodity, it’s a signal. If you’re dealing with unmotivated youth, consider that the problem may not be the person. When we label young people as not seeming to care, what we’re really saying is that they don’t seem to care about the things that we think they should care about -- and we’re probably right. The key to motivating young people, and people of any age, is to find things that are important, exciting, and relevant from their perspective.

This refers to internal motivation. It is possible to motivate people externally -- through mandate or coercion -- but external motivation tends to be short-lived, disappearing as the external pressure is removed and often resulting in a rejection of the externally motivated behaviors. If you are going to create lasting internal motivation, you have to consider the perspectives and desires of the individual.

In providing services to young people this is often a huge problem, considering that many of the things that we wish to see accomplished tend to be things that most young people do not identify as important, exciting, or relevant. The saving grace is that the motivation does not necessarily have to be attached to the outcome. For example, an individual may have little or no interest in completing their basic education, but may strongly desire leadership. By building leadership opportunities into the completion of educational goals you can increase motivation in an “unmotivated” area. This is only one idea, of course. The concept is to get young people invested in the outcome by involving them and making it relevant to something that they want. When you succeed at that, the young people you work with will show you just how motivated they can be.