How to unlock your creative motivation

Take a look at these five key motivations for the creative process and work out where the force is strong with you. Tailoring your work to suit your strengths and weaknesses can mean jobs become rewarding activities rather than laborious headaches. Most people are strongly motivated by only one or two of the following. It might help to imaging a recent project from your own work.

1. Competition – being the best or unique. What gets you up in the morning is the idea that what you will eventually deliver will be better than everyone else’s. You like standing out from the crowd or coming first in the pack.
2. Process – building something step by step. You love being there behind the drawing board, notepad or wherever the working surface of your job takes you. Just doing what you do, practicing your skill is your motivation.
3. Product – seeing the finished article. Even before you’ve started you can imagine the task completed. Pictures on a wall, pots on a shelf, an album being played. The rest, making the thing, comes second.
4. Effect – the audiences appreciation of the product. What gets you out of bed, tackling those moments of low motivation is the idea that people will love and appreciate what you’ve made and that, somehow, you will get to hear some of that feedback.
5. Oversight – controlling the whole process or team. You can see all of the stages needed to bring an idea to production. Your motivation is to oversee all of the work and ensure that it all joins up. This tends to only apply to groups working together.

Build on your strengths

You can begin to restructure or craft your job to suit your particular strengths. Pick positions or tasks that naturally suit your motivation. Make the most of the stages of the job that you know you’ll really enjoy. Find a balance between your intrinsic and extrinsic motivation if you use this model to enhance your commercial work. If you apply it to your leisure time creativity then intrinsic motivation is more important.

Work on your weaknesses

Recognize the stages of the process that you’re not strong in and plan around them accordingly. It could be that you can avoid that stage altogether. If, for example, you are strong in Product and Effect motivation but weak at Process, you may be in a hurry to finish a job with a cost to quality. Simply knowing that could encourage you to take more care or you could work with someone else to check your work through the process stage.

Another strategy is to save your most focused and energized working time for the stages of the process you are less motivated by – and to set small, clearly measurable targets for that work.

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