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What Motivates People?

* Touch the "HEART SPACE," those higher values we learned from our parents and spiritual advisors such as love, conscience, altruism, generosity, sharing, sense of rightness. We have an inner voice that speaks to us, to some louder than to others, of what is right, of what is good. When we answer that inner voice, we do feel the best we can ever feel about ourselves.

* Sympathy, empathy, and identification are really strong motivators. Sympathy is our tendency to feel similiar feeings to the feelings of others. When someone is crying, you may find tears coming to your own eyes. That is sympathy.  Any feeling can engender sympathy; infectious laughter is another example.

Empathy is somewhat different; it happens when you understand and care about someone else's without necessarily experiencingthose feelings yourself. When you say, "put yourself in this person's place," you are attempting to invoke empathy. Empathy allows us to predict what someone will feel in a given situation. Both of these are examples of the process of identification.

* Achievement, pride, and feelings of competence are motivations present i everyone: the desire to achieve meaningful accomplishments, to feel pride in one's endeavors, to feel competent or able. They exist in all areas of one's life, from the desire to achieve good relationships with parents and friends, to the desire to do well in your job, etc.

* Anger, hurt, resentment and the need for revenge are the darker side of the human spirit but potent motivators nonetheless. It would be irresponsible and reckless to directly utilize these motivators unless you are attempting to calm these feelings or provide a positive or creative  way to cope with them or resolve them.

* Competitiveness and the desire for excellence can be compelling motivators for most people, except those who have already given up, who see no hope for themselves, or who believe the adversary is too powerful to overcome. Most people, at least in our society, seem to have feelings of competitiveness.

Closely related to competiveness is our desire for excellence, our need to become more than merely adequately at what we do. Many areas of human endeavor offer reinforcement for this desire: awards, prizes, etc.

* Adventure, curiosity, excitement, change, risk, and danger can be powerful motivators. When people are bored because they've been doing the same things for a very long time, or because they're at t he top and there seem to be no new mountain to climb, they begin to crave adventure, excitement, and change.

We believe there are three levels at which most people operate: the survival level, where they are using almost all their energy just to get through the day's challenges; the maintenance level, where they use a middling level of energy to survive and have some energy left over to repair or plan for repairing things that have gone wrong, or decide how to preve nt problems from occuring; and the enhancement level, in which they begin to actively seek new challenges, learn new skills.

More By  :  Dr. Chetan Chopra

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Comments on this Blog

Comment The prime motivators: food, money, power, fame, sex, knowledge

Daniel Rey M.
29-Oct-2013 03:55 AM






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