4. What Motivation can Teach You about Yourself

Today we are talking about another core part of Emotional Intelligence: Motivation.

The definition for motivation is: emotionally intelligent people are motivated by things beyond money, fame or success. They're also able to understand and desire the need to fulfill their own inner needs and goals. 

What do you think about this? What motivates you?

What can you learn about yourself as you uncover the role motivation plays in your life? 

Lani: Caregiving Philosophy
Melissa: Wandering Missy - Start Living the Life You Want. How to find Joy + Purpose in your Life.

Transcript

MOTIVATION

SUMMARY KEYWORDS motivate, motivation, lonnie, people, bonbons, celebrations, bigger, emotionally intelligent, small, life, desire, celebrate, happiness, mother teresa, emotional intelligence, spite, summed, day, goal, melissa 

SPEAKERS Melissa, Lani 

Melissa 00:04 Welcome to Happy Life Story. I'm Melissa. 

Lani 00:08 And I'm Lani. We're discussing how to create your better life story. 

Melissa 00:17 Okay, here we are. Back again, talking about number three motivation, which is 

Lani 00:27 the third part of emotional intelligence. 

Melissa 00:31 Exactly. This emotional intelligence is a very big subject. This is just the tip of the iceberg, too. So the definition I have for motivation is emotionally intelligent people are motivated by things beyond money, fame or success. They're also able to understand and desire the need to fulfill their own inner needs and goals. What do you think about this? 

Lani 00:58 Yeah, I think that's awesome. Great, I don't have anything to add. 

Melissa 01:03 When I was reading this through earlier, before we started recording, I was thinking that it's Lani and I right now. Because neither one of us quote, needs to be sitting here right now. We want to be sitting here right now. 

Lani 01:20 We do want to be sitting here. 

Melissa 01:26 We could just be sitting back on the couch eating bonbons all day. But we've decided that we want to use our life experience, the experience we have in our many wonderful years to help others. The financial reward is not what motivates us. 

Lani 01:44 That's still sticking out in my mind. Motivate ourselves without thinking about money and what was the other one? 

Melissa 01:53 To not think about fame or success. 

Lani 01:56 Money, fame or success. Interesting, because a lot of people are motivated by those things. 

Melissa 02:01 Exactly. And I think that the fact that we're joining together and we both have a similar type of coaching practice that's dealing with happiness and people who maybe are not 100% content with their current life situation. So to bring us together like that doing this out of the kindness of our heart. I don't mean like, we're Mother Teresa or something. I think what motivates us is our own internal curiosity about why we act the way we do, why other people do, and our desire to help others supersedes any ambition for money, fame, or success. 

Lani 02:44 We're so interesting aren't we? 

Melissa 02:48 I'm sure people are gonna start to understand that the more they listen. 

Lani 02:53 What I think people don't do to motivate themselves is actually celebrate each small accomplishment. I think a lot of people think celebrating along the way to an accomplishment is not good enough, not big enough. So they dismiss the little celebrations. I'm all for the little everyday celebrations. 

Melissa 03:14 I couldn't agree more because it's these little small steps that get you to the bigger goal, the bigger outcome or the bigger transformation or whatever it is you want to either change or evolve. Showing up every day and doing something small, you should celebrate. You should because you're doing it! 

Lani 03:36 Right. I also think people try to avoid challenges because they don't want to change. But I think challenges, getting over challenges, is the best thing you can do for happiness. Moving forward and doing something that you didn't think you could do or was hard, I think that getting over that is what makes you happy. And I think that's super important. 

Melissa 04:01 Exactly. In spite of sometimes you might have some small failures along the way as well but just falling down and getting back up and continuing in the direction that you are wanting to move in and not stopping because something didn't go perfectly. 

Lani 04:19 Yeah, we can't expect everything to go perfectly. In fact, the more fails the better right? They say fail fast so that you can keep moving forward. 

Melissa 04:27 Exactly. We may be saying the same thing when we listen back to these early episodes! But, I'm excited to be here and our motivation, our shared motivation, has us sitting here right now and I'm excited for that . It's a great example of doing something because you love it and want to do it versus have to do it and you're only doing it to pad your wallet or something. 

Lani 04:59 Right. I love that you said before about doing this to share all the information we know. I think it's really important to have a purpose in your life, like to help other people. 

Melissa 05:15 Absolutely. We've got too much knowledge in our 50 something years to not want to share a little of it. And, to take in knowledge from other people, to learn something. It's why I wake up every day. I love learning something new. 

Lani 05:33 It's so fun to learn about things and it's so fun to learn about why people do things. 

Melissa 05:42 Keeps us young and happy. I think right there we kind of summed up a really positive component of these five parts of emotional intelligence. So, if you're good we can move on to number four in a separate episode. 

Lani 06:08 Sounds great. Coming up next is empathy.