Do you lead a team? Are you finding it hard to maintain your own levels of motivation let alone those of your team members during this testing time? You are not alone. I’m a coach. I support others when they need to find direction, overcome barriers, gain confidence, inspire through leadership etc. So, I should be able to do the same for myself, right? Well yes .. and sometimes no .. even if only temporarily!

It has been interesting to see how I’ve responded to the uncertainty brought about by Covid-19 and lockdown. Early on, I struggled with direction, motivation and focus which is quite unlike me normally. I found a way to move through this that I’ve shared with a couple of clients who found it useful and I’m sharing key elements below which may help you to help yourself as well as your team members.

Start with the end in mind

I’ve long been a fan of Covey’s ‘7 habits of highly effective people’ and his advice to start with the end in mind is perfect in times of uncertainty. I found it hard to do this at first though. My inner voice had lots of short term worries. Finding a way to re-anchor to something meaningful for the longer term helped me to find motivation for short term action.

I used a Japanese concept called ‘ikigai’  which has no direct translation but embodies the idea of happiness in living. Psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya said that Ikigai is what allows you to look forward to the future even if you’re miserable right now. A western view of the term has been captured in the form of a Venn diagram summarized as ‘my reason for being’. I decided to use this framework to consider the 4 questions linked to each circle: ‘What am I good at?’, ‘What do I love?’, ‘What does the world need?’, ‘What can I be paid for’. It helped me to reconnect with what my business means to me and to refine what I am here to do that gives me passion.

If you work in an organization and want to help team members find direction in this way it may help to change the questions slightly to:

• What do I love?
• What am I good at?
• What do my stakeholders need from me? (whether that’s internal customers, external customers or something else)
• What am I paid to do?

Where the answers to these questions intersect, energy and motivation can be found. While I appreciate all aspects of a role need fulfilling, focusing on the intersect can help fuel motivation in the short term. I found it helpful to summarise my ‘reason for being’ into a statement starting with ‘I’.

The diagram below shows a simple example for Javier who is a customer service manager. To do this fully you would  have several more statements for each circle.

Align short term focus to ‘reason for being’

Once you have your ‘reason for being’ statement you can brainstorm 3 or 4 ways in which you can contribute to that ‘reason for being’ over the next 1 to 3 months. For me, it helped to consider the following:

(a) Are there any barriers that I could remove (one focus area),

(b) How can I build my capability to be better able to deliver my ‘reason for being’ (second focus area),

(c) What I might need to do differently in my approach and communication to better align (third focus area)

Decide on achievable actions for each focus area

Taking each focus area at a time, consider 2 or 3 things that you can do towards making it happen. Then prioritise across all of them and consider what you’ll do first.

The diagram below continues the example for Javier:

(1) The result of the ikigai exercise – the statement for Javier’s reason for being
(2) His 3 short term focus areas that he generated by asking the same questions that I asked myself
(3) His prioritised achievable actions for each focus area

I hope this gives you some ideas that may help either you or your team members if you need to find a way to connect to your work meaningfully at this time of Covid-19, or at any time when uncertainty means that you struggle with motivation and focus. If you try it, I’d love to hear what your ‘Reason for Being’ statement is and how it may have helped you.