The Difference Between Motivation and Inspiration - People Development Magazine

Many years ago, when I was a new and inexperienced manager, one of my team came back from a very long lunch and swore at me in front of everybody. He was popular, he was influential with his peers, and every leader I spoke to had already decided he was trouble. I had been putting off dealing with him for weeks, which is a lesson of its own and not the one I want to draw here. This time there was no putting it off, and a formal warning followed within the day.

Once the formal warning was out of the way, I did something I had not planned. Instead of going over what he had done wrong, I asked him what he actually wanted, not that year but eventually. It took a while, and then he told me. So I described, as plainly as I could, where his behaviour was taking him instead, and I asked whether that was what he had in mind. He said it was not.

His behaviour changed from that day, and it never went back. Five years later, long after we had lost touch, I read that he had been appointed to the role he had described to me in that room.

I had been trying to motivate him for weeks, and none of it had worked. What worked took about twenty minutes. I had stopped trying to give him reasons to behave differently and helped him reconnect with something he genuinely wanted for himself. I did not understand it in those terms at the time, but I had stumbled across the difference between motivation and inspiration.

What My Children Got Me Out of Bed For

For years, I got up every morning and went to a job I did not always enjoy. I had children to provide for, and that was reason enough. I did not need to love the work or feel inspired by it. I knew why I was doing it. The alarm went off, I got up, and I went to work.

That is motivation doing exactly what it is meant to do. There is nothing wrong with it, and we should not underestimate how powerful it can be. My children needed providing for, and that mattered more than whether I particularly felt like going to work that day.

When my children became independent and no longer needed me in the same way, my motivation went too. The reason for it had gone.

The difficulty comes when we expect motivation to do a job it cannot do. It can give us a reason to keep going when something needs to be done. What it cannot necessarily give us is a sense of direction, meaning or energy for the rest of our lives. For that, we need something else.

The Two Directions Motivation Works In

One useful way of thinking about motivation is that it often works in one of two directions. We are either trying to get away from something we do not want, such as debt, poor health or an unhappy situation, or we are moving towards something we do want, such as a qualification, a promotion or a better life. Both work, and both can be powerful reasons to act.

Moving away from something can be particularly effective because there is usually some discomfort involved. We want the situation to change, and that gives us the push to do something about it. The problem is that we can become so focused on what we are trying to get away from that we never really think about where we want to go instead.

Moving towards something gives us a goal to aim for, but it has its own limitation. We get the qualification, the promotion or whatever else we were working towards, and then what? We need another goal.

That is what both forms of motivation have in common. They need something to keep them going: a problem we want to solve or an outcome we want to achieve. Once that reason disappears, the motivation often disappears with it. Of course, human motivation is more complicated than two neat categories. I find the distinction useful simply because it makes me ask: am I moving towards something I want, or mainly trying to get away from something I don’t?

Inspiration feels different to me. I don’t need to talk myself into caring about something that inspires me. I already care.

When Inspiration Stays with You

Years ago, I began a long road of self-discovery, which I am still on today. I began to understand how differently we might experience life if we were less driven by fear and learned to listen to the wiser part of ourselves. What I was learning changed my life, and I knew I wanted to write about it and share it with as many people as I could who might find it useful. However, for a very long time I did very little about it.

Life got in the way. Relationships broke down, people I loved passed away, I had three children, a demanding career, a business to build and all of the other ups and downs life brings. There were years when writing about any of this was nowhere near the top of my list. Every now and again I would come back to it, write a little more or think about what I wanted to say, and then life would take over again. But the idea itself never went away.

What was lacking was not inspiration, but capacity. I did not always have the time or energy to turn that inspiration into action, and that affected my motivation to sit down and actually do the writing. What I never needed was motivation to care about it. Nobody was waiting for it; there was no deadline and, for much of that time, there was no obvious outcome to aim for. I simply kept coming back to it because it mattered to me.

That, for me, is what inspiration feels like. Motivation helped me do the work. Inspiration was the reason I kept wanting to.

What Inspiration Is Doing Differently

This is the distinction that has become useful to me. Motivation often gives me the push to do something. Inspiration is why I care about doing it in the first place. And, of course, I often need both.

Being inspired does not mean the work is always easy. I can feel inspired to write something and still need motivation to sit down and finish it. The inspiration is why I want to do it; the motivation helps me get it done.

This is also where I see the connection with the Higher Self. It is very easy to spend years pursuing what we think we ought to want. Listening within helps us separate some of that noise from what actually matters to us.

Finding the Meaning Finds the Inspiration

That is also what happened with the young man in my team. I had spent weeks trying to give him reasons to change his behaviour. In the end, I simply asked him what he wanted. Once he could see the connection between the person he wanted to become and the choices he was making, I no longer had to persuade him.

I saw something similar with a coaching client who told me she hated most of her job. The parts she loved were those where she could see she was making a difference to someone’s life; everything else felt like routine. When we looked more closely, much of that routine work was making a difference too. She had simply lost sight of the connection. Her job did not change, but the way she saw it did, and the work became much easier to do.

That is where we sometimes ask too much of motivation. We use it to push ourselves through things without stopping to ask what they are in aid of. Sometimes there will be no deeper meaning. Houses need cleaning, forms need filling in, and deadlines need meeting. But sometimes the meaning is already there, and we have simply lost sight of it. Finding the connection to something we genuinely care about can be enough to bring the inspiration back.

When we understand what matters to us, we become more able to recognise inspiration

Try This: Ask What It Is in Aid Of

Think of something you need to do but don’t particularly want to do.

Ask yourself: What is it in aid of?

Maybe you’re working to provide for your family, exercising because you want to feel healthier, or doing something tedious because it will make life easier later.

Sometimes remembering why something matters is enough to make it feel a little easier.

But what happens when we get what we were working towards, and it doesn’t feel as good as we expected?  Sometimes what we were really chasing was not the thing itself, but how we thought it would make us feel, which is where we go next.

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