How do you motivate someone who doesnt want you?

An attendee from a recent seminar asked a common question I get about learning other people’s passions: How do you motivate someone who claims to have no motivation? He did the exercise in this post, “How to make someone feel understood: the Confirmation Cycle,” where you ask the other person their passion.

He wrote:

How do you deal with the “I don’t know” when you ask people what they enjoy or what they’re passionate about?

I found this in trying out this exercise with several family members, I believe it’s related to the idea that as a leader, it’s your job to find out what other people’s motivations are but it can still be hard to get around. I also wonder how to frame this question in a way that doesn’t seem combative or accusatory. For example, I texted someone I’m interested in dating that noted that she was going to a feminist book club the question “What does feminism mean to you? I’m curious” and immediately regretted it. Other variations I’ve gotten are “Why are you asking so many questions?” Basically, I’d love to know how to sort of reset and reframe the C-Minor scale in such a way that people don’t find it invasive.

The premise of that exercise, and much of leadership, is that you can motivate people more with their existing motivations than by trying to impose your motivations on them. The challenge is to make them feel comfortable sharing their motivations, which the exercise helps with. His question is broad so I’ll answer from several perspectives. I think the first and last sections will help him most.

Put their interests first

Asking about passions is asking about vulnerabilities. If someone senses you asking for yourself more than for them, they’ll stop answering to protect themselves. They don’t want to be your dancing monkey—someone who performs by answering your questions without you contributing—or to go out on a ledge by making themselves more vulnerable than you.

When you added that you were curious, for example, you put your interests first. You asked them to share their vulnerability to satisfy your interest, not theirs.

If they say you seem to ask a lot of questions, you probably sound like you’re asking to satisfy your interests. The Confirmation Cycle is designed not to satisfy your interests, but to make them feel understood. Ask to understand what they’re saying, not to get new information, but to clarify what they already said.

See, even if they give a curt answer, internally they’re connecting with something big and important. They want to share that big important thing. They’re worried about being used or laughed at, which happens when the other person is asking for their reasons.

Basic technique

If it fits your relationship you can ask someone “What’s your passion,” “What’s a passion of yours,” or something direct like that. If it doesn’t work, I recommend starting with complimentary remark about something I noticed that they care about, then ask why they care more than the average person does. Examples:

• “I noticed you take the time to participate in this club. You already graduated, so you don’t have to. If you don’t mind my asking, what’s your motivation?”
• “When you do the weekly report you do it more thoroughly than most people. How come you take the time and attention to do it that way?”

Polite, firm persistence

If they dodge or don’t answer the question, asking again politely but firmly usually gets a response. I have to repeat the question a lot. I rarely change more than a few words. Sometimes I’ll add a few explanatory words in front.

Again, they have something big and important inside. They want to share it, only they’re worried about you using it against them. When you ask by putting their interests first, they’ll get the feeling that this is their chance to share something important to them.

Don’t make them work with open-ended questions

A question like “What does X mean to you?” takes negligible effort on your part but forces them to dig into their psyche to come up with an answer. If they care about it and want to share already, you didn’t have to ask anything, so at best you break even with open-ended questions.

If you’re not sure, stick with the wording I describe to remove variables when trouble-shooting.

The question “What’s your passion” or the bulleted examples above are designed to get short answers, referring to specific motivations they have. When people put care into something, they have a clear motivation. Those questions access that specific thing. What something means to someone is broader.

The meaning of your question isn’t exactly clear, at least not to me, so they have to spend time making sense of the question. Your question has the structure of an interview question, asked by someone who knows nothing about you and wants you to put yourself on display so they can evaluate you.

Start simple, work up to hard

If you’re starting practicing the exercise with people who don’t answer, leave them aside and practice with people who do answer.

This is like saying if you’re learning the piano and difficult pieces are too hard, leave them aside and practice simpler pieces, or even scales. Or if you’re starting lifting weights and can’t life them, start with less weight.

Asking a woman you’re thinking of dating involves complex emotions. A coworker or friend might be more receptive. With practice, things that seemed moderately hard will become simple and harder things will become moderately hard. With more practice even the once-hard things will become simple. Eventually it will become second-nature to learn about other people’s passions and to make them feel comfortable sharing

Nonverbal communication

I can’t comment on your nonverbal communication without having been there, but it conveys much of the meaning of what you say, especially the emotional content. Pay attention to your vocal tonality, pacing, eye contact, facial expression, posture, gesturing, and things like that.

Have effective beliefs

When I ask someone about their passions, I have no doubt they have many passions, and I also expect they’ll feel shy about sharing. The beliefs below motivate me to do all of the above. If you don’t have those beliefs, or equally helpful ones, you risk undermining your communication.

1. Everybody has passions
2. Everybody wants to share their passions
3. But sharing them makes them feel vulnerable
4. They aren’t used to the attention
5. They want reassurance you genuinely find them compelling)

Claiming no motivation

Sometimes someone will claim they have no motivation or no passion. Since I believe everyone has motivations all the time, I don’t believe them. Inaction doesn’t mean no motivation. It means motivation not to act. Calmness is an emotion that motivates relaxation. Similarly with satisfaction, contentment, laziness, and so on.

So when someone says they have no motivation or passion I say something like, “Well, you got out of bed this morning. No emotion whatsoever would mean lying there until you die. But you eat and go to the bathroom, so that’s a start. And you choose what you eat, so you care about some things more than others. What have you cared about more than something else?”

If someone repeatedly insists on having no emotion, then that insistence is a passion. A rebellious teenager who claims to care about nothing, cares about implying they care about nothing. When you realize that, you can ask, “You seem to have a motivation to resist strong emotions. Is that right? … What’s behind it?”

Patience

With practice you pick up on increasingly subtler signs of passions and overcome increasingly challenging defenses, making more and more people feel comfortable sharing increasingly deep passions with you.

But it takes time and practice, like any meaningful discipline.

Everything you do, you do to either get pleasure or avoid pain. Building strong habits works the same. Every tool mentioned below is designed to either increase the pleasure or decrease (or even eliminate) the pain from the habit. Keep that in mind when you are trying to motivate someone into building strong habits or achieve their goals. Everything is done because of pain or gain.

• Help them to believe that they can do it.

If you believe that there is a chance of failure, you’re going to want to avoid doing it. Eliminating the belief of failure and creating the belief of their own potential is key. Again: Believing you can do something is essential in doing it and I can show it to you in a very simple example.

Stand up and put your feet together. Point your right index finger right in front of you.Turn clockwise as far as you can.Keep your feet straight and notice where you stop.Do it now.Now drop your hand.You are going to do the following when I say GO.Close your eyes and imagine doing it again.Imagine your finger coming up.Imagine going twice as far.GO.Now imagine it again, but going three times as far.GO.Imagine it a final time, and turning SO FAR, that you’ve come back to where you started.GO.We are going to turn around again now.Point your right index finger right in front of you.Turn clockwise as far as you can.

Keep your feet straight and notice where you stop.

You turned much farther the second time. There is no doubt in my mind. Why didn’t you go this far the first time? Think about it. There was nothing physically holding you back. But your beliefs were holding you back. Your belief determines what you are able to do. You had a belief that you could only go as far as you went the first time. What other beliefs are holding you back? I will say it once more. Believe it and you can do it. Make someone else believe they can do it and they CAN.

• Help them realise that it will take time

Michael Jordan is considered one of the greatest, if not THE greatest basketball players of all time. He became the first billionaire NBA player in history. He didn’t become so good because he was born with the talent to throw a ball through a hoop. He practiced every day. Michael Jordan has great habits. And is extremely patient. Take a lesson from people like Michael Jordan.

If you try to build habits, it is often said that it is going to take at least 21 days before it becomes easy and 90 days for it to become a habit. This is called the 21/90 rule. It is awfully inspiring, but the “rule” came from a MINIMUM set by a doctor in the 1950s! That means, that in his experiment, he found that it took at least 21 days before it became easy. But these 21 days were so inspiring… Only 21 days! And everyone started using it as a guideline. But it is not a certainty. It can take a lot longer for your habits to become easier.

Some habits are easier to adopt than others. A habit to walk the dog two times a day is easier to build because the dog will remind you that he needs to go. If you don’t walk the dog, he or she will go in the house. Consider building the habit to turn off the lights when you’ve left a room. If the light shines from underneath the door when you close it, you will build that habit a lot quicker than if you can’t see it anymore after closing the door. Be patient, new habits stick a lot slower than you think.

Michael Jordan created the habit to practice everyday for hours on end. He became a NBA superstar because of it. Daily practice was only “easy” for him because it was one of his habits. And even with all that practice he missed a lot of shots. He is famous for saying:

I’ve missed more than nine thousand shots. I’ve lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot, and missed.

And every time he missed, he would go and practice another hundred free throws. Be patient, you can’t become an expert without practice. And practice takes time.

If you want to create such strong habits you need to be patient. It takes on average 66 days to create a habit. But it could take a year. Or a week.

• Help them to see the benefits

To see the benefits, you need to know why you are motivated in the first place. You need to put yourself in their shoes and see the world from their point of view. This takes a lot of empathic ability, but you get a clearer picture of their motivations. I’ve said this before, but it is so good that it’s worth repeating.

Everything you do comes from avoiding pain or getting pleasure.

When you help someone to see how much fun an activity is, they are more likely to do it. We do this with children, creating games designed to make them put away their toys. Or pretending that their vegetables are on an airplane instead of a fork. In fact, gamification is used by many businesses to make things more enjoyable, like language learning apps that use virtual “awards” for reaching certain milestones. Other examples of gamification can be found in exercise, work, and social media platforms.

If it’s fun, you’re more likely to do it. Here’s a little video that explains it more:

• Praise the effort, not the end result

This is one of the most useful pieces of information in this article, especially for parents. What kind of parent wants to give their children a fear of failure. No parent… But a lot of parents give this fear to their children without meaning to. They are rewarding them in a “wrong” way. They are praising for good grades, a gold medal or learning a skill well. This seems like a good idea, right? But this has a problem. Because when you praise someone for the end result, you will only praise them for a successful result. You would never say: “Way to go! Last place!”

Instead of praising the end result, praise their effort. So what if your child has done their absolute best and was up against faster, smarter or older kids? Coming in last place can still come with praise: “Way to go! You really gave it your all!”

This encourages them to try their best. Their achievement doesn’t depend on the skill of the competition. If you want to motivate someone to keep doing their math homework. Instead of: “Wow, you are really good at math!”

Try: “Wow, you’ve put in all that effort!”

If someone is getting good grades because they are “good at math”, they don’t need to take their homework seriously because they are good at math. If someone has gotten good grades because of their efforts, they will put in the effort again in order to keep getting good grades.

Praise the effort.

• Help them to take the first step

Let’s break a 10 (km or miles) run down into two parts. Option A: Running 8 first, take a break, running 2 more. Option B: Running 2 first, take a break, running 8 more.

What seems easier?

You can argue it two ways, in option A, you do the hard part first and only have the easy part left. In option B, you get started with the easy part and it prepares you for the more difficult part.

A study on achieving goals has shown that most people think option A is easier. But people who choose option B achieve more of their goals. It is more likely that you start the activity when you do the easy part first instead of the hard part. And when you’ve started it, you are more likely to finish it.

Choose option B. Start with something small. And help them take that first (small) step.

• Help them to set realistic goals

I’ve talked a lot about SMART goals in other articles. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely. The R in SMART stands for realistic goals. All the other parts are helpful as well, but when you are trying to motivate someone else, you can help them most by setting realistic goals.

If you’ve never done any exercise and are not interested in it, running a marathon is not a realistic goal. You are not going to commit to the goal. And sometimes your goals are unrealistic, because there is an external factor that limits you. Becoming a snowboarder in sunny Florida is an unrealistic goal when you are not willing to move to a region o fthe world with more snowy mountains. And if you are really short, becoming a professional basketball player will also be difficult. Keep your personal limitations in mind.

When you are motivating someone to do something, help them set realistic goals. Break their goal up into small goals to make it easier to start.

• Remove their distractions, increase their focus

When have the option to do one of two things, there is always one that is going to be more fun. Or less horrible. So when you have to do something that you really don’t enjoy, you will find excuses for doing other tasks. I do this all the time, cleaning the house when I have another very important task. It just feels like the less horrible of two tasks.

Some people don’t have the discipline to shield themselves from fun. Giving these people a gaming console without limitations has only one possible outcome. Distraction. For some people, Whatsapp, Netflix, Youtube or Facebook is their “gaming console”. The internet is one major drain for our attention. That is probably why so many people are struggling to keep their attention focused towards one thing for an extended period. A single break in your focus and one of these is already in the back of your mind, calling for your attention.

You can help people by removing their distractions or you can teach them how to meditate. Meditation increases the ability to focus. It can be trained like a muscle. Meditating is easy. I have a guide at the end for you in my FREE eBook if you want to read more!

When working towards a goal, it’s easy to forget our progress. After all, once you’ve done your task, you often feel like it was a lot easier than you initially imagined it would be. But you need to remember to celebrate those wins as well. Otherwise, all that work goes unrewarded. And you will only remember the pain of it the next time you think about it.

I have a little story to make this clearer. Imagine that you are climbing a mountain. And every hill has a finish line where you can celebrate making it that far. After that celebration, you move on to the next hill. Because that’s how you keep growing, that’s how you reach new heights. But when you don’t celebrate those victories on the hills and only focus on the top, you will only have a brief celebration. Because when you reach that top, you will find another top, just like you found another hill to climb. You will endure a lot of pain, with only a little gain. CELEBRATE THE HILLS! Once you see the amount of hills (and celebrations) you are experiencing during the climb, you will find the whole process much more enjoyable.

• Let them get in a state of flow

The state of flow is best explained in the picture above. On the vertical axis, you look at how difficult a task is and on the horizontal axis, you look at the capabilities of a person. Does the difficulty of a task fit with the capabilities of the person? Then the person will experience a state of flow.Does a task bore the person? Increase the difficulty of their task or give them a different task.

Is a person anxious about the task? Help them to increase their knowledge or give them an easier task.

A task can also give us anxiety when it is too daunting. It looks difficult. “How am I going to do all those things?” Breaking it down into smaller and more manageable tasks lowers the task difficulty and relieves some of that anxiety. And that makes you get into the flow zone more easily.