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.
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.
Then they grew up. They no longer needed me in the same way, and somewhere along the line that particular motivation disappeared too. It had not failed me or somehow run out. The reason for it had gone.
I think 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
Motivation tends to work 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.
Towards motivation gives us something 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.
Inspiration is different. It does not depend on having something to escape from or another target to reach. It comes from something within us that matters, and that is a very different source of energy.
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
The difference, as I see it, is that motivation needs a reason. It might be a deadline, a goal, a worry or somebody we do not want to let down. Inspiration is different because the thing already matters to us. We do not have to persuade ourselves to care about it.
That does not mean inspiration makes the work easy. I can feel deeply inspired to write something and still need motivation to sit down, concentrate and finish it. The motivation helps me do the work; the inspiration is why I want to do it in the first place.
This is where inspiration connects with Living From Your Higher Self. Our higher self is the part of us that knows what genuinely matters to us, underneath all the things we think we should want or ought to achieve. Inspiration is one of the ways we can recognise that.
The more we understand what really matters to us, the easier inspiration becomes to recognise. It can give us an idea, show us a possibility or draw us towards something we want to create, change or contribute.
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 I think 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.
Try This: Ask What It Is In Aid Of
Think of one thing you are currently pushing yourself to do and would rather not. It can be small. Then ask what it is in aid of, and keep asking until you reach something you actually care about, rather than something you feel you ought to care about.
A few things will not survive that question, and it is genuinely useful to know which ones. Most will. What we usually find is that the connection was there the whole time and we had stopped looking at it. Nothing about the task changes. What changes is that we can see what it is for, and that is very often enough to make it easier to face.
Where We Go Next
There is something else that happens, though, and it is more confusing than a drive running out. We get the thing we were working towards, the thing we genuinely wanted, and it settles far less than we expected. Nothing particularly excites us afterwards, no new direction is calling, and the things that once mattered seem to have lost their pull.
We tend to assume we need to find something new to get excited about. I am not sure that is the problem. Sometimes what we were really after was never the thing itself, and that is what I want to look at next.