How I Got My Motivation Back At Work
The previous six months were probably the hardest and most nerve-racking times in my life as an employee. I got new responsibilities which I aimed for.
In our company I “slipped” into the sales department, on the one hand because we needed someone new for this position to take some of the burden off our founder’s shoulders, on the other hand because I’ve always regarded sales as an exciting instance in a company.
Well, to be honest, I started with little or no basic information about sales and possible strategies. I learned from our founder himself and at the same time from a provider who wanted to simplify the lead generation for us.
From time to time I improved myself into the topic and started having fun with it, but the success failed. I could only watch how our founder closed one deal after the other and my success account still showed a big 0.
To our regret, we also fell into the frightening “summer-vacation-hole”, there were no relevant appointments with clients and our pipeline looked frightening. My motivation was fading from day to day and I felt like I was staying at the same level.
I also carried this demotivation into my private life, every day after work I thought about what I was doing wrong and whether I was the right person for the job or even for the company.
I wondered if others would see what I was doing and I was plagued by huge self-doubts, so I even thought about quitting.
The whole thing was eating me up.
How did I manage to motivate myself again?
- Well, the first thing that helped me was a clarifying conversation with our founder. It was an open and honest feedback discussion for both sides, it was good to get the frustration off your chest and it made my position in the company clear, I am able to say “I am not as useless as I thought!”
- I stopped “taking my work home with me”.
I used to think I have to be available at any time. If someone writes to me I have to do it immediately and if I have a free minute I have to think about how I can implement all the strategies in a better way.
NO, I DON’T HAVE TO DO THAT!
Free time is free time. Besides my role as a mother and employee, I have completely forgotten myself lately. I have a regular and monotonous daily routine, regular is good but monotonous? — Rather less good!
So I have started to paint again, which I have certainly not done for 3 years. And it feels so good to go for a hobby and just get your head free again. - And last but not least (and this was probably the biggest incentive): The possibility to learn. Our founder arrived with the suggestion: “Hey, I want every employee to take one hour of his working time per week and acquire some knowledge that will push him/her in his role!”
Skeptical as I am by nature, I first of all nagged and questioned, who has the time for it and most of them won’t do that anyway, but I wanted to try it out for myself.
And see there: After listening to some podcasts and reading some interesting books and blog posts about sales, the thoughts bubbled up in my head.
My office promptly turned into a bulletin board full of post-its, I’ve started to develop strategies and hypotheses & theories about our existing clients. You should have seen the astonished face of our founder, he just slipped out: “I didn’t expect that …”. (By this he didn’t mean that he didn’t trust me, but that if he had known beforehand that I would need to spend an hour a week with learning material to develop something like this, he would have “forced” me to learn before) :)
This reaction drove me to such an extent that I started to work again with more energy and ambition.
I can only say that when you feel like losing your motivation, you shouldn’t immediately think about giving up. It’s better to think about how to make your working environment fun again. And if you don’t come up with it on your own, then you should try to have a clarifying conversation with the responsible authority person, this is the only way to avoid problems and clarify possible doubts.
