In my most recent blog posting I gave four strategies to help a parent motivate a child. Motivating a child can be difficult work for a parent.

One problem with motivating your child is you need to be constantly on the job. So wouldn’t it be great if your child could motivate himself? Well, there’s no reason why a child should not motivate himself. How? The same way an adult does – by learning the skill of motivating himself.

Motivating yourself is a skill that anyone can learn, even a child. Even better, it is something you can learn with your child, and though it may involve more work in the short haul, in the long run, having a child who can motivate himself is more than worth the time. Especially when you add in that you will learn how to motivate yourself.

The first step in learning how to motivate yourself is learning the model for self motivation. Here’s the model:

MOTIVATION = ƒ (VISION, SUCCESSABILITY, ENVIRONMENT).

The model tells us that your motivation is directly impacted by your vision (some special change you want to make in your life), your successability (your confidence in your competence, that is, your ability to make the change) and your environment, both your physical environment (where you will do the work necessary to make the change) and your social environment (the people and organizations available to you).

The model for self motivation tells us that any positive steps your child takes to impact his vision, successability or environment will automatically positively impact his motivation.  Reading my other blog entries and reading my book when it become available in April will guide you through the process, but here is a summary.

Vision: If you read my earlier blog, you read that my Mom continually told me I wasn’t working up to my potential. But one of the reasons my mom never got me to work up to my potential was that I had no idea what my potential even looked like. I was never encouraged to dream. My parents never asked me what things I liked to do, or if there was something I might like to try. I don’t blame them; I’m sure they were never asked these questions by their parents either. But I asked them of my children, and you can ask them of yours. This is how a child positively impacts his vision, the first factor, by getting in touch with the things that are truly important to him.

Successability: The more confident a person is that they can make a dream come true, the more likely they are to pursue it, the more motivated they will be in their pursuit. One strategy to helping your child be more confident is to make training opportunities available to him. But let your child have input as to the training you make available for him. If he totally dreads receiving the training, it’s unlikely he will gain the skills he needs. If, on the other hand, he suggests some training or skill development he desires, he will have an investment in being correct and will work harder and longer.

Environment:  Give your child some degree of control over the place he does his work.  The degree will vary with each child, of course, dependent upon such things as the child’s age and maturity, and factors outside of the control of the child or the parent, but the important thing is that the child feels he has some say, some autonomy, in the decisions that are being made.

Control is a prerequisite to being motivated. Giving control over to our children is something most parents struggle with. But a motivated child is one that will grow into a responsible adult, who knows what is right, and pursues it. He becomes a child any parent would be proud of.

As I shared in my last blog, when I was a child my mom was continually frustrated that I wasn’t working up to my potential. She let me know it, but complaining about something is a bit different than motivating someone to change.

So if you would rather be effective, instead of just annoying your child, here are four strategies you can use.

Strategy 1.  Make sure your child understands why doing the activity is important to him. Motivating another requires thinking about their needs and wants, not just yours. Take the time to try to see the issue from your child’s perspective. Know your child well enough so that the reason is important to the child. What motivates us may not be what motivates our children.

Strategy 2.  Child empowerment – this one is particularly difficult for many parents as they feel, often times correctly, that they know best what is good for the child. Let your child get to know him or herself. Give the child the opportunity to try out different things. But also give them to responsibility to stop doing it after a reasonable amount of time passes if they find they don’t like doing it. And try not tell them, “I told you so,” or call them a quitter.  My daughter wanted to try a dance class. After a couple of classes, she knew she didn’t like it, so we let her quit. Art, on the other hand, was something she found she loved, and continues doing it even now, late into her twenties.

Strategy 3. Make sure they have skin in the game. If a child wants to try something new, let them spend part of their allowance toward the cost of it, or have them do an extra chore. This way the thing the child is trying becomes more meaningful and the child will be more likely to give it a fair chance.

Strategy 4.  Let the child fail. This is how a person learns to handle frustration, and to build their tolerance for not getting immediate satisfaction. You don’t want your child to bail as soon as they hit a bump in the road, or when the inherent motivation of something new wanes.

Careful use of these strategies will make you a much more effective motivator. They are harder to implement than nagging, but they will work so much better.

In my next blog, something even better than motivating your child, teaching your child how to motivate herself.

Sometimes the biggest struggle we have with motivating someone else is when we motivate our children, trying to get them to do things we know are good for them, but which they just aren’t inclined to do.

When I think about this, I always think of my mom. My mom’s favorite words to me, at least the words I complain about more than any others, were, “Bob, you aren’t working up to your potential.”  I would not argue that she was wrong, especially since I also heard it from teachers, but telling someone this, without giving them the means to improve or fix the problem, is simply nagging.  Not only is it annoying to the child, but it’s equally annoying to the parent, for it never seems to improve the situation.

When I talk about motivating a child, I’m not just talking about getting a child to clean his room or do his chores without being asked, the things you want done. I am also talking about the more important things, things that result in well rounded children, children who have a sense of their own power,  children who know what is good for them and how to go after those things. I’m talking about raising a child who feels good about himself. You don’t need to worry about peer pressure with a child like this.

I know my mom loved me and wanted me to work up to my potential for my benefit, not hers. The problem was, though she had some vague idea of what I was supposed to be doing, she was unable to motivate me to do it. She simply didn’t know how to motivate me to work up to my potential.  So it’s to Moms like her, and to their long suffering unmotivated children that I dedicate these this and the next two blog posting.

In my next blog I will give you strategies to help you motivate your child.  In the blog after that one I will present an even better idea, something even better than motivating your child.