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Writer's pictureLizzie Chapman

How to Motivate at Work in Tough Times.

Updated: Mar 17


Motivate at Work

The one sentence advice that sometimes falls short when it comes to motivation: “Love where you’re at.”

I think many others’ can relate to spending a lot of time working towards the next thing because the next thing will make us happy. Spoiler alert: the next thing doesn’t make us happy. Enjoying the moment you’re in makes you happy, and the more you enjoy and gain fulfillment from the moment, the more successful and motivated you’ll feel. When you equate success to getting to the next level, you’re in a constant race of always wanting more and never feeling success, but when you can appreciate what the day or next hour holds for you, you get to be regularly fulfilled. So what does this look like when you really don’t love a lot of the things happening around you that are beyond your control either due to a challenging or changing work environment, tougher macro-economic situation, whatever it might be. We generally have three options:

  1. Leave the job

  2. Stay and hate what we’re doing

  3. Shift our mindset to love something…anything!

Partnerships people do a lot of undesirable work, behind every partnership announcement, there are hundreds of hours of grinding internally to get every team on board and prepped while also getting alignment and buy-in from the partner and it can be exhausting and demotivating. Almost every day, there’s at least one thing I don’t like doing, such as putting in my expenses, digging deep into an operational fire, explaining why we are doing something the way we are for the 27th time, and going through my overwhelming email inbox (that's hardly motivating at work). But every day, I choose to focus on something I love doing, whether that’s having a career discussion with an incredible human, building a deck for an upcoming webinar (yes, this is one of my favorite things to do), brainstorming potential solutions to an ongoing problem or starting to build a strategy around a new opportunity. I only let myself do the things I dislike for so long because if I let it take all day, I’ll be spent and useless for the rest of the week. As a leader, I push my team members and co-workers to do the same. Businesses go through difficult times and transitions, which can drain entire teams and have a huge impact on revenue. When the focus is only on the things we dislike, not much gets done and employee retention takes a hit. So I encourage people to focus on something they do enjoy doing or I just give them a project that I know they’ll like.

The next time you find yourself demotivated, schedule an hour on your calendar with a title like “Something I love: Start research on SMS partners” and encourage your co-workers or employees to do the same. Find the joy in the micro-activities and it will hopefully start to spread into other areas or help you understand if there’s a change that may need to be made.


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