"I WILL GIVE YOU YOUR MOTIVATION BACK!' - NO SUCH THING

If you are interested in behavioral science and/or have ever read a women's magazine :)), you know that an incredible amount of motivational models, research, and theories have emerged in the past eighty years. Mainly because it's incredibly difficult to decipher why someone is 'motivated' and why someone is not. It's even harder to accept that as a leader, you have far less influence on this than you ever thought or were taught.

Opinions also differ on what we even call motivation. If you ask Wikipedia, Google, or OpenAI, you will find that it is a kind of internal incentive system that influences an individual's behavior, thinking, and emotions.

However, if you ask a neuroscientist, they will say that momentary motivation, the dopamine level in the brain at any given moment, and a person's motivation is the dopamine baseline of how that person's brain functions. If you're unlucky, the thought process will continue for days and will include neurotransmitters, neuro pathways, and the like. I do suggest that if you haven't already, forget the leadership coaches (except one here for sure :) ) start delving into the work of neuroscientists and biologists (Huberman, Attia, Galpin, Sinclair, Toleikyte, etc.) because the way your brain works is given. What you can do for yourself is also given. But being able to permanently influence the brain function of a peer, boss, or colleague, well, that's not possible.

You cannot permanently motivate someone. You can inspire someone, sure, so I'm not saying that you are not influencing the lives of others, because of course you are. However, I am saying that you can only motivate someone momentarily, not in the long term.

Because the smart ones say that the dopamine baseline in your brain is given. When you experience a peak because your motivational level jumps due to an external or internal effect and you find that your performance also jumps, you're 'running like a machine,' whether physically or mentally capable of extreme effort - then there is always a price to pay for that. Because the dopamine level drops the same amount after the peak. Then it returns to the baseline.

This baseline is not the same throughout an entire lifetime for any individual. But what influences it, besides yourself, is not something many people have control over, like it or not. Because regular exercise, healthy eating, exposure to natural light during the day, especially in the first hour after waking up, sleep quality, and who knows what else - all affect it.

If you elegantly move on from these situations and still seek your responsibility to permanently "motivate" your team member, peer, anyone, then you will only find very faint connections. Because if you are a 'terrible boss' who pushes your colleague to the limit without regard to their well-being every day, pushing them to work even at night, then their sleep quality will deteriorate. This will have a long-term impact on their dopamine level, indeed. However, you also know that there is no such thing as a 'terrible boss' because what you do is not important, what is important is what they feel from it. Their perception is your leadership. If your behavior, or that of anyone above them in the hierarchy, causes so much stress that they can't sleep at night, they will be less motivated in the long run.

The bad news is that this correlation is much weaker than previously thought. Because most of the behavioral science experiments on which famous motivational theories were based were always short- or medium-term. And it is true that it is possible to achieve a dopamine peak in someone from the outside in the short term.

But fewer people care about what it takes to increase the baseline dopamine level in the long run.

Or if it is possible.

Because if you have an employee whose home environment is stressful for any reason, who doesn't exercise, who eats poorly, who goes out in leap years (and this is not a rare combo here, just look around your immediate circle of friends, for example), and whose baseline dopamine level is also genetically low, then you, as a leader, won't be able to change that even if you stand on your head. Anyway, it's not your job. Your job is to try to keep it at its maximum. But you can only do that for a short time, as mentioned above.

What you really need to do is deal with your own baseline dopamine level. That's what you need to do every blessed day. And then there will be a big factor in it, genetics, that you can't change about yourself either.

The rest is solely your responsibility, not anyone else's.

Do you think about what you're doing with your body?

Do you think about what you're doing with your brain, what you're thinking, how long you're ruminating on a given issue?

Are you looking for an excuse for why you're not outside, why you're not getting enough sleep?

Do you consider how what you drink at seven o'clock in the evening affects your night's sleep and what it will do to your dopamine level tomorrow?

And I could go on and on, but I think you understand what I'm saying.

As long as you talk in a passive form about your own actions or thoughts, first catch yourself in the act of what you're doing.

Then if you've done that and you've done everything you can to really inspire those around you, then you can lean back.

Because your responsibility ends here.