Maybe it's the season, or the fact that the year is starting to wind down, or just personal circumstances, but I'm very reflective these days. I often start the week with what I call Motivation Monday since it is the start of the week and a fresh go at making things happen. So here I am reflecting on a few pieces about motivation that basically fell in my lap. By the time this gets posted it will likely be Tuesday but the motivation came on Monday and I'm getting back in the blogging saddle after I fell off of the horse, so bear with me.
The first motivating morsel was in my daily Shine text message. A little aside because I love the design of this product and there is a lot to learn from it for delivering small bursts of learning. Basically you sign up and get weekday text messages with ... well I'll let them speak for themselves -- "Every morning, we'll send you a conversational experience around your wellbeing, with research-backed content around confidence, daily happiness, mental health and productivity." Ok, back to me now. Once you get the text message you click the link and it starts a little conversation with you and offers you an article related to the topics of the day.
From there you can stop, or click to learn more and continue the "conversation." It is a great way to feed the content and let the reader control how much and how deeply they want to go with the daily topic. The design is clean, simple, and a wonderful start to the day. If you want to try it out go to www.shinetext.com/?r=AYKY4a9 and sign up.
Now back to today's article which was entitled Need Some Motivation? Try Tapping Your Locus of Control. The assessment linked to in this article, I hadn't seen before. The Rotter’s I-E Scale gauges whether your locus of control is more internally or externally focused, meaning where to you fall on the continuum between belief in your own individual actions vs being acted upon by others. Not an earth shattering discovery, but another way of thinking about how different people respond to learning. Do they take control and responsibility of their learning or do they think their fate is in the hands of a possibly capricious or unfair instructor? Worth your couple of minutes to explore.
The other new-to-me motivation idea goes back a few years to an article about Noam Wasserman and Timothy Butler's survey of why entrepreneurs go into business. The range of motivations they queried isn't surprising (affiliation, altruism, autonomy, financial gain, intellectual challenge, lifestyle, managing people, positioning, power & influence, prestige, recognition, security, and variety), but what I found most interesting was the way in which the motivations changed as the respondents got older.
I found this slide highlighting the changes between entrepreneurs in their 20s, 30s, and 40s interesting.
While everyone rated Autonomy as key, those in their 40s definitely shifted their focus. Just another reminder that not only will you likely have learners with multiple motivations in a single course, but motivations aren't static. You don't have to wait decades for them to shift, either. Often they are in flux as a learn goes throughout a single course or series of courses, as well as over a longer time frame.
Well that's it for today. What is motivating you today? What are you working on? How can I help you with it?
If you found today's post useful or interesting, and it made you think of someone else who might be interested, please share it.