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Change and motivation

A, B, C

  • Asking: the statement or action you’re asking for.
  • Becausing: the data and facts that explain why.
  • Convincing: the response to anticipated challenges.

Motivate change

  • Direct the Rider
    • Follow the bright spots
    • Have a destination postcard
    • Script the critical steps
  • Motivate the Elephant
    • Find the feeling
    • Shrink the change
    • Promote a growth mindset
  • Shape the Path
    • Tweak the environment
    • Rally the herd
    • Make it a habit

Careful of the Fundamental Attribution Error: maybe it’s the situation and not the person.

Three realms of disagreement

  • What is true?
  • What is meaningful?
  • What is useful?

Things to check:

  • Is everyone arguing in the same realm?
  • Is it actually about urgency, priority, grieving, solidarity?

Disagreement Template

  • Learn
    • Facts and evidence
    • (Multiple, diverse) Interpretations
    • (Multiple) Values
  • Orient
    • Shared values
    • Proposal
    • Discussion
  • Act
    • Commit
    • Check-in tripwire
    • Measurement of success

Hierarchy for motivating change

  • Intrinsic motivation (enlighten, inspire)
    • Feels like: the right thing to do; the smart thing to do; making a difference; helping people.
    • From seeing the real world benefits to people.
  • Extrinsic motivation (rewards)
    • Helps, but focuses on the practitioner, not beneficiaries.
    • Can result in doing it just for the reward.
  • External control (guilt, punishment)
    • Sets a low bar. Can result in doing the minimum amount of work necessary and othering the beneficaries.

Planning the change

  • Attractive
    • Link a reward with a good action
  • Satisfying
    • Use a habit tracker, visual record of progress
  • Easy
    • Start with small, quick, wins
  • Obvious
    • Use Implementation Intentions, tweak the environment

Behaviour change model: BMAP

  • Behaviour = Motivation × Ability × Prompt
    • Sufficient Motivation and Ability are required to cross “The Action Line”
    • Motivation and Ability can compensate for each other somewhat
  • Troubleshooting order
    • Is there a Prompt? (Action prompts are more reliable than Person or Context Prompts)
    • Is there an Ability blocker? (Make the Behaviour easier. Check time, money, physical effort, mental effort, routine)
    • Is there enough Motivation? (It’s unreliable. Motivation towards an abstract doesn’t work.)
  • Celebrate immediately after the habit because emotions form habits via dopamine
  • Rehearse a habit to make it sink in more quickly.

Coach-like questions

Some coach-like questions for clarification and getting to the root cause. An alternative to using Five Whys because that can be annoying sometimes.

The focus is a bit like Appreciative Inquiry: focus on strengths and assets rather than problems and deficits.

  • What do you mean?
  • What do you want?
  • What would be our best outcome here?
  • What have you tried and how has that worked out?
    • What’s worked before?
  • And what else? / Can you tell me a bit more about that?
  • What are you worried about?
  • What’s holding us back?
  • How can I help?

Watch for SCARF: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness (social), fairness.

Tripping over the truth

Viscerally seeing, feeling, the scale and scope of the problem. To motivate toward and appreciate a solution. Effective because it doesn’t come across as being pushy, forceful, or opinionated.

  1. clear insight
  2. compressed in time
  3. discovered by the audience

PACT goals

A different take on SMART goals.

  • Purposeful. Meaningful to your long-term purpose in life.
  • Actionable. Based on outputs you can control, an adaptable approach.
  • Continuous. Simple, repeatable, actions, an adaptable approach.
  • Trackable. Rather than measurable, a “yes”/”no”.

Sources