Monthly Motivation from Ready Resilience – September
GUEST POST BY WENDY JENKINS OAM, READY RESILIENCE
Ready Resilience helps organisations thrive during times of change and challenge, using practical neuroscience-based resilience tools that have been proven to offer in-the-moment solutions and long-lasting results.
September motivation
Understanding how your brain is motivated, and how it learns by changing mindset (i.e., from a fixed to growth mindset) can help improve your workplace performance.
Individuals with a growth mindset tend to embrace lifelong learning and effort, and the joy of incremental personal growth. They do not see their intelligence or personality as fixed traits, but malleable so they can be cultivated to build resilience and mastery to overcome challenges in the real world. In essence – neuroplasticity – the ability of our brains to restructure or ‘rewire’ themselves when there is need for adaption.
Encouraging a growth mindset in team members can therefore result in employees who are motivated to work hard and improve without an incentive reward in mind as the outcome. It is enough for them to experience the inherent satisfaction of the activity itself and the resulting changes.
Researchers believe that individuals with a growth mindset are also more receptive to corrective feedback, with a heightened awareness of and attention to mistakes.
When I highlight in resilience workshops that ‘mistakes’ are just ‘learning opportunities’, growth-minded individuals will tend to agree, seeing them as an essential part of lifelong learning. Studies have shown that these intrinsically motivated individuals will generally perform with a higher accuracy after mistakes (i.e., post-error accuracy). Encourage your employees to turn errors into valuable life lessons.
Intrinsic motivation also seems to be related to a part of the brain that responds best to undertaking interesting tasks, with autonomy often the strongest predictor of intrinsic motivation. This is when employees self-endorse the actions they take, where they feel less coerced and generate autonomous behaviour at work.
Enabling opportunities for more interesting and autonomous work can therefore be a sound way to motivate growth-mindset focused employees to rise to the prospect of further learning and development.
