Motivation

You and I are motivated by desires. Perhaps a desire to be rich and attractive. Or a desire to eat a sandwich or have a shower. A desire to own a flashy car or, more likely, to get the feelings that come from showing others that you own a flashy car. Whether big or small, trivial or essential, desires are the mother of all motivation. Our desires may be avoidant. We desire to avoid rejection, to evade moments of social anxiety or all to commonly to hide from the unsettling experience on uncertainty of what to do next.

This last point keeps us trapped on treadmills of familiarity. They become terribly painful places to stay if you’re there long enough.

Desires are like succulent food dangled in front of a starving man, and we satiate that hunger the best we can. Each time we succeed. Each time we accomplish a tiny goal, the brain gets a jolt of dopamine, which motivates us to engage in more pleasure-based work. More desire and more satisfaction. Dopamine is fleeting however and we soon crave more. The craving nags us and that is often why it is worth breaking large tasks in to small ones and ticking off each small accomplishment so it tops up your dopamine frequently.

A big task broken up means you can achieve lots of little goals rather than failing at one big one.

Your motivation is a balance between the stress of the task/work vs the pleasure from progress towards completion. That’s why if you truly enjoy dental work it seems as if you have infinite energy and motivation for it.

So, a pertinent question is, what are you motivated by at work?

We would argue doing your job well, building relationships with good patients and helping their own lives either improve or be free of suffering is a good place to start.

Now, your personal motivations are either external or internal. Derived from without or felt within.

External is the accolades and applause and admiration from others. It is pleasing your boss and getting your wage. A bit of money and a thank you are external motivators for most people. You can think of that as a pushing form of motivation.

You need the money so you push yourself and use willpower to keep going to work.

Push motivation is the alarm clock going off when you want to sleep but you push and use willpower and go to see patients when you don’t want to. Push is hard, push takes effort and a successful daily battle for willpower to win over the obstacles.

External motivators will typically fall into one of three categories: Sex, status and stuff.

None of us are immune but if all of your self-esteem, all of your actions and all of your identity is outsourced to the external…then that external controls you. Such is the challenge for being famous or an influencer.

Internal motivation can be one or more of five things. Five gears in the V8 engine of internal drive. These are different to ‘push’ motivation. These pull you and compel you forward. They are powerful and fast and seem to almost never tire. Pull motivation is power and energy and hope and excitement.

Pull motivation comes from living a life true to your heart. Values are a buzz word these days but they’ve been around for centuries.

William Shakespeare wrote: This above all; to thine own self be true.

He meant, find what’s in your heart, find your values, use them to derive purpose and live a life you are excited to live. Shakespeare is arguably one of the GOATs as a writer, but I’d argue he was an astute socially smart psychologist too, perhaps they’re the same thing on some level.

The magic five internal motivators are – curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy and mastery.

Curiosity – Passion – Purpose – Autonomy and Mastery

These feel like a pull and if you are pulled in you don’t need to push through. Develop these and all the motivation you need is yours.

Dentistry can be inherently stressful and so we must note that pleasure is the neurological antidote for stress.

Many clinical psychologists argue that curiosity is the antidote for anxiety. I can see what they mean. If you are curious and excited for tomorrow, it’s hard to generate worry.

Even the anticipation of pleasure and novelty will motivate the brain to work harder.

It’s also important to maintain the belief that our desires are reachable. That is the essence of delayed gratification or playing the long game. So we need to keep in mind that our daily toils fixing teeth and injecting people are predictable and are leading somewhere worthwhile. The dental treadmill of surviving to the weekend cannot be the sum total of all our work…

Your neural motivation circuits stay active if they anticipate pleasure or reward. So if you want to stay motivated long enough to achieve your goals make some effort to fill each of your days with an assortment of experiences that make you smile, laugh and relax. Working with people who bring this source of pleasure to the table makes a big difference. There are days when the only good things that I experience are the people I work with.

There are lots of ways to do this, for example, take a five-minute pleasure break every hour during work – turn on some music you love, go hug someone, get yourself a head massage, yawn, stretch or meditate for 60 seconds.

Then when it comes to actual dental work…focus on your values and use them to build towards a future you believe in and have fallen in love with.

The idea of Identity and Future Self forms part of the Day 3 teaching we explore on Aspire Conversations.

This course came out of our empirical realization of how we could help delegates more.

Sure everyone wants to develop skills, but what about emotional intelligence, what about mental resilience, psychology and conversational skills? These are all real and transferrable skills. Delegates lobbied us for more and so we set up a two-day course.

It now has an optional bolt on third day for personal development outside of dentistry. I feel it may be the highest value day some of our alumni will ever attend.

Anyway, back to those day to day rewards. All of those activities stimulate the motivational centres in your brain and you’ll immediately experience a boost of energy and an increase in the quality and quantity of your work. Concentrate and feel grateful for the amazing people you work with.

It pays dividends to do this small thing each evening after the last patient has left: write down all the small pleasures and tiny successes you accomplished that day. This reinforces in your memory circuits that you can be successful in the world. The result, a reduction in stress chemicals that interfere with sleep, a boost of neurological self-esteem that lowers anxiety and more resilience when it comes to facing daily problems. I’m big on evening routines and sleep hygiene. People laugh lol…but I truly believe sleep, like food, if plentiful and nutritious won’t solve all of your problems but a lack of either will muck everything up.

It amazes me that there are incredible values I see in the characters of my colleagues which have become ignored or overlooked. Kindness, compassion, a desire to help every patient, a desire to do the best for every patient.

So if that means your dentistry takes a little longer…so what. You care and take your time…unless the NHS contract, like a computer, says NO!

What reward do you get for this kindness? What fiscal incentive is there for being compassionate to a vulnerable and fragile person who needs that in abundance? None I know, but that is ridiculous, those qualities are worth something, to you and me they are anyway.

Now, here’s is a short paragraph or two about your beautiful brain – the thing that makes you YOU! Skip ahead to the non-italics part if you don’t want to read about it!

The motivational centre in your brain is influenced by the nucleus accumbens and this is more than just a motivation machine, as the most recent research shows it literally has a mind of its own, playing a key role in identifying which thoughts, feelings and desires should be acted on and which should be ignored.
It even suppresses ineffective actions that hinder you in achieving your goals.

Your nucleus accumbens is almost worth considering in the third person. Like a part of you that you can have a conversation with. Talk to your motivation control centre and listen to what it has to say. Ask it important questions.

1. What would my best future self/dream identity do or say in this situation?
2. Who do I want to be (today)?
3. Who else benefits if I am my best self today?
4. What can I do to make my future-self proud of my decisions today?
5. Is my current life filled with goals aligned with my heartfelt values?

Creating motivational desires with pleasurable rewards can be of tremendous value to you, particularly when you use it to also serve the people you care most about at the same time. It’s a gift that should not be ignored. Nurture yourself as you strive for bigger and bigger goals!

Motivation is driven by the anticipation of pleasure, or a future reward. It works the same for essential desires like food and warmth as well as luxurious ones like a Rolex or a house with a pool.

If you have spent time with us and built a vision of a Future self you love, based on tiers of tough but achievable goals…then you have a path to the life you want and the path feels good to walk, no matter how hard.

When engaged in difficult tasks and long-term goals, regular pleasure moments keep the motivation circuits active in your brain.

The ability to delay immediate gratification, improves academic and work-related performance. However, you must be mindful about a strong belief and expectation that you will achieve your goals. Combining pleasure, curiosity, patience and perseverance with your skills and values is an evidence-based formula for continued success. That’s why we try to keep our delegates focussed with purpose. Too many dentists just drift, they survive week to week rather than actively planning for a better future.

You can probably see how this has expanded outside of just dentistry and your curiosity for the life you could live as your desired Future self is a powerful concept for life, not just other people’s teeth.

I could write more on this for days as it fascinates me and Raheel so much. We can often be found deep in discussion together looking for more ways to contribute to our delegates lives. The new personal journal and now our ability to bring evidence-based tools for personal development and psychology training via the follow up Conversations Club within our app are, I confess, proud examples of this.

We hope to see you there soon and as ever if you dear reader have any personal questions or feedback…we remain open and grateful to meet and get to know you all more.