You Can’t Motivate Anyone. Here’s What to Do Instead.
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One of the most common requests I hear, especially from business leaders and parents, is some version of “How do I motivate my employee, my team, my kid?”
I tell them I have good news and bad news.
Most people want the bad news first. So here it is: based on my years as a business owner, a parent, and a coach, there is no such thing as motivating another person. Motivation comes from within, not from the outside. We can’t motivate someone else because we don’t live inside their dreams, fears, or desires. We will never fully know what lights another person up in the particular way that keeps their engine running long enough to finish something worth finishing.
And the goals worth finishing almost always take more time, effort, and commitment than we expected when we started. Staying with them to the end is not something I can manufacture in you, and it’s not something you can manufacture in your child or your team.
So is there any good news? A great deal.
The first piece of good news is that you don’t actually need motivation to reach a goal. So many of us treat motivation as feeling like doing the thing. But we don’t need to feel like doing something to do it. Ask anyone who’s finished something hard, and they’ll tell you most of the time they didn’t feel like doing what it took. They did it anyway.
This is where I want to speak to three people at once, because they’re often the same story at different ages. If you’re a leader waiting for your team to feel fired up before they perform, if you’re a parent who learned to equate loving your child with never making them do what they don’t feel like doing, or if you’re a young adult who was raised that way and now finds yourself capable, well cared for, and strangely stuck, the confusion is identical.
Somewhere along the line, feeling like doing something got welded to the ability to do it. In my coaching practice, I see this constantly, and I watch the stuckness loosen the moment someone pries those two things apart. That’s good news, because a confusion has a solution in a way that a character flaw does not.
The second shift I want to offer is to stop chasing motivation and start with inspiration. Inspiration is the fire starter. You light the first match. But a match doesn’t stay lit on willingness alone. That first flame needs oxygen, and the only oxygen that works is a real, honest ‘why’. You have to be clear about the actual reason the goal matters to you.
And here I part ways with a lot of coaches. I don’t believe there’s a right or wrong why. Setting a goal to satisfy your ego is as valid as setting one to feed your family. My job isn’t to grade your reason. It’s first to make sure you genuinely mean it and that the goal is one you want for yourself rather than one someone else wants for you, and then I help you reach it. Your why lives in your values and in your own often hidden desires, in your willingness to admit what lights you up regardless of what the people around you think you should want.
Finding that real why is most of the work, and it’s rarely the why you’d guess. A client of mine, I’ll call her R., came to me wanting to change the snack program at her children’s school. Any parent who has tried to change anything at a school knows what a heavy lift that is. We spent our first months together on much larger things in her life, nothing to do with school snacks. Then one day she asked me to help her get motivated to finally start the snack project.
Here’s what I expected. Because of her own strong parenting, R.’s kids weren’t even eating the school snacks. On paper, she had no personal stake left. I was fully prepared for her to realize she didn’t actually care enough to do the heavy lifting.
But when we dug underneath the goal, something else surfaced, and it was obvious to both of us the moment it did. Her why was never about her own children. It was about the health of all the children, and that turned out to be a value deeply aligned with who she is. We didn’t manufacture motivation. We named the real why, said it out loud, and let her feel its weight. That was enough. She was energized and moving within the week.
Now, the honest part. Inspiration lights the match. It does not carry you across the long, dull middle of a worthy goal, the stretch where the spark has faded and the finish is still far off, and you don’t feel like any of it. No one feels their way through that part. What gets you through is the unglamorous machinery I talk about often: consistency, systems, and the decision, made ahead of time, to do the thing whether you feel like it or not. Inspiration and a clear why get you to start and bring you back when you wobble. Showing up anyway is what gets you to the end.
A why can also change as you go, and often deepens. When I first looked into becoming a coach, my why wasn’t noble. I had lived through a real transformation working with a master coach, and I wanted to build a thriving coaching business, partly to prove the doubters wrong. One moment stays with me. I had just earned my certification from IPEC, after pouring in real money, time, and effort, and my sweet boyfriend, meaning well, asked whether, with everything already on my plate, I really needed another hobby.
I knew right then I wanted to prove him, and plenty of others, wrong.
That’s an ego why, and I’ll own it. I’ve always come alive when someone tells me a thing can’t be done. But it didn’t take long for a deeper why to grow beside it: helping young adults reach their potential. That one has stayed. And a decade in, what drives me most now is the desire to work with unapologetically ambitious peers, the kind of clients I learn from as much as I coach.
Ego lit the match. The fire that keeps it burning is something else entirely.
