Thus, getting
direction right is critical, honing skills to perfection is obligatory to be a
great sports person, but I think it was Linford Christie who said that at the
Olympic level the training was all much of a muchness: everyone had trained the
same, more or less. So, it was mental attitude that made the difference.
In other words, to
use the kung fu vocabulary, it’s the courage. And to use our favourite word,
it’s the motivation: how motivated are you? What is driving you to succeed?
And here we come to
the revelation of the day. We at Motivational Maps establish the motivations of
thousands of employees, and as often as we do it we find the same thing that
flies in the face of conventional wisdom. We even find this contrariness when
we ‘map’ the motivations of sales forces. What is it? That people who work in
corporations are all motivated by money. Not ALL are. In fact most aren’t.
My bet is: not ALL
sports people are motivated by the gold medal, as paradoxical as that sounds.
Some, for example, may see ‘sport’ as their flight to security; others as a
route to wealth; and yet still others may simply love their chosen sport for
the sheer skill they can develop in practising it – one thinks of how George
Best started playing. And there are more motivators besides these.
Perhaps, then, if
England is to go forward with developing its talent and its sporting prowess,
it might like to take a long hard look at how sports people are really
motivated, and whether the reward strategies in place really motivate or merely
maintain the status quo. We don’t want, after all, the status quo – what
England wants, what England expects, is the holy grail of victory – courage,
then, or call it motivation, massively!
The Mapping Motivation Series 