Motivating people their way
Here at Pegasus NLP we have developed an approach to motivating people called Consultative Motivating. It uses a number of elements of which two are fundamental:
- Motivate people their way: use their motivational style rather than yours – and discover this by chatting with them
- Motivate through consulting rather than lecturing. Remember old sales maxim ‘when you’re telling you’re not selling’.
The rest of this article includes a series of 5 Twitter Tips on motivating people. These are in italics. (The Twitter Tips series used to be published daily during 2011 and 2012.)
(1) Use their own motivational style
Aspirational or Risk Averse
Motivating Tip 1. Check their personal style: risk averse or aspirational? Can be context-related. They need different approaches
Motivating Tip 2. Aspirational style: they move towards what they want. Risk averse style: move away from what they don’t want.
In any situation people will tend to have a predominant “motivational direction” or style – they will be paying attention to what they want to gain or what they want to avoid.
People with a Aspirational style want to move towards achieving or having what they want. For them the future can look rosy and full of opportunities. They like plans and goals and dreams. In NLP we call this a Towards motivational direction.
Those with a Risk Averse style want security and safety ask; they aim to avoid unpleasant events or nasty consequences. For them the future needs to be carefully planned so that unpleasant events are pre-empted or avoided. They are risk averse. In NLP we term this an Away From style.
These styles can often vary with the situation. For example, some people will be highly risk averse at home but aspirational at work – or vice versa. And neither is ‘positive’ nor ‘negative’: sound decision-making requires both the aspirational and the risk averse aspects be taken into account.
How to recognise a person’s style
Motivating Tip 3. Identify their style from their words. Towards: want, achieve, have. Away From: don’t want, avoid, protect from
Motivating Tip 4. Identify their style by asking them: What’s important to you in this situation? What do you want? Not want?
It’s easy to identify a person’s motivational style. Just have a chat with them and they will tell you. Ask them for their views on a situation, making sure you use ‘open questions’ so as not to nudge them towards a particular viewpoint, and you’ll find that:
Aspirational: they will talk about what they want, what they look forward to, the benefits of doing it, the opportunities facing them, what doing something will achieve for them, and so on.
Risk averse style: will be looking to avoid unpleasant consequences and will talk about what they want to avoid, what they want to move away from, what they want to prevent happening and so on.
It’s as simple as that. No need for complex personality profiling – a five-minute chat will do fine. In fact, a five-minute chat will give you their current views about the current situation – rather than what was going on in the mind when they completed the personality profiling instrument months or years ago!
(2) Consult-with rather than tell-to-do
Use a different approach with each style
(5) Asking is more effective than telling: ‘How will doing this benefit you?’ ‘What will this enable you to avoid?’
Most of us try to motivate others using our own style – whether this be risk averse or aspirational. But this will only work if the other person’s style is very close to our own.
For example, let’s say that Joe works with you and his style is predominantly risk averse – and you wish to motivate him to do something.
Pointing out the wonderful opportunities awaiting Joe as a result of doing this is a waste of time. You must first assist him in considering the downsides of not acting. Only then will he be prepared to consider the benefits of doing it.
If your personal style is highly Towards, highly aspirational, you may find that this approach will feel alien to you at first as in “how could anybody look at things that way!”
But if Jennie’s style is mainly Aspirational and yours is mainly Risk Averse then attempting to motivate your way i.e. getting to feel pressure or warning her of the consequences of not acting will have a highly demotivating effect on Jennie. She is quite likely to refuse to cooperate simply because you’ve used what is, to her, an alien and disrespectful approach.
Motivate through asking questions
Apart from trying to motivate people your way, as in the above examples of Joe and Jennie, the other common flaw when in motivating others is through talking at them rather than engaging with them.
Through using statements rather than using questions. For example:
Joe’s style is Risk Averse so it would seem that the best way to motivate him would be to tell about all the nasty consequences which he will be able to avoid by doing the task. And this could work. But it will be much more effective to use questions.
Simply ask Joe to tell you what these are e.g.
- What will doing this enable you to avoid, Joe?
- What will happen if you don’t do this?
- Anything else in addition to these?
Jennie’s style is Aspirational so you could tell her how great it will be when she does it. But it’s likely to be more effective if you ask her
- ‘What will doing this achieve for you?
- How will doing this benefit you?
- What else will it achieve for you.
- And what will be the best part of having done it?’
Quicker? Or more efficient?
Consultative Motivating takes a little longer – in the beginning. This is because you actually talk with and listen to the person rather than tell then what to do and feel. But it’s more time efficient.
With the tell-to-do approach is ‘high maintenance’ – you have to keep after then encouraging, checking, motivating, managing.