Motivation Activities

The whiteboard coaching technique is a powerful tool for motivation. By using a whiteboard, you can help someone visualize their strengths, weaknesses, and career goals. Column one focuses on their current state, while column three explores their ideal job or tasks. By connecting column two to column three, you can create a plan to help them move towards their desired outcome. This technique helps individuals stay motivated and committed to their goals, making it harder for them to be swayed by other opportunities. Now, one of the greatest things that we love to do when it comes to motivation is to use our whiteboard coaching technique. And the whiteboard coaching technique, again, is you go to a whiteboard, you can do this digitally and you can do it in person, and you draw two columns or two vertical lines to create three columns, column one, column two, and column three. And then when you sit down with a person, and you can ask a whole myriad of questions, but it gives you a visualization, here is the method to the madness. When they are looking at the whiteboard, it creates an emotional response. People are visual creatures. Number two, when they're looking at the whiteboard, they're essentially looking at themselves, and they're starting to craft career planning, a visualization of where they want to go and where they're at. It's very, very powerful. So in column one, you can ask questions such as, as it relates to your current state, what are your strengths? What are your opportunities to improve? What do you love? What do you like? What do you dislike? And it'll give you a really good picture of how they feel and how they view their current job. Number two, go to column three and say, ideally, what would you love to be doing? Whether it's a specific job or a type of work, what would you love to be doing? What would you like to be doing? What would you like to avoid? And I'll never forget this. We had somebody who literally was on a track for going into management programs. And this person said, I love to work with analytics and data. And the current job had very little of that. And I said, have you shared that? He said, no. And I said, why not? And he said, well, I don't want to rock the boat. I said, do you mind if I play something back to you? And he said, sure. I go, so you're going to take a promotion at the expense of yourself because you don't want to rock the boat? He said, is that what I'm doing? I said, I think so. And that's where we, when we find out what motivates somebody, then they can visualize it. Because when I got to the third column, it goes, oh, I love data. I love analytics. I love studying data. I love statistical analysis. His current job had very little of that, which was amazing to me, but he was on the fast track to go through management programs. So again, a lot of times, managers, we can try to promote. Our intentions are good. It may come at the expense of what someone truly wants to do. So again, column three is ideal. What would you be doing? Is it a job? What are the things you'd love to be doing? And then you go back to column two and you draw an arrow to column three saying, what are the actions we need to take to move in that direction so you are ultimately happy? When you perform an activity and you ask questions around motivation, I'm going to make a really bold comment, and you have a visualization, and you fill up column two, and you schedule time to share in those actions, to move them in the direction of their ideal state, you just became really tough to quit on. Let me give you a representation. If a headhunter calls that person and you're not scheduling time, and they say, oh, we've got a job with data and analytics, you think they would listen if you weren't scheduling time with them? You're darn right they would. So that's the cool thing about this activity. It gives you a visualization, but it also gives you a roadmap as to what to have scheduled coaching sessions centered around.