Category Archives: Motiviation

Purposeful Nature

The Nature of Purpose

Stunning Silence. Soul-filling, peace-giving silence. Stunning because the tree frogs and the bugs slept in late today. Even the birds noticed. Their songs were more like Mom humming in the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, and their conversations were held in their most respectful library voices.

With the bustle of Labor Day behind us, the trees seem to be in a hurry to leave a hot and humid summer Autumn-Nature-Purposebehind as well, their leaves beginning to blaze with the colors that will return them to the earth, so they can prepare once again to create their verdant coat in the spring.

I can’t help but see that the “purpose driven life”: that goal centered activity; that unstoppable passion exists all around us in Nature.

We don’t find many things in Nature that don’t have a clear purpose, based on their most basic values. Most of Nature knows the things it must do to fulfill its purpose, and will do those things faithfully. We don’t see squirrels wasting their time trying to be frogs, or birds trying to be dogs.

The exception of course is Human Nature. We must often search to find our values-based purpose and we must fight against many distracting or opposing forces, to determine the actions needed to get us there.

Since the Human Species has been able to have thoughts and express them with language, we have created stories, plays, and books that are intended to help others along in this journey.

The Achievement Protocol is such a book and I hope that you will find it of value, so that, in other moments of Stunning Silence, others will observe you and marvel at the simplicity of the way you follow a purpose driven Achievement Protocol.

Peace

Nothing Succeeds Like Success!

ZZ_MotivationMotivation is the fuel in the engine that moves us forward toward our goals.

In the late 60’s Dr. Edwin Locke wrote a pioneering work called “Toward a Theory of Task Motivation and Incentives”.

This paper represented the beginning of what would become known as Locke’s Goal Setting Theory.

Now, over 50 years later, most of us cannot imagine a time when Goal Setting Theory (and the use of S.M.A.R.T. Goals) was not part of standard management practices.

A key principle of Goal Setting Theory has to do with feedback. Positive feedback, such as that received when a goal is achieved, provides further internal incentive to achieve the next goal.

If we can break our goals down into bite sized chunks that can be accomplished daily or even multiple times throughout the day, then we keep our motivation fresh and are better able to maintain forward momentum. This is true as long as the goals are specific, measureable, attainable (while somewhat challenging), realistic and time-relevant.

For example, having goals of making 6 sales calls before lunch and 4 sales calls after lunch, is much better than the goal of making as many sales calls as possible.

Having small successes throughout the day and the week can provide us a constant drip of motivation, keeping performance up and moving us ever more effectively toward our Big Goals. And as Sir Arthur Helps said in 1868, “Nothing Succeeds like Success”.

UPDATE: