The past two weeks I shared with you the importance of motivation and momentum; two of the absolute most important things when it comes to personal development, individual empowerment, and daily execution.
I promised some tips on motivation.
Here they are:
First, understand motivation is an individual thing. It’s often personality driven, it’s more often than not tied directly to some past experience, expectations, upbringing through childhood.
Someone who was never praised much usually doesn’t think about praise. Someone who was always gifted things or used to winning awards or being recognized will have a need (maybe an expectation) for that.
In every person’s case, motivation is different depending on what they are going through in their own life and what goals they have.
Now, I have already taught you and explained this many times, that you should know the life motivation, the bucket list, the desires, the ambitions, the challenges of your team, both in and out of the practice. This is the only way to have empathy when empowering, and those two things go hand in hand.
When it comes to motivation, it’s not much different…you can motivate the group but you have to empower the individuals. If you don’t connect with them individually, you won’t connect with them as a group.
This, we’ve covered before.
So, big broad brush strokes…strategies for motivation.
1. Daily, obviously the huddle, their individual goals and responsibilities for the day are the norm but there must be a driving energy that says “The game is about to start, in 6, 7, 8, 10 hours it is going to end…our only option is to win – your performance, focus and creation of opportunity to help your patients get healthy today is our only judge as to whether or not today was worth it, whether or not we won… Ready – Go!
2. You do want to have daily incentives and also monthly group objectives, usually an overriding bonus that the team shares in when they cumulatively exceed the agreed upon baseline.
This should become their focus at the end of every day, did we make progress towards this goal, how much closer are we to it, based on our daily results are we on track.
3. Now, what I really like doing is something entirely different, and I can tell you the most successful practices producing more per team member and earning more per chair than anyone else do this – that’s give either individual or team “surprise challenges.” For example we say …
“Okay, you are getting your monthly bonus which is like a profit share, but I don’t want you to be stagnant and just keep hitting your little bonus, I want you to stretch yourself, so what you are going to do is go from where you are today to where we want you to be 4 months from now, that’s 4 months of laser focused determined growth and at the end of that time you are all going to…go on a vacation…get a shopping spree…do something with your family you’ve always wanted to do but will never pay for it or do it yourselves.”
This is so much fun and this really drives motivation. This builds ownership and intense obsession over the goals and objectives. The key is get them involved in deciding the prize. What I love doing is 3x a year, living 4 months as if it were 12 and having 3 complete cycles of growth and challenges.
Here’s what I can tell you for sure, if you give yourself a year to achieve your goals you’re nuts. You’ll waste 11 months and probably run out of time. Stop allowing so much time for people to win and do great things.
We run contests we call “Best of the Best” every 4 months for all of our All-Star Practices and they have mind blowing (often doubling) results in 3-4-5-6 months because that’s what they set out to do.
Motivation creates momentum, momentum creates incredible breakthroughs that most people would otherwise say are impossible.
Your turn!
