It takes more than talk to keep workers in line;
mere words go in one ear and out the other.Proverbs 29:19Â from The Message
If you were forced to limit your answer to only one thing – what would your answer be to this question:
What is the one primary thing that causes you to act?
In thinking about this long and hard, the answer I would have to come up with is self-motivation. I guess that is more of a term or a concept then a thing, but it encompasses why people do what they do, they want to. Now, lets look at what causes someone to want to do something.
It could be a number of things, but if we are working on a model for communication and understanding, lets break it into types of goals, or desires:
– create – to make something that was not there for the end of having a result that is improved
– have – maybe there is something out there that you do not possess, but you want to for improved situation or feelings
– stop – something is happening that you do not want to have happening
– prevent – the action, activity, or result has not happened, but you never want it to happen
– destroy – there is a person, place, thing, or situation that exists, but you desire it not to
This proverb can be taken on several differing levels depending on your role in a relationship; if you are the employer or the employee, slave or mater, marketer or consumer.
I wrote quite a bit more on this subject this morning, but it was one of those cases where I had a since that I needed to set it aside and come back to it later.
In re-reading the above looks to be enough. For some it will be new, different, and strange – others will react as if it is opposite of how the world should be, and for others it will be the next step on a trail they have been on.
The thought that nobody acts unless there is some desire within them that they believe the action will “benefit” them is a hard one for a portion of our society, so I will just leave it at that.
At the same time, if more people understood, grasped and acknowledged that as a fact of human existence – we would be able to understand one another on a deeper level. Is that something you desire?
Part of the Proverbs Challenge series.
