Inspiration and motivation are very tacit, yet very vital subjects of everything we do. Could you determine the reasons and root causes why we do what we do? Why we feel what we feel? Why we usually follow the first impulse, even though maybe it’s not the rational action?
We asked you, the readers, in a recent poll what we should write about this week and you decided to know more about inspiration and motivation. Thanks to all who participated and hopefully you’ll enjoy this article. “Why Not” is the motto for 2016 and there we hope you enjoy the subject we have chosen for you, to tell you a little bit about the “Why” and the “Why Not”.
We're doing another poll for an article's subject for next week. Let us know what you want to read about!
— TechAcute (@TechAcuteCom) February 19, 2016
As per Merriam-Webster the definition for inspiration is “something that makes someone want to do something or that gives someone an idea about what to do or create or a force or influence that inspires someone”.
Understanding the why and the reason can be interesting for you and everybody, but understanding the why is imperative for organizations, which want to market products or services to others. Why should they buy the goods or services from you? If you don’t know why, then you have neither case and nor base for negotiation.
MindSight Matrix
In the book The Science of Why: Decoding Human Motivation and Transforming Marketing Strategy, David Forbes from Forbes Consulting tells us about the MindSight Matrix. This tool, or conception if you want to call it like that, has a focus on explaining customer purchase decisions, but it can potentially be adopted more widely if you abstract the mechanic of “selling”.
The Objective to Change
Next to survival, change to improve one’s life is a new imperative of us humans. We don’t need to escape from predators and we have all the food readily available as much as we can buy with our money and have little risk to our life. As soon as the natural requirements are covered and accounted for, we strive to improve our life. Key aspects to change desire are the following:
- Expectations
- Experiences
- Outcomes
Whether you seek to inspire others as part of a leadership function or as part of a marketing strategy, if you are conscious of these points, you will be able to build a much better strategy rather than ignoring the theory altogether.
Inspire and Motivate
Motivation is a friendlier more passive term for manipulation. Whether we seek to motivate and inspire ourselves or others, there are certain categories of motivation that can be listed down here.
- Intrapsychic motivations
- Instrumental motivations
- Interpersonal motivations
These sound very theoretical at first but actually they make a lot sense. The change inspiration from above’s listing is directly relative to these categorization of inspiration and motivation. Internal changes are commonly part of intrapsychic motivations. On the other side, instrumental motivations or interpersonal motivations can be outward-directed changes. All these are also interrelated with our article on why you want to be cool, published recently and lead to the desirable outcome of feeling better.
However not all of these mean that buying the latest sneakers, make you feel good because you will be socially more accepted, when sporting culturally nourished fashion. Another strong angle of intrapsychic motivations is also the desire to feel safe, secured and the trust to rely on other peers, whether that would be a company or a person.
Instrumentally motivated people, usually like to be informed and well engaged with. You could consider those to be a fairly large group as part of the Generation D present in curated spaces like social networks. Unlike the instrumentally motivated crowd, the people who are primarily motivated interpersonally are on the decline. They are your low self esteem lemmings, who do something because someone else also did the same thing as example. This could be replicated to work environments just as well as trend shopping.
Summary
Inspiration is a complex field. Many know it primarily as part of creative processing, but it can account for anything that will be enriched by information or decisions. In this article we learned about the non-evolutionary desire for change and how those map to certain categories of motivations. If you want to inspire people, make sure to address their dominant type of motivation.
If you enjoyed this article or have an opinion to share, I would love to read your thoughts in the comment section below.
Further Reading
Photo credit: Embedded animation by Forbes Consulting / Keshav Naidu / Unsplash
