Troubleshooting Motivation

I was chatting with a friend earlier about how I regret quitting writing in the past, and how I felt that my challenge at the time was motivation. But how do you go about staying motivated?

A useful framework is Tina Seelig’s Passion-Confidence matrix which she introduces in her new book InsightOut. She explains how she uses the matrix in her the creativity course that she teaches at Stanford in order to help draw out insights on the influence of each student’s motivation on his/her behavior.

The matrix categorizes activities based on our degrees of passion and confidence. Here is how mine looks like.

Seelig’s argument is that each quadrant gives clues as to how we can improve ourselves — in a nutshell the challenge for us is to get the activities in quadrants II and IV move into quadrant I where we feel passionate and confident and thus our experience continuously reinforces our behavior.

Here is what each quadrant means:

I. This is what you are spending considerable time doing.

II. You are not committing enough time to these skills, find out why?

III. Delegate or if necessary you might want to ‘artificially’ motivate yourself.

IV. Probe why you are not motivated? In the end, you are choosing to be active or passive with each of these activities. Key is to reignite the passion by seeing the activity with a new lens.

So for example looking at the matrix above, helped me realize that the reason I am writing this blog is to jump-in/commit time to ‘writing’ — ie. move from quadrant II to I. On the other hand, if I was to motivate myself to do more of anything in quadrant IV, I would need to see it with a new lens in order to build the passion to master it further.

Another way of looking at this is recognizing that we find purpose in what is motivating, and that passion gives purpose.