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When Motivation Has Gone

By January 13, 2021June 1st, 2021Culture
When Motivation Has Gone

Feelings of depletion and despair can rob us of essential energy and attention. But mindfulness offers a key to overcoming our demotivation. It starts with recognising and accepting our feelings. Here’s what to do When Motivation Has Gone.

For decades, organisations have looked to increase employee motivation and performance. Motivation is a powerful energy that drives people to contribute to organisational success. From the organisation’s side, it involves setting clear and achievable goals, ensuring management is enabling and supportive, providing actionable feedback, and giving recognition that is timely and relevant.

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Yet, the onus to create a motivating workplace does not lie with the organisation alone. Employees share the responsibility of creating and sustaining their own personal motivation.

Now in the second year of the pandemic, with upwards of 40% of the global workforce currently working from home, anxiety among employees is at all all-time high. And increasingly, so is despair.

According to UK-based charity group Mind, more than one in five people with no previous experience of mental health issues, say their mental health is now poor, or very poor.

Defined as an utter loss of hope, the sense of discouragement and dark pessimism induced by despair can render a person powerless.

It is vital during this time of existential crisis that we extend care to ourselves, as much to build a healthier mental state, as to move forward and become unstuck from feelings of meaninglessness and despair.

A combination of mindfulness and compassion training offers a pathway back to a more open and expansive reality in which we are better placed to gain a sense of presence, purpose, and meaning.

Tara Brach, Ph.D, psychologist, author and teacher of meditation, emotional healing and spiritual awakening offers a simple, yet effective, method to learn this structured pathway. She uses the acronym, RAIN (Recognise / Allow / Investigate / Nurture) as an essential tool to overcome emotional reactivity. Brach offers a superb online course, called, Transforming Suffering with RAIN, which can be done at a person’s own pace, and in their own time.

A key learning from this course is that in gaining a greater awareness of our internal state of being, and in recognising and allowing our feelings to exist in an open, non-judgemental way, we respond more skillfully to those feelings which, ultimately, brings us to a more resourceful and calm state of mind.

With greater ability to manage our emotions, and to see a way back to equanimity, we bring to our work, our workplace, and our colleagues, a calmer, more consciously aware mind.

I don’t know of a single person who wouldn’t benefit from becoming calmer and kinder right now. Do you?

Felicity Hinton

Felicity Hinton

Felicity Hinton is the founder and chief strategist at Humanist, a culture-change agency that helps transform people for business success. Previously, she worked in human performance solution design, and advertising. She is a certified change manager (UCT), has a Bachelor’s degree in English (Wits), and has won several awards for her business writing, including a Silver Quill.

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