Welcome to Motivational Mondays, your weekly (PEP) Proactive, Empowered, Performance, talk with Mark Kent.
It's hard to believe that our summer is quickly coming to an end, but if you are from Nova Scotia, the best is yet to come - as we have awesome autumn weather.
Talk about rewards, have you noticed that your motivation is higher when the sun is shining, and the weather is great?
How much easier is it to go out and work in the yard when you feel better?
Yes, rewards play an intrinsic role in stimulating motivation and the desire to be active.
Often rewards come to us as a by-product of what we do (extrinsic), however, the best way to sustain motivation is by intrinsic rewards. These rewards give us the ability to derive satisfaction from an activity whether or not you are recognized or rewarded for your efforts.
This week I would like to briefly discuss the concept of motivation specific to stepping outside your comfort zone.
We are driven to manipulate our environment so to create a familiar surrounding that meets our basic primary needs, i.e., food, shelter, warmth and safety.
As well we strive to meet our secondary needs, i.e., acceptance, companionship, and achievement by controlling the physical environment.
For example most of us work to meet our basic physical needs, so we can then focus on our secondary needs.
Once we have accomplished this goal it is easy to become comfortable and complacent.
Lets face it, as a species we tend to seek familiarity and the known over the unknown.
Instability, and an unforeseen future create anxiety and apprehension; however, creating an environment of comfort can diminish our intrinsic motivation as well as our extrinsic motivation.
We can loose our innate desire to overcome, take risks, and essentially use anxiety and fear as a motivator to be productive and create change in our universe.
Our innate desire to learn new things, and take on challenges can be inhibited by creating a familiar zone.
Often the universe will force us out of the comfort zone by unforeseen and unexpected events; however, the ability to continually strive towards creating new opportunities can have a high motivational impact upon your life.
We are hard-wired through our DNA to strive towards meeting our primary and secondary needs. We are also hard-wired to take risks and seek new adventure, but we can tame and even lose these opportunities when operating within our comfort zone.
To ramp up your motivation it's necessary to step out, and take risks, and acquire new knowledge about the universe around us through real experience, and virtual learning.
Knowledge creates choices, choices give us power and power gives us control, and control can give us freedom.
It is when we utilize these freedoms to step out and challenge ourselves that intrinsic motivation has the best chance of driving our behaviour and improving our productivity.
This takes the ability to accept some anxiety and fear of the unknown as part of the learning curve - to step out and take a risk and allow intrinsic motivation to ramp up your productivity.
Next week I will expand upon this exciting concept, so stay tuned.
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Thanks for the opportunity to serve you.
To your empowerment, productivity, and motivation,
Mark Kent
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