One of the great leaders of the twentieth century was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Both as supreme commander of the Allied military forces during World War II and, later, president of the United States, he was a man who had to be a leader. Anything less would have meant an unpleasantly different world than the one we know. He defined motivation as “the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.”

That is the essential problem any leader faces, no matter how grand or small the scale. You have to get people to willingly take on a job and to get it done.

Notice Eisenhower used the critical word “want” twice in his assessment. Motivation is not about proving to people that something is possible or arguing why a goal is worth your team's time. Like any type of selling, it is based on a completely emotional experience.

A Matter of Choice

Let's say it's a lazy weekend morning. You wake up and consider a chore that needs to be done, but then you roll over and consider the comfort of your bed. The idea of sleeping in and then treating yourself to a late brunch sounds much more appealing. What you might say under such circumstances is that you don't feel motivated. More correctly stated, you've considered your options and prefer what you would like to do over what you ought to do.

People always have this choice, and ultimately they will virtually always pick what they want. Sound surprising? Perhaps you are thinking of all the things you do that you don't want to do. For example, you might go to a job that you aren't crazy about, spend time on the weekend running errands and doing chores, and end up having dinner with some boring couple because your significant other is friends with one of them. All these are things that you don't want to do.

However, each of the distasteful actions is something you undertake to prevent something even more unpleasant. You work at the job because being out of work means being out of money, and finding a new job is not something you enjoy. You run errands and do chores because not having these things done makes you very unhappy, and it's worth the effort to have clean clothes and get new tires for the car. And dinner with the other couple? That's simple — it's easier to socialize with someone that you don't like than it is to face a fight with your significant other. In other words, in each of the above cases, you're doing something you don't like to avoid another something that you dislike even more. You're trying to find the most palatable solution.

Have It Your Way

One of the great secrets to marketing is the realization that people always do that which gives them what they want or think they want. Savvy marketing people will admit that you don't actually sell things to people. Instead, you find a way to let them buy what they want. The process is almost never rational. Even when you're in the market for something you might objectively need, like food, emotion controls the way in which you satisfy yourself.

Now put this into a context of activity. You'll see volunteers that put tremendous effort into a nonprofit organization because it gives them pleasure to do so. Contrarily, there are people who will join the same organization and do little, if anything, because what they really want is to perceive themselves as the types who do volunteer work. They don't really like doing the work, so they don't.

These decisions can be difficult to understand if you try to find clarity and logic. When you deal with what people want, you enter their emotional lives. Many attempts at motivation fall flat because they don't really deal with the emotions of others. Instead, they treat motivation as though it were a series of steps that could be checked off from a list. To really motivate, you have to grasp the appropriate emotional dynamics.