I remember a time in my life when I could work 12 hour days and think nothing of it. I could get up at 5.30 am to go to the gym. I could sit in commuter traffic for hours each day to and from work, loved listening to the car radio and being part of a busy city life. Now I look at those times and wonder how I ever did that.
Table of contents: |
The "Strive Drive" Stage: Motivation's Role in Early Adulthood |
When Motivation Fades: A Natural Developmental Shift |
Common Reactions to a Loss of Motivation |
Reframing the Experience: Understanding Developmental Stages |
The Power of Clarifying Your Values |
Taking Time for Reflection and Realignment |
Moving Beyond Motivation to Embrace Clarity |
The "Strive Drive" Stage: Motivation's Role in Early Adulthood
What happens as you grow and develop into adulthood, is you find yourself in the “strive drive” (which is one name given to this stage of human development). It is a drive that has you wanting to head out into the world to become an independent person wanting to make a successful life for yourself.
When Motivation Fades: A Natural Developmental Shift
This drive transcends and includes the earlier stage when you were being guided by family norms. This drive to succeed can stay active for many years and provides an internal motivation system to keep you going, and persevering through challenging times as your life plays out.
And then there comes a moment when you notice a shift. It may be subtle or it may feel like a huge loss of motivation which impacts how you feel about yourself and your life.
Common Reactions to a Loss of Motivation
What might you notice? The things you may be likely to notice are that you are:
Not as motivated as you used to be,
Tired of pushing yourself,
Questioning why you are doing things and
Noticing that things that used to matter to you don’t matter any more.
It can be an unsettling and confusing time in your life. For a lot of people they can think: What the heck is wrong with me? I have lost my mojo and how do I get it back?
In reality there is no going back. Now is all you have.
For me, when that moment came, I was in a Global Talent Management role, with responsibility for leadership development across Australia, New Zealand and ASEAN. I was in coaching conversations across all levels of the leadership hierarchy. I was facilitating career development workshops regularly, supporting leaders to elicit their values and base their career decisions on what truly mattered to them.
Reframing the Experience: Understanding Developmental Stages
What was really helpful to me at that time, when the motivation dropped away, was rather than go down an un-resourceful rabbit hole, was to use my understanding of human development to gain clarity on what was happening. This understanding stopped me taking the change personally or think that something was wrong with me. It was simply a stage of development.
The Power of Clarifying Your Values
The pragmatic step to ground myself was to revisit what mattered to me. Values reflect what you care about deeply and they can change over time. If you now have children, if you now have a mortgage, if your lifestyle is different to how it was previously, your values may be changing.
Knowing what matters to you gives you clarity to see that needs, wants and priorities may simply have changed.
Over time values themselves mature to become more expansive as guiding principles.
Taking Time for Reflection and Realignment
Beyond a values check there can be value in taking time for a more comprehensive review. Cultivating time to stop and reflect to explore how to align your values or your principles with your lifestyle.
Gifting yourself time and space to re-evaluate your life, your relationships and how you want to be in the world. This can be an empowering way to re-energise yourself and re-imagine your next chapter or to enact change.
Moving Beyond Motivation to Embrace Clarity
What can also be especially resourceful is to find a community that has members that are at a similar stage of development to you. This is one of the reasons I created the online community called The B Community. A place for people to come to when they are intentionally developing on purpose.
You may be noticing that friendships and routines you had don't matter as much as they used to. As some of these fall away, having a community that you belong to, can support you as you re-evaluate your life and resourcefully navigate this natural and normal life transition.
Eimer Boyle
Stages of Human Development Coach & Facilitator
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