Motivation and creatives

Now this sums up where I'd got to in thinking about this but hadn't yet put into words. I think I instinctively understood this but haven't always been very good at acting on because of lack of experience in the past (as I look back).

... you can only really shout at people a couple of times a season if you want it to be effective — if you do it every week they just get used to it and ignore you. And if you have to shout, encourage and cajole your people to put the effort in every week, then something’s wrong.

And then comes a really nice metaphor/analogy which helps to conceptualise what's going on.

I once went to a seminar with psychotherapy guru Bill O’Hanlon where he talked about motivation in therapy. He drew an analogy with curling, the winter sport in which players take turns to throw a stone across the ice towards a target, while their teammates sweep the ice in front of it with brushes, to reduce friction and help the stone slide further. According to Bill, it’s not the therapist’s job to throw the stone — the impetus for change has to come from the client. The therapist’s role is to sweep the ice and help the client keep going, facilitating rather than pushing. I think the same applies to management — if you’ve got people who put plenty of force and direction into their throw, you can do a fantastic job scrubbing away the ice in front of them. But if there’s no energy coming from them, you can sweep all you like but the stone won’t move.

I thought that it also potentially helps understand the role of a life-coach: a lot of coaching is about motivation but it isn't about creating motivation, ultimately, it's about identifying it and connecting it up with life situations. And, I think that it also relates to spiritual direction: helping people to access the tradition/s in ways that are congruent with their kairos. This includes noting their personality, life-stage, history and motivators, but sweeping the ice before the stone is a good picture. There is the desire a person has to connect and live with God, but there is friction as sin derails and slows. A soul-friend's job is to help brush away the friction and even to help steer the stone (judicious sweeping can help make some pathways more likely) but the hurl is the befriended's job. As the sum up says:

So you can’t ‘motivate’ anybody else. You can show them the target, smooth the way and cheer them along. But motivation is something you draw out rather than put in.

Of course, in leadership this can make for a somewhat laid-back style, but outside of military or pay-disciplined environments, that's necessary otherwise the heavy-handedness demotivates. In church terms, I've come across successful clergy-leaders but some of them have had a high attrition rate among those they have brought in to partnership with them; their momentum and 'success' has been bought at the expense of a lot of burnout or collaborator-churn. Of course, there are also potential cultural problems; if leadership is culturally defined, in effect, in Il Duce terms this working-with leadership is always going to seem weak and anaemic. However, it is likely to be longer-term and to grow others better. The one thing that can carry the Duce leadership is a strong ability to envision others so that collectively individual motivations and concerns are firmly connected up in people's minds with organisational or ministry goals. The problem that can arise from that is that rhetorical power frays in contact with realities.

Have a look at the article for further thoughts on how to maintain motivation. Again this can apply to both coaching and spiritual accompaniment by helping to identify actual motivations and realities and vocations and to examine these against the false consciousnesses created by gift-envy, church 'ideologies' and ministry projection.
I'll be watching the further episodes of this...