DRAFT
Michael : Good morning John.
John : Good morning Michael.
Michael : Many thanks for taking part in this podcast on motivation. To anyone that doesn't know you yet, can you introduce yourself?
John : Sure. My name is John - last name La Valle, of course. And I work closely with Richard Bandler, co-wrote a book called Persuasion Engineering with him. And I guess I have been involved in the field of Neuro Linguistic Programming for coming-close-to Twenty Five years now, mostly in business applications.
I also run the Society of NLP, that's the certifying body.
Michael : We're going to be talking about motivation, so if I could ask you straight out - What does motivation mean to you?
John : That's a big question I guess. Let's see. There are a lot of things that people want to do, and when we talk about motivation, what comes to my mind is "How much do they want to do what they think they want to do."
If I think about it from a language point, if somebody wants to do a particular activity, how much, or to what degree is their want or their willingness to do that activity?
So its a thing where some people want to do certain things, but how bad do they really want to do those things? That's the way I look at it.
Michael : And the next question is a bit of a two-part question. The first part is "What are the "inner" things that impact on motivation?"
John : There are a lot of things, and they all work in conjunction with each other. Motivation is an interesting thing - there are certain things, like, are you able to do certain things? Are you mentally capable?
I always look at the capability factor - are people able to do what they want to do? And if not they need to go off to learn that. And the second part of that is that they really have to believe that they can do that - but there are a couple of other sub-routines if they will. Its not just that they believe that they can do it, but lets say that they don't believe that they can do it to the extent that they want to do it, and they want to rearrange their beliefs, or enhance their beliefs - and build the belief that its possible for them to do it.
Firstly they have to have a belief that they can change their beliefs, so they have to have a belief in themselves that they can change what they believe about themselves, or their own capabilities. So they have to have that first of all.
And the second thing is, that there are these - linguistic structures, really - that people would call them their "Values" or "Their life criteria", basically the things that are important to them, lets say. So where those things are on a list, lets say, would determine how they do a particular activity.
I'll give you an example. Lets say that someone wants to be able to run their own business. I would be interested in what is important to them about that, or find out where those things are on their list of priorities, because that's really what motivation comes down to - a list of priorities - so the hierarchy of importance.
I have a friend of mine who's probably around Fifty years old now, somewhere around there. And he's always wanted to become an astronaut. And lo and behold, the guy has had an absolutely phenomenal career, or should I say careers, collecting very expensive autographs, to marketing things, marketing campaigns.
And lo and behold, at whatever age he's at now - he's probably about Fifty-ish - he has just passed the first leg of a test to become an astronaut.
So, it's not like he didn't want to become an astronaut before - he did - but the hierarchy of what was important to him must have been, I'm not sure - If I was to say it was number five or number six on his long number of things that he always wanted to do - he's finally getting around to doing that after doing what he always wanted to do.
Michael : Moving on from that, you've talked about what's important in our inner world - what sort of things in our outer world do you think effect peoples motivation?
John : I'm not sure how much that things that are on the outside can effect us. Because to me that is the environment and we can change how the environment will effect you. Obviously if you want to do X activity and it requires one million dollars to invest in, or half a millions pounds - I guess to some degree, you'd have to have access to that kind of money - but that's not the only way to achieve that activity, even if you had to make that investment, there are other ways of getting access to that type of money.
So I don't know. I am sure that there are things that people perceive in the outside world that could stop them. To me the mind is the last bastion of freedom that we can have. So we could do lots and lots of things if we put our minds to it.
Michael : So, as an NLP'er, what are your views to the main approaches to motivation?
John : There are lots of techniques and procedures that I see that people will use, and continue to use, and some of them are pretty good, but I think there are strategy elicitation and things - there's one key piece that I like to use with people.
The first thing to realise, is number one, that if they really, really, really want to do something, then the motivation really ought to be there to begin with. So we're talking around, in this case, about things that people don't really want to do. Sometimes there's a compulsions, they're compelled to do it by someone else, or their boss - I guess that's an external piece, but they want to be motivated to do something that they're not really wanting to do on their own, lets say - or not 100% on their own.
But in that case there are things that people can do. Nobody likes to write out checks or pay their bills, but they somehow know that they have to be motivated to do that once or twice a month or whatever that number is.
So as a strategy, there's a piece - where if you were starting to do a new activity, a new project for example - you'd be excited, you'd be motivated - all of the resources you needed would just plug in.
But depending on the project as you move along, you may lose that motivation, or it may diminish - and that happens for a group of different reasons - mostly because something more exciting comes up, or you've lost interest for whatever the other reasons could be.
But the point would be that its the sort of activity that you have to do, that you have to finish - so the strategy where there's this motivation piece where you start off, its useful to be able to take that resource, anchor it, amplify it, intensify it, do all those sorts of things.
And you can actually predict in the future - because for the most part the people that run these that run these strategies over and over and over again, so they can predict down the road at what point their motivation will diminish.
And you could build that into the strategy by noticing where that motivation begins to diminish, go back a few steps before that, and loop that motivational feeling that pushes you through that particular point in the strategy where it would have begun to diminish, but in fact doesn't, it keeps you excited about it.
I guess there are other factors involved in it too. I don't know what demotivates people, and I like to ask what it is that motivates people to do certain things.
Michael : Lets move on to the next question that relates to that. If somebody comes to you because they're not feeling motivated about something - what are the sorts of question that you ask them at the beginning?
John : I'd like to ask them a few things.
First of all I would ask - I do like to find out - this thing that they're motivated towards, or want to be motivated to do, is it there's? Is it all there's? Is it 100% for them? Is it there want and desire or is it someone else's?
Because if its truly not there's, its going to be more work, lets say, for them.
If I was working with someone that wanted to quit smoking for example, I always ask them "Is this something that you want to do, or are you doing it for someone else?"
Or typically they might respond "Well, its something that I want to do, because- so-and-so, my spouse wants me to do it, or my friends want me to do it."
And while there's nothing inherently wrong with that, now what i have to do is really make sure that this is for them, and not for someone else. So that's one of the questions that I would ask.
Another one that I would ask - in NLP there's the sentence "We're not allowed to ask the question Why?" Which is really totally bogus - we're allowed to ask the question, its a matter of when we ask it and for what purpose we ask it.
But the question "Why?" What it does, is it elicits motivation. So I will ask someone, even though they say that they want to do something, a modal operator thing - I'll even ask them "Why do you want to do this?"
I might even ask the question "Why are you motivated to do this?" And even ask for the motivation behind the motivation at times. Because I really want to know, and I think that they ought to know what it is too.
Because too often people think "If I snap my fingers then I'm going to change!" and they forget that there are things that they actually have to do in order to change, they think "Wave a magic wand above my head, and there I am, I'm done"
So I ask those types of questions. I ask them what it is to them. I word it in terms of time and effort, because the effort part we often forget about that piece. If people aren't willing to put in the effort to do things, then you have to question their motivation, they're real motivation.
Michael :So you ask some questions at the beginning, what sort of things do you do next? You talked about strategies before - is that what you do most times, or are there other things that you may do?
John : Oh there's lots of other things. One of the things that I do when I am listing information from them - and I like to get them to do a lot of the speaking so I can get a lot of the language patterns naturally formed - not because I'm eliciting information form them. I'll just say "Talk to me about this", and then I'll sit back and start taking some notes.
I'm listening to a few things. I'm listening to the level of their pro-activity, or reactivity to what they want to be able to do. I also listen to anything else in their language that gives me clues to the sub-modalities that are going on inside their brain.
That's a key factor actually. One of the key factors - and this is tends to be whether they believe that they can do something or not. The emphasis tends to be around whether they can see themselves doing the activity or not. And what they associate with what they see in the image, you see in their language structure - they'll say "Well, i just don't see myself doing that.", "I just don't see myself being able to finish that."
And that's a very simple sub-modality distinction.
Michael : Can we just take that example, somebody saying "I just cant see myself doing that?" And I appreciate that we're taking a very small chunk, but what would you do with them to help them with that?
John : If I was doing that with a step by step technique, I would literally have them dissociate from the image - because chances are they're associated to the image like they're there - but they don't see themselves in the image or in the movie that they're making.
So I would actually have them dissociate so they could see themselves in the image, behaving in a way, or generating the behaviours needed for the activity. And then of course if its a movie I would have them watch themselves doing it, hear themselves doing it, listen to what they're saying.
And then I have associates I have them dissociate, I have dissociates I have them associate. And the final step that I would use actually is that I would use them dissociated from it in the future - so lets say the activity is something that they're going to accomplish six months from now, so they would be able to see themselves doing this activity over the next six months and they'll find that that they complete that activity.
Again, by associating it to them they would then know what to hear, what they would see and what they would feel on the way to doing the activity. And then hopefully if that all plugs in when it comes time to generate that activity, or completing that activity - all of those things would plug in at once, and they would have what I would call a full-blown experience of the activity.
Michael : OK, so you've talked about sub-modalities - you've talked about checking whether they are productive, we've talked about their sequence or strategy - is there anything else that you'd look for or consider in that middle bit?
John : I guess I would consider how it is they organise their time-lines. More specifically how they organise their own priorities, whether they can sequence those, and whether they can multi-task or not. I always look at that.
Michael : Could you just talk a little bit about that? Its an interesting topic.
John : Well a lot of times, the motivation thing for me - especially in business situations. I run into this with businesses all of the time, when they say "Our boys aren't motivated."
Well, I truly believe that the employee is really responsible for motivating themselves and the boss is really not accountable for their employees motivation. But I fully subscribe to the fact that the boss sets up the environment and can put roadblocks in the way to stop the employee becoming motivated, I understand that.
But really, in most business cases its a matter of the list of priorities in today's economy - well, its been going on for a long time actually - somebody's boss keeps piling things up on top, somebody's plate gets full, as they say - and now its a matter of Twenty-Four hours a day, seven days a week - and when the plate gets that full, something is going to fall off of the plate.
So the employee gets to choose, essentially, what it is that they want to do or not. And when you look at a list of things, there are some things that they are more motivated to do, and some things that they are less motivated to do, of course.
So those things are the list of things that they have to do in their priorities, and the next thing that comes up is "Whose list of priorities are we looking at?" Is it the bosses list of priorities, or is it the employees list of priorities?
And the employees list of priorities is going to be way different from the bosses list of priorities - that's the first part: "Whats really on the list and how does it sequence down?"
And the timeline piece, to me that's really an activation tool. We all have our time-lines, and we all utilise them, but these little things and priorities keep replacing other things in the timeline.
So the boss walks in the door, for example, with a business application, and says "Look I need this right away." All of a sudden things in the whole timeline start shifting around, and their futures start shifting around. Now how well the employee has a handle on what the things are on his priorities - what his priorities are in the future, in their timeline - even if its only in the next week or two - in the next week - If they don't have a good hold of how to control that, things will fall off the timeline, and they will stay off the timeline - they might not be put back on the timeline by the employee alone - it might take the boss to come back in by saying "What about this project?"
Michael : So we've talked about some ideas on how to start the session, some ideas that would come up in the middle - how would you normally close the session and what sort of things might you consider towards an end of a session?
John : Towards the end of any session - when it comes to the motivation thing, I like to stay in touch with the person. I'll do a follow up a couple of weeks later, even a month or two later, and just find out how they're doing, and find out whether or not anything else got in the way that they hadn't planned on, or we hadn't planned on.
But at the end of the session I always make sure - that we do in NLP anyway - a complete future pace - and that does not just include just putting things into the future, but of past events, past experiences and knowing what its going to be like afterwards.
I think that's there's a lot of things that people don't really do when they're doing future-based. Its one thing to say "Well, I can see myself doing it in the future, but whats it going to be like after Ive done it?"
Whats it going to feel like? What are the benefits? Any consequences that there are? And yada yada yada, after the thing - and I think a lot of people don't plug that piece in.
Remember, we're dealing with the brain here. Its an exercise in neuro-chemistry, in brain chemistry. Its not just a matter of the sights and the sounds and the chemistry, its the chemicals that go along with the brain-state.
So people that are future pacing, when they do that, if they go into something after its already been finished, they can take a look and see how its going to look. I think its a more pervasive change for people, and them doing what they say they want to do, is more likely to happen.
Michael : Looking now at what you've just said, or maybe bring in anything that you want to - what tips would you give anybody listening who wanted to improve their motivation on something?
John : The simple things are - if they say there's something that they want to be motivated to do but its not really for them alone, and somebody else wants them to do something. The first thing for them to think about is thinking about, and literally listen to their own language.
And listen to the modal operators, or for the layperson what I would call the motivator words - I want to, I'd like to, I need to, I have to, I wish I could, - things like that - I can, I must.
And then number two - notice the submodalities. The modalities for visual, for auditory, for kinostetic, notice how big the images are, the vibe of the sound
Where are the images? Are they in black and white? Are they movies, are they slides?
All of the submodalities that I would really need to take a look at, as they're saying what they're saying to themselves. I think that's an important piece, because ultimately, the submodalities are how we encode information, and the easiest way to recode the information if we're paying attention to the process.
Michael : Taking a big picture approach - is there anything that you'd like to emphasise or anything that you'd like to add. Any big picture thoughts of motivation.
John : If you really want to do something, then you probably will. If you really don't, you probably wont - to the degree where you decide, if you're going to change something or not, you have control over your brain, and you can decide another strategy - to run a decision strategy, to decide whether you want to do something or not.
But the truth is, if you want to do it, you will.
The only other thing that I could add in here is, people will categorize what they want to do, they categorize them as their hopes and their dreams. And that's an internal activity - they're in there thinking about what they want to do. "Things I need to do" "Things I dream of doing".
And I heard something a while back, that was quite profound actually, and I don't really remember who said it either - and it went along the lines of this:
"In order to be able to reach your dreams, you have to be able to first wake up."
And I thought that was really profound - its a way of saying "Get to the outside of your head and go do things." Wanting something isn't enough, you have to do things about it."
Michael : Now is there anything special that you're doing at the moment that you would like to plug or tell our listeners about?
John : Well actually there are a lot of things. Richards new book is absolutely excellent, I highly recommend it. You can get it online at Amazon. I'm sure there are other places you could get it at the time - the latest one is "Get the Life you Want" its really an excellent book.
The only other thing is - anything we have you can get from out websites,
nlp, John La Valle & Richard Bandler's schedule here or
Richard Bandler NLP Hypnosis Design Human Engineering, Neurohypnotic Repatterning seminars . . .
Michael : And the last thing of course, is to thank you for spending twenty-five minutes with us. I really appreciate it.
John : Thank you Michael, its always my pleasure, really.
John La Valle on Motivation
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