Dimensions of self motivation

American psychologist, Csikszentmihalyi from university of Chicago has done extensive research on kind of elevated and intense states of mind many people reach when they work, says Daniel Goleman of Emotional Intelligence fame. He interviewed, over decades, artists, sportsmen, business executives, ordinary people extraordinary people and so on. He has discovered what is now, generally, come to be known as flow - kind of mental state, meditative state, people go into when they work. This for lot of us - was a privileged state of few extraordinary artists and musicians - the likes of Michelangelo or Mozart or Michael Jackson.  Flow can be great motivator. Once you learn to be in flow, you learn better to do the work that put you in the flow. It is a kind of self reinforcing cycle. More you learn more you are in flow. And more in flow, more you learn.

Work is very central to all of us. Today's man by and large is his work, especially for people like us, educated, working, working on your own or in a corporate job, significant part of us and life is work. Hence, one of the key questions for us  is how do we work and how can we make it fulfilling and meaningful. How can we make music out of working as lot of people seem to do. For many people work is tyranny. It is boring, tiresome and something that is inevitable. But it has to be more like something that people deeply connect to. Like many people say and as you hear from many musicians and artists and athletes, how they used to enjoy their work and be in some kind of state of meditative bliss. And of course as we saw above, in the research, how to enter the flow

If one can deeply connect to his work, boundary can merge between work and the self and that can be great source of motivation to work. It moves people to work beyond what can

be expected of the ordinary people for then, work is no more work. It is one self!.

Gandhiji's self realization

Gandhiji writes in his autobiography - Story of my experiments with truth;

“If I found myself entirely absorbed in service of community reason behind it was self realization. I had made service religion of my own. I had gone to South Africa, for travel, to gain my livelihood, escape from Kathiawad intrigues. As I said, here I found myself, in deep search of God striving for self realization.”

As we can see gateway to connect to God for Mahatma Gandhi, as he saw  was, service of the poor Indian community in South Africa, his work. So work is very central to man’s own self worth,  work is man himself.  Man can tap into deepest source of motivation to work by understanding how integrated he is with his work.

Alchemy of Flow

Among many other research projects, Csikszentmihalyi did research on 600 odd fresh college students in University of Pennsylvania. Students were given a beeper, and wereasked to record their state of mind, out of predetermined choices given, when the beeper beeps randomly. This was done over a period month or so. The findings were very interesting. Findings of the research showed that students, who were in kind of flow, a deeper concentrated, meditative mental states were able to work  significantly more number of hours and also were able to score significantly higher grades in exams.

For some people enjoying work is very natural. They are born like that. They just are happy to do anything. May be we are all born like that, let me correct. As children we all loved doing some simple stuffs. Over the years as we gathered, perhaps, more and more knowledge about work we developed certain basic attitudes towards it. May be we started saying things like, this work is more interesting, this is not and so on. The work attitude, and hence how we enjoy work, also gets shaped by, we can safely say, attitude towards it at home. How our parents looked at it, what they said about it affects our own attitude towards it. So we gather motivating and demotivating things about work, and slowly over time become either disinterested in it or disengaged with it depending upon role model's attitude towards it.

Look here what Kahlil Gibran, a Sufi philosopher and a great poet writes - in his book The prophet.

“And I say indeed life is darkness, save when there is urge

And all urge is blind save when there is knowledge

And all knowledge is vain save when there is work

And all work is empty save when there is love

and when you work with love, you bind your- self

to yourself, and to one another and to God.”

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