Experience and Motivation – a heady mix?

There’s an interesting performance journey we go on in motivational terms when we develop from novice to expert and it’s worth thinking about how we can seek to balance the combination of motivation and experience over time.

When we start off in a career or with a new passion, we have loads and loads of motivation to do really well and this drive will help us both compensate for the fact that we have little experience and as a result, expertise. The drive we have at this point is critical in helping us develop expertise we aspire to as a result of our targeted efforts to grow.

As time goes by, our experience and expertise grow – obviously as a result of focusing our motivation. So, we settle into the role of newfound competence and the results of our motivation give us a great sense of satisfaction.

With more time, our expertise is developed further and perhaps it feels there’s less to learn and less to prove, so our motivation doesn’t feel so rich and we have to work to maintain the motivation that was once the catalyst we were so intoxicated by. So now we’re higher in experience/expertise than we are in motivation. Something of a holding pattern of performance by all likelihood.

If we’re really lucky, there’s a final, really powerful combination. Let’s say we have a career break, or we move jobs or we connect with some new people who join our business and there’s the return of a familiar ally – a novice like motivation born from a refreshing challenge, a new perspective or re-setting of priorities. This is a wonderful situation where there’s now deep experience with that early, passionate motivation. Deep experience and novice motivation – a rare but highly valuable partnership.

This got us thinking about where the people are that we work with most frequently in terms of the motivation/experience combination. And more importantly, it got us thinking about starting to ask people where they’re on the two things and wondering with them what it would take to reset motivation to novice levels to truly add some infectious energy to the database of experience.

So where are you right now in the experience/motivation balance?

High Motivation with Low Experience?

High Motivation with High Experience?

Low Motivation with High Experience?

Or maybe… novice like motivation that is driving high experience to new levels of relevance and application.

I’m off to get a few answers – let us know where you’re at.