One of the workshops I delivered this week with a colleague was all around the principle of ‘Words that Change Mind.’ It was all around the language of influence. One of the questions I was asked in an open frame question session was ‘Why would you want to manipulate someone who had lost their motivation into doing things?’ The simple answer was ‘I wouldn’t.’ I gave a long answer at the conference and after a short demonstration, the questioner accepted he had understood. I was going to write the answer up here…..

I started to consider some of my interests in anthropology and the ecology of situations, people and connections. Particularly interested in The Tipping Point (a la Gladwell) in which the idea of when a species reaches extinction is discussed or when a meme really catches on. How do ideas breed?

I wasn’t sure how these things necessarily linked, and i’m still not entirely sure i just know they’re important and then….

As serendipity would have it, I was in a group myself this weekend that were talking about the idea of intention (and how it can get confused sometimes.) It’s a subject that comes along once in a while with actors – which brought about that adage ‘what’s my motivation?’ We often mock actors for what can be seen as a trite saying – but what if we humour them for a moment? What if we actually thought about what our motivation in life is?

If we were characters in a book or on a film, our pre-script has already been written but knowing we can influence the rest of the story- how would, and will you choose to allow it to go?

We often talk about our motivation as if it’s concrete. As if it’s something we can pick up, put down, take for a walk. It’s almost sometimes as if we’ve lost our house keys.

‘Hold on a minute, i’ve lost my motivation.’

It can be interesting when you consider for a moment how motivation was never an object. It never actually existed. It wasn’t tangible. You can’t actually hold it.

You can BE or ACT  motivated, you can even attempt to be motivatING but you can’t lose ‘your motivation.’

So, where do we go from here with this abstract idea? What’s the practical use?

Well if you’re not feeling motivated- the most likely cause is that you’ve lost your criteria for being. If it’s a job for example, what’s important to you about a job? If you can list your 3 main things, you can pretty much work out what makes you tick.

An example could be cash, challenge and progression. If for that person, the cash wasn’t enough, the challenge wasn’t happening anymore or they felt as if they were stuck- then it’s unlikely they’re going to want to go through the journey of being motivated if they’ve lost the direction.

As soon as one of those is subtracted, it’s interesting how quickly the process of being motivated can become stagnant.

What’s important to you about your life? What do you want? As soon as you’ve got your criteria- you can probably recognise how when those things are there; you feel motivated. If they’re not, then there might be work to do.

Aristotle thousands of years ago had a really simple principle. The pleasure/pain principle. He asked us in our lives to identify every time that we make a movement, an action or a behaviour- are we moving towards pleasure? Or are we moving away from pain?

Regular readers of the blog and indeed the people that I see regularly will be well aware of my basic foundations of believing that we have choice. We can make our own decisions; we can just sometime be unconsciously interrupted into not being congruent with what we really want. This can be termed secondary gain.

An example of secondary gain is the smoker who doesn’t quite want to quit because she’s concerned about how she’ll relieve stress otherwise. We can consider subjectively that if she wasn’t putting toxins into her body, and found other outlets to breathe- the tobacco wouldn’t be necessary. It’s much easier to notice these small tendancies though from a disassociated position.

And this is where we can start to tie things together. The concept of schismogenesis is the connection pattern here.

Schismogenesis is essentially the beginning of a rift or a division of sorts. We can look politically and see examples of it throughout the past 4 years. Gordon Brown taking over the Labour party caused a rift to get larger; The Expenses scandal was an example of a schismogenesis between the public and politicans.

We can also see it from sociological perspectives, functionalism and throughout mainstream religion.

There’s internal schismogenesis though, too. There’s those moments where if we tell ourselves we’ve lost our motivation, without thinking of it as a process, there’s a risk of the rift between what we want to do and the ‘motivation’ to do it (there’s that noun again) – this is when things get difficult.

How do we avoid the schism then? Well once it’s created, it’s done. We can move on. It’s what we do to repair it or even create something new, which is where the real wonders can happen.

As always, I’ve written a lot more about this topic, particularly around the ideas of the unconscious and ideas of anthropology and i’m more than happy to e-mail the drafts to any particulary interested parties – just drop me an e-mail at info@zackpolanski.com

Zack Polanski is a leading Cognitive Hypnotherapist at 1 Harley Street. For a free phone consultation, call The Lewis Clinic on 077380888632.