The Right Motivational Story

Thinking Big Picture about the work you do can be very energizing in the face of stress and challenges because you are linking one particular, often small action to a greater meaning or purpose. 

Something that may not seem important or valuable on its own gets cast in a whole new light. 

Every time you make a decision, you create a state of mental tension that is, in fact, stressful. 

The solution is to reduce the number of decisions you need to make by using routines. If there's something you need to do every day, do it at the same time every day. Have a routine for preparing for your day in the morning, and packing up to go home at night. Simple routines can dramatically reduce your experience of stress. 

1. Create conflict: those who don’t receive incentives may be jealous of those who do regardless of merit. Those who receive incentives might also be upset if they worked harder than others to get the same reward.
2. The focus of work becomes competitive instead of being focused on quality and people will only work as much as it takes to earn the incentive.
3. It eliminates productivity for everyone except top performers who are more benefited by incentives. 
4. Incentives can become quite costly as they need to continue to rise on a scale of cost in order to remain effective.

A growth mindset is a belief that anyone can change their talents, abilities, and intelligence. Those with a growth mindset:

• take on challenges
• take advantage of feedback
• use the most effective problem-solving strategies
• provide developmental feedback
• is persistent in accomplishing goals

Conversely, those with a fixed mindset believe that talents, abilities and intelligence can't be improved.

Leaders with a learning mindset are motivated to increase their competence and master something new.

A performance mindset desires to gain favorable judgments about competence and avoid negative judgements.

They pop up to do mischief, even when you're not conscious of it.

We can learn to recognize bias in ourselves and reduce the harmful impact of that part of ourselves by applying acceptance and commitment therapy. It focuses on developing psychological flexibility. When we investigate our implicit biases, we become more aware of them and can bring our actions in line with our conscious beliefs.

All forms of prejudice can be explained by what’s called authoritarian distancing - the belief that we are different from some group. Because they are different, they represent a threat we need to control.

When people adopt authoritarian distancing, they display three characteristics:

• The inability to take the perspective of other people.
• The inability to feel the pain of other people when you take their perspective.
• The inability to be emotionally open to the pain of others when you do feel it.

21–35% of our life is spent at work, making it a crucial part of our lives to spend at something we find meaning in.

Meaningful work should be:

• Motivating and purposeful.
• Should be coherent and make some sense.
• Should be significant.

Meaningful work is when we feel a genuine connection with what we do for a living and our larger spectrum of life.

It is motivating, creates deep relationships and helps others.

You will need to feel safe and secure and establish a connection with your therapist. It is reasonable to try out a few until you find the right one.

The right therapist will encourage and support you in making uncomfortable changes.

Ask your community for mental health specialists recommendations. Consider asking your GP, family, friends or local community.

Once you have a few names, look up their qualifications and read up about them.

Start your next response with “I help people…” because it usually takes the stereotype away from your job title.

For example: You can say you're a copywriter or you can say you help companies tell compelling stories about their brands.

Tell a story about something that was fun or inspiring to you at work.

It will help you make connections: the brain activity of the storyteller and the listener mirror each other, despite the fact that one person is talking and one is listening.

1. Core. Your purpose. It is sustained by two things: Having Meaning, and Forward Movement.
2. Support. What enables your goals. They can magnify the motivation core you have, or speed up the momentum that you build.
3. Surface. Any type of external recognition that might give you motivation.

Try to see your strengths in relation to what energizes you. Something is a strength if: 

• it makes you feel successful
• you're drawn to it
• it fully engages you
• after doing that activity, you feel energized and fulfilled.

It's difficult for us to see our own strengths, but people around us (friends, coworkers, family members, mentors) will most likely see them clearly.

The goal is to identify things that you wouldn't have thought of on your own—or to find patterns.

Whenever you get stuck to an idea, you put yourself at risk to promote obsolete or just one-sided theories. You might, however, want to try keeping an open mind to the possibility of change. 

Change is unpredictable and being flexible enough to adjust in proper time is a sure key to growth.

As an expert, one should try to be as open-minded as possible. Solving all kinds of issues while taking into consideration all possible scenarios might simply turn out to be the best thing ever.