The 2010 Motivation Show in Chicago has announced a slew of initiatives to help it go green and reduce its carbon footprint.

The most obvious change is the choice of location: the McCormick Place West building which has received LEED Certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) from the U.S. Green Build Council. However there are other changes, in particular to reduce the amount of paper products usually generated by trade shows.

For a start all exhibitor material will be distributed online and online forms will be used for exhibitor data collection. For show attendees the most visible change is that they’ll no longer be mailed a badge. Instead they’ll be sent an email confirmation of booking which includes a barcode. They to print this out and on arrival it’s scanned and they’re given an RFID badge.

Behind the scenes the Motivation Show is working with its general services contractor GES on initiatives such as recyclable carpet padding, energy efficient lighting and biodegradable trash bags.

Putting aside the possible privacy issues over RFID name badges it sounds like a very positive green move for the show.

Happy New Year! I hope you all had a great Hogmanay and are now fully recovered, ready and eager to grab 2010 and the opportunities it offers.

I’ve said before that I don’t like New Year resolutions, I consider them an excuse for failure. However that doesn’t mean ignoring the change of year. It’s still a powerful symbol that we can harness to boost our motivation and personal development.

Even though I don’t do specific “resolutions” I do use the New Year as an opportunity to look back over the recent past and forward to the future. It’s a good time to take stock of where I am and where I want to be - as well as who I want to be.

So although I don’t do “task based” resolutions (eg “go to the gym twice a week”) I do think about more general achievement based plans (eg “live a healthier lifestyle”). At this time I find it more useful to concentrate on the outcome rather than the method.

Of course these objectives need eventually to be translated into actions. So the New Year is also a good time to look at the system(s) I’m using for this (GTD, Eisenhower matrix, Pomodoro, etc) and make sure that a) they meet my needs and b) they’re up to date. Essentially I treat the New Year as a time not for low level resolutions but for a much higher level annual review.

As a wise sage once said: “Look to the future now, it’s only just begun”.

If you run a team, a department or a whole company then how do you set pay? Do you reward your best performers more money or do you prefer an equal pay system?

Many people fear that paying some people more than others at similar levels of seniority creates tension: those paid less might resent the higher paid and possibly even try to undermine them.

New research from the University of Nottingham School of Ecconomics suggests that the opposite could be true: employees might resent equal pay.

The researchers found that in a roleplay experiment an equal pay system demotivated those working hardest. They came to resent their fellow workers who were doing less for the same money and subsequently eased up themselves. By contrast those who were paid based on performance worked much harder.

Johannes Abeler, co-author of the study, said:

Equal pay is often referred to as a cornerstone of a fair wage scheme and is one of the most prevalent pay modes. But in a work environment, the equity norm demands that a person who puts in more effort should receive a higher wage. In other words, if equity is important, the often-heard slogan ‘equal pay for equal work’ implies ‘unequal pay for unequal work’.

Of course this research was based on a very simple experiment. The report itself is careful to stress that:

The results in this paper should not be interpreted as arguments against wage equality in general. They rather suggest that equal wages come at a cost that has to be weighed against their potential benefits.

(A point apparently lost on much of the British press).

There are many interacting factors in a real workplace. For example, should “performance” be defined by effort or results? How do you reward workers for helping their colleagues to excel? Perhaps most importantly of all, how do you ensure the process is transparent without creating an adversarial management framework?

No doubt academics will study these issues at some future date.

How’s this for an opportunity: free motivational tips from people who get paid huge amounts of money to motivate people. I’m talking adverts here, people, in particular the Christmas advertising campaigns crucial to the retail sector. Of course the ads are designed to get you to spend money, but many of the principles apply to motivation in general.

In the UK, analysts TNS have announced their list of most motivational Christmas ads on television. Winner was the Boots “Christmas gifts” campaign which features “predominantly female colleagues opening their secret Santa gifts to the soundtrack ‘Here Come the Girls’”. Second place went to Tesco’s “Finest Christmas” with Morrisons “Fresh Christmas” coming third.

Of course you might normally hate watching adverts - I do. But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re often carefully designed by experts in human behaviour and motivation. What can we learn from them?

Paul Baker of TNS says:

Christmas is a time which has a natural ‘feel good factor’ attached to it. Ads which draw on positive emotions tend to do very well in converting sales. What is common amongst all the top performing ads is their success in conveying a level of Christmas cheer which has a resonance with viewers across all demographics - generating high levels of both engagement and motivation.

Could you improve your own motivational toolset by studying and modelling some of these adverts? Maybe some adverts actually put you off certain shop. This is also useful information which might give you clues about what saps your motivation.

Companies are paying millions to design these ads and the results are there for you to study free of charge.

A little competition can do wonders for motivation. However it seems that too much can seriously damage it.

Researchers from the University of Haifa and the University of Michigan have been examining the effect of competitor numbers on results. In US university entrance SAT results they found a negative correlation between numbers taking the tests and average test scores. In other words, the more people taking the test, the lower the average result!

Although the researchers “took into consideration differences between the states in relevant socioeconomic variables”, they still wanted more focussed figures. So they carried out two sets of controlled tests with students and found the same results: if the students knew they were competing against a larger group, average results fell.

Dr Avishalom Tor of the University of Haifa said:

It is a well-established fact that subjective factors influence our motivation to compete. Our new studies have shown that objective factors, such as the size of a competing group, also have an effect on motivation

Introducing an element of competition is often used by managers and life coaches as a motivational factor. So the question now is, at what point does this become counter-productive? The point at which “I can’t beat all of them” outweighs “I want to win” is likely to vary from person to person.

The research also has potential economic and political ramifications. Does it apply at the company level? We’re always being told that increased competition in the market makes everyone work harder and benefits us all. But could too much competition actually result in a less efficient market? If so, many economics textbooks will need to be rewritten.

If you’ve been planning to give up smoking but keep putting it off then today might be the day to start. Today is the Great American Smokeout - but even if you’re not in the US you can use today for motivation.

So choose to stay smoke free today. Choose to improve your health and fitness. Choose to save money for other things.

Make today a day of positive choice. And if the urge to have a cigarette does get too strong for you, don’t look at it as a failure. Instead really taste that cigarette, think about the noxious chemicals inside it and visualise what it’s doing to your lungs. Smoking a cigarette and really thinking about it can be a powerful incentive not to smoke any more.

So choose not to smoke, whether it be for a day or just an hour. Then make the same choice again. And again, and again until it becomes a habit.

How’s your day been? Have you had “one of those days”? If you haven’t today you will have done so at some point.

You know the sort of days I mean. Nothing seems to go right, the universe keeps throwing problems at you and you end the day with more worries than you started with. We all have days like that from time to time.

It’s so frustrating. You crawl into bed feeling tired and annoyed at having achieved nothing - and wake the next day demotivated before you even begin. So you have another bad day.

It’s a downward spiral that we can easily get into. So try to stop it before it starts. You can’t always stop the bad days happening - the universe is like that - but you can contol the way you respond to them.
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Henrik Edberg has a great post over at The Positivity Blog. It’s called 11 Questions That Could Help You to Vastly Improve the Quality of Your Life in 2009 and is well worth a read.

One of the questions that made me stop and think more than the others was number ten: “Am I detached from the results? “. Now one of the things I’m constantly talking about is the importance of remembering why you’re doing things, using the reasons to provide guidance and motivation. At first sight this would seem to be at odds with staying detached from results.

Yet I completely agree with Henrik when he says:

But when you play/blog/work etc. stay unattached to the outcome. Just focus on what’s in front of you. Things will become easier. You’ll create less inner anxiety and pressure for yourself. And you will perform better because you are focusing on what’s right in front of you and not weighing yourself down with a lot of imagined or real expectations from other people and self-created negativity.

How to reconcile the two approaches?
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There’s an excellent sketch show on CBBC called Stupid. One of the recurring characters is the “Want it? Can’t have it!” girl. Her gimmick is offering something that someone really wants then, at the last moment, pulling it back.

I don’t know about you but sometimes I feel the universe is like that: it holds out the promise of something you really want, let’s you get so close and then, at the last moment, snatches it away.

Obviously that’s an unhelpfully negative viewpoint. How can we reframe it into a positive?
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Today I want to do a little time travel. Don’t worry, it’s just a thought experiment - we won’t be meeting any Daleks! The experiment is in two parts, the first of which is probably familiar to you. The second might be new.

Let’s start by assuming you can travel back in time to have a word with your earlier self. How far back you go is up to you - one year, five, ten, whatever. What advice would you give your earlier self?

I’m not talking about the winning lottery numbers here! I’m thinking more in terms of general advice (”You need to change career” or “If you don’t get fit you’ll have major health problems”) and priorities (”Spend more time with your family”). In particular I’m thinking of things that you probably knew at some level back then, but either ignored or were just “too busy” to implement.

If you’d had that advice back then, advice from yourself of all people, would you have acted on it? I suspect you would. And that could have changed your life today for the better.

OK, on to part two. You can probably guess what’s coming next…

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