Pearls: Creating motivation

EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl

How do you motivate people?

I have listened to folks who were motivational speakers – quite a few of them, actually – in my lifetime, and they always left me feeling ready to make sweeping, positive changes in my life. But something else usually followed these initial feelings of inspiration…

I tend to go right back to the way I was before I heard the speech in the first place. You know it as well as I, that we have this nature to us, this way that we just are in our personality, in the way we see the world.

Basically, it’s pretty difficult for you and me to listen to someone else’s motivational words, decide to change our personalities, take concrete steps toward our transition, and then to carry through and live differently because we listened to a good piece of advice. It’s not impossible to transform ourselves based on the suggestions of a gifted speaker, but it’s not common to see someone living his or her best life on the counsel of a good YouTube video.

That all being said, I work in education, and one of my daily challenges is to motivate kids,to work alongside teachers and students in an effort to change the way those students see the world: more importantly, I work to improve the way each student sees himself or herself fitting into society.

But there are no magic words, sadly, no combinations of sounds or ideas that will change people’s hearts and minds. If only it were that easy, right? So since words alone don’t work, I have to go to Plan B, which is to enforce changes in behavior and habits in my students, the hope being that their mindset also changes in the process of meeting improved expectations.

When it really becomes a sight to behold is when these steps result in one of those students changing his or her expectations of self. You can do a lot of good with telling a student to sit here, write this or read that, but getting that individual to change his or her self-expectations and begin to set goals – well, that’s the education version of teaching a man to fish. Once a kid turns that corner and is setting his own high standards to meet, he’ll grow up to feed a village.

It takes a lot of persistence, I can tell you that. Beyond that handful of kids who seem to just love school like a fish loves water, most of them need a little prodding, a little bit of encouragement to feel at home in the school environment. But if you catch them just at that perfect time, that moment when the interest in school is fading, but the desire to succeed in front of adults is still there, you can be an eyewitness to something truly special as an educator.

But to actually motivate another human being to do something, that might be a gift beyond what the average person possesses. There’s a reason that personal trainers exist, right? They get you to the gym, they tell you what to do, they hold you accountable and they never help you make excuses. They motivate by bossing you around, and you pay them for their service.

In education, we can’t full-on personal-trainer-style push kids for 7 hours a day. They’ll burn out, and when kids burn out, then you have to start all over again with them. It’s not ideal.

So we look for moments, for opportunities to enact momentary change. We encourage after small victories. We redirect kids when they get distracted, correct them when they step out of line and expect them to improve every day.

Does that all count as motivating them? I’m not sure. But perhaps we can inspire a few of them to motivate themselves. Maybe that’s the best we can hope to do.

Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.