Applied Psychology

How Motivating Others Helps You

Jun 18, 2024 | By Saranne Durham
Reading time: 3 min
Motivating others to achieve a goal

Motivating others is about getting them moving in a positive direction to achieve a specific goal. This could be within your personal or professional capacity. One of the benefits of motivating others is that it can have a positive ripple effect on one’s own life. Thus, by learning to motivate others to reach their potential, you’re also advantaging your own wellbeing.

Why is Motivation Important?

Motivation is impacted by our life experiences and our expectations. It’s moulded by our emotions and self-concept that translate into behaviours, which in turn can determine how successfully we can motivate others and ourselves.  

In order to accomplish a goal, you need to feel inspired to do so. And motivation is what helps provide us with the grit to get started and keep working towards achieving our ambitions. Motivation is important both internal and external motivation; usually a mix of both because it helps us achieve our goals and fulfil our needs. It also helps us form healthy habits or break free from unhelpful ones. If you can master how to motivate others, and yourself, you’ll improve your own and the effectiveness and efficiency of those around you. 

Motivating Others and Yourself

Motivating others helps to boost your own feeling of accomplishment. For most people, successfully assisting someone else to achieve something results in them feeling like they have a purpose. For managers, team success is both individual for team members and shared as a team. Sharing in the joy of success is somehow contagious! 

3 Ways to Motivate Others

  1. Praise Accomplishments: Acknowledging someone else’s accomplishments can assist them in staying the course and working harder. Furthermore, publicly recognizing achievements can inspire colleagues to do their best. Don’t forget the importance of a simple ‘thank you”, which expresses both acknowledgement and appreciation. 
  2. Believe in Others: Don’t underestimate the abilities and potential of those around you. Therefore, actively find out what someone is good at. Then motivate them by supporting them and providing opportunities for them to use their talents. 
  3. Find the WHY: Helping someone to discover the underlying reason they want or need to do something, enables a better rate of success. It also assists in finding the most effective way to do something, thereby boosting productivity

How Motivating Others Inspires You

Aside from the innate sense of achievement that usually accompanies helping someone else accomplish something, there are several ways you’ll benefit too. 

Motivating others takes you through a process of deepening your self-awareness. Thereby assisting you in being more aware of your own ambitions and better describing your goals, often this results in a good understanding of why and how you want to do something. This is key to being self-motivated and successfully achieving a goal.  

Being part of successfully motivating someone else boosts your positivity. This helps to foster a healthy can-do attitude within your own life. Which, in turn, motivates you and results in successful achievement. Working and living alongside motivated people can also inspire you to take hold of new opportunities. This leads to your being able to accomplish an increasing amount across both your personal and professional life. 

Thus, learning how to be a better motivator can positively impact one’s personal and professional capacity. There’s an Art to Motivating others. As such, short courses that impart tools as well as deepen understanding of the fundamentals of motivation are empowering. 

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