Are you motivated?

Do you think of yourself as a highly motivated person? I have to admit that I am not one. When the summer Olympics were on TV, a friend and I were admiring some of the women athletes, but remarked that neither one of us would put in the time and effort needed to excel in any type of sport. For me, possibly target shooting, since I am already fairly good at that, and it requires mainly being able to stand still and concentrate, which I am also pretty good at. But my boss, who is my age, decided at about age 40 to get in shape, and now 12 years later he has run at least a dozen marathons. He probably thinks I’m a big couch potato, but if I’m running, it is only because someone is chasing me. Band camp and swim team both seemed like way too much effort to be putting out during the summer, so I never did either one. Well, swim team for a week before I realized how totally lacking in fun it was, and fortunately I was allowed to quit.

“Work smarter, not harder” is definitely one of my mottos. I am extremely industrious at work, and I have created various shortcuts and streamlined procedures to get more done. I have even taught these to other staff members, but many actually prefer to plod along rather than learn or remember a new and easier procedure. I am sure I do not work as hard as several of my coworkers, but I get more done, and whenever we have a short-term project that has any high-volume aspect to it, I’m always one of the lead people because I will get it done and still get my other work done. But there are times when it might appear that I am goofing off, which I might be. I am fortunate in that my current boss has a similar working style, so he generally just leaves me to do my thing. He assumes if I am eating nuts and listening to something on headphones and have several extraneous papers out on my desk, I can also be doing my work, which I usually am.

Every once in a while I will get very interested in something new – an activity or a topic, and I may participate in it or read about it fairly heavily, but generally I do lose interest eventually and move on to something else. Something that has managed to hold my interest for over ten years now is Sacred Harp shapenote singing. For the first couple of years, I attended one or two singings a month and then spent a couple of hours a week at home learning tunes and practicing leading. Now, however, while I still enjoy it, I’ve only been going a few times a year, mainly because other interests have supplanted that. When I’m retired and have more time, I expect to go back to more shapenote singing. There are people who have been in the May Festival Chorus for 20 years or more, but I can’t imagine sticking with the same thing for that long. For one thing, that rules out doing so many other things. I have boxes of needlepoint and beading supplies from times when I was more interested in those activities, and they also may be things I will revisit in retirement. I planted all perennials because I can continue to enjoy them while no longer really having an interest in working with them on a daily basis.

Neurolinguistic Programming generalizes that there are 2 types of people, those that are motivated to move TOWARDS pleasure or what they want, and those that are motivated to move AWAY FROM pain or what they don’t want. I am generally an “away from” person – I floss my teeth every day because I don’t want gum disease; I arrive on time for work every day because I don’t want to get in trouble; sometimes I go along with the crowd because I don’t want to be criticized or ridiculed. I am willing to spend money now (replaced both oxygen sensors in the car when the engine light came on) to avoid MORE pain later (burning out the catalytic converter if I waited too long). I suspect that the “towards” people might feel a higher level of motivation to accomplish whatever their goal is as compared to my motivation mainly to avoid negative outcomes.

If I am motivated in the short term, it is often for some convoluted reason that many people would not even see as germane to the situation at hand. This has always been the case, and my mother picks up on that right away – “And you’re doing this because???” Over the years she has been surprisingly supportive when I wanted to do something off-the-wall for some bizarre reason, usually a reason that I would not even reveal. I am still this way, and I can be found at meetings or activities in which I have no real interest, but there is some tangential thing that does interest me – possibly just the building it is held in, or someone I hope to meet who may or may not even be coming, or I think something will happen that will be worth watching, because I do like watching interesting things going on. On occasion I’ve been pleasantly surprised and developed an interest in something new once I got involved, so this tendency does expand my horizons.

I’ve recently been doing … something … that seems to me to be a total waste of time in terms of what the goal is SUPPOSED to be, but there is one aspect that I am enjoying a great deal that is not a component of any other activity I have done, and it takes up most of the time, and for me, that is good enough reason to participate. The thing I like so much is even optional, and we had the choice to not include it. Without this “option”, I would not be interested at all – which I would not say because it seems to me rather shallow, so I don’t want to admit it. I happen to also like the building and grounds where this takes place, and I would otherwise have no reason to go there. So I just go and I don’t make many comments -- I think there would be some hurt feelings if I told people who are serious about the activity that I think it is a waste of time, and on occasion, a bit too close to laughable – last time around there was something new that caught me off-guard that struck me as really funny and I was glad none of my snarky friends were with me or we would have been giggling and possibly asked to leave. I was telling my mother about it, though, and she observed that perhaps over time I will find the real value in this activity. Ya never know, it is quite possible. My mother is usually right.

On occasion I do get genuinely motivated. Right now I am very gung-ho about my classical singing. While rehearsing the Bach cantata “Wachet auf” (which I was doing as a favor to the director and not because I had much interest in doing it), I was filling in one time on soprano and realized I could now hit notes that totally eluded me when I was a voice major in college. Then I joined the women’s chorale “Women in song” (because I wanted to work with the director, who left before I even joined, but I decided to check them out anyway), and the new director was OK with me singing along with the sopranos during the warm-ups, and I felt the same way – that I finally could hit the notes that I never could back when it would have mattered.

So now I’m taking voice lessons. I am not sure exactly what my motivation is – I get hired all the time and I don’t need to sing better to get gigs. The fact that the new director of Women in Song teaches voice and is a fascinating individual is a big part of it. A male soprano, formerly of Chanticleer, and even after the initial shock value of hearing a guy sing soprano wore off, I was very impressed with his vocal technique. I had the feeling, “I could sing that way”, while more often I hear or see someone really good and think that I could NEVER sing that way. He also was very patient during the stressful times of final rehearsals, unlike many musicians I have worked with. In many ways I want to get over all my bad memories of studying voice more than I want to be all that much better – all of which I told him at the outset. I never felt comfortable enough to be honest with my original voice teacher in college, so I wanted to be sure I didn’t recreate that situation now. If I end up singing better, that will be fine, but if I just end up feeling better about singing, that is enough for me.

I don’t know when something new will motivate me and maybe I won’t want to devote so much time to singing. I do have two banjos collecting dust in my master bedroom ….