Wednesday, June 23, 2010

The real affect of this recession is on motivation

Motivation is said to be Intrinsic or Extrinsic and that's the rub of the recession.

Hi my name is Ronald C Hughes and although Psychology is what I write about a lot of the time, I am not the Psychologist. I am the Business Skills Consultant and Trainer here in at Contact Ignition in Dublin, Ireland. I am currently running a life skills programme directed at executives made redundant by the recession called “How to Eat Chocolate”. We have only been running for a short time but we are having a positive effect on the members of the group. The aim of the programme is to keep up the morale of individuals currently stressed by a rapidly changing environment while they try to either find a job or, as almost all are doing, create a job by starting a business. So that’s how I got onto the subject of motivation and I started to realise that the real affect of this recession is on motivation.


Firstly, an affect is a change in the emotions of a person. When I say that what is happening is that the recession is having an affect on motivation I am talking about what drives us. On the other side of this, the effect is what we should all be concerned about, and that is that these people will stop moving forward and give up.

When I talk of individual morale most people will not understand as they would associate morale with group-think. Things like sports teams, a military or a company. But I am talking about the wider social group of community where we come across social welfare and how an individual will be motivated by other group members to continue to struggle even when all of their personal,intrinsic, motivation is exhausted.

The recession moved my motivator or, I should say, removed my motivator. Most people claim to work for the money and in some ways they do because money is a form of extrinsic motivation along with a pat on the back, a job title and fulfilling the need to feel worthy. This type of motivation comes from outside of us. When I lost my job I didn’t just lose my income, I lost the driver for my income! I lost the key to my energy and I needed to get it back.

Intrinsic motivation comes from within. It has to do with appreciation of beauty, knowledge, as well as mental and physical sensation. It’s the motivator Sir Edmond Hillary claimed he used for climbing Everest ".....because its there”. For either the experience of the climb or for conquering the unknown this is intrinsic but I actually think that Hillary was really “climbing to be noticed” which is extrinsic.

In a recession the external motivators that people use almost all of their adult lives dry up and the affect of this on our motivations means that we are in fact out of fuel, washed up finished. The only thing we can do is switch motivators but most people don’t event know how they are motivated and even fewer have the ability to switch their own motivator without help.


You might be judgmental and think that people that don’t work are lazy but most of the time people that don’t work lack motivation to work or are in fact motivated to not work. There is very little reward in not working other than the basic concept of impulse control. What I mean by this is that a person of little resources will exert control where they can to express independence. If refusing to work is the only way I can look strong then and only then will I play this card. I find it hard to understand why so little is being done while so many people slip steadily toward work atrophy, the inability to return to work, when what makes a community attractive to direct inward investment (outside businesses locating new facility locally) is the potential employee base, which is work ready, educated and experienced. Yet recession changes the nature of the workforce. People are left to waste and have no personal understanding of why or what then can do to keep ready for the next change.

If you are unemployed or know of someone who is unemployed I urge you to seek help for yourself, him or her. A small amount of outside intervention is enough to get you or them headed in the right direction. You need to move to intrinsic motivation which sometimes takes a lot of extrinsic motivation and help from friends and family. Self help books can help and indeed reading of any sort can be helpful. Social networking is not helpful unless it is within the context of extrinsic motivation seeking for example when you tell people about the courses you attend and they tell you "well done". Business Networking with a purpose and looking for connection back into employment is extremely helpful because you get to talk the talk of a professional which awakens that extrinsic motivation within you.

The reality of life for most of these people is that the current recession has sparked a permanent shift in our major motivators, moving us to being intrinsically motivated from now on. This means that what will get us going in the morning is not fear of the boss firing us, but seeking to find the beauty within the tasks we invest our time in. It means that we will need to get in touch with our emotions and understand what is motivating us. What are we hungry for? What do we love? It means spending a lot of time with ourselves and maybe by ourselves but not being alone. We need to find ourselves first and then we can find our paths and we need to keep our relationships open while we do this. Most of the things required to move your motivators will fall under the category of life skills materials. All that is important about these materials is that they force a shift in view from external to internal and that the programmes must be thought provoking and involve the development of new skills.

If you can turn your motivators from extrinsic to intrinsic, two very powerful things happen. The first is that you get a little more enjoyment out of each and every day and the second is that you will find that intrinsic motivation is far more powerful than extrinsic. You get far more energy from love, joy, beauty and knowledge than money can buy.

If you are involved in Community Education or working with the unemployed and would like more information on this and other courses, please contact Ronald C Hughes at http://www.contactignition.com

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