Grow in your profession through tribe learning

In his book Drive, Daniel Pink describes Motivation 3.0 as an intrinsic motivation.

A motivation that comes from within and is a sustainable source of energy for the professional. Worldwide research indicates that 3 elements are needed to make someone experience motivation 3.0:

  1. Keep growing in your craftsmanship
  2. Autonomy within a framework that suits you
  3. Meaning by making an essential contribution to a greater whole, which in turn makes a contribution to society

In blog 3 of this series we have seen that Resilience grows through social and structural energy resources. In this blog we will look at the connection between

  • Motivation 3.0
  • Growing in your profession
  • Resilience

We also look at how working in learning-tribes contributes to these three elements.

The 5 structural energy resources that promote both resilience and motivation 3.0 are:

  1. Job matches talents

To remain intrinsically motivated it is necessary that you work at least 25 percent of your time with one or more of your intrinsic talents. When you are able to realize this, your resilience will also grow because the use of intrinsic talents brings you into a ‘flow’ in which the work gives you more energy than it takes. In the learning-tribe you will discover your unique strengths and skills more clearly by means of different talent and personality scans. And that is the start of job-crafting: matching your job with your talents.

  1. Growing in Mastery

The moment you experience growing in your craftsmanship as a professional, that gives you a basic energy that leads to motivation 3.0: intrinsic motivation. In blog 1 we already indicated how the learning tribe contributes to this, that as members of the tribe you continuously motivate each other to continue to grow in your unique craftsmanship.

  1. Challenging stress

The moment everything in your profession goes automatically and you can just ‘cruise’ on your experience, your resilience slowly but surely decreases. Resilience is like a muscle. If you don’t train it, it decreases in shape and tension. So using the muscle is not enough to keep it at a healthy load-bearing level. More than just using it, the muscle needs to be regularly challenged to maintain a healthy level of tension. Precisely for this reason, the learning-tribe, which meets 5-7 times within a year, can provide this regular challenge for every participant. People who have to organize their entire learning process completely on their own are particularly lacking those regular positive stress stimuli in order to continue to grow and train.

  1. A meaningful mission

Dr. Viktor Frankl describes in his beautiful book Man’s Search of Meaning, why meaning is one of man’s most basic necessities of life. And in Daniel Pink’s research we also see that it is one of the three essential elements of motivation 3.0. Passion and meaning are also part of the 7 Resilience competences. And that is why it is an enormous structural resource of energy, if you feel at work that you are making a meaningful and substantial contribution to a larger whole: the mission of your company, organization, school, hospital, municipality, club or any other form of organization. Then, of course, it is important that the organization you give your life time to, also has an inspiring mission and you can connect your contribution to it. In the learning tribe each participant discovers what his or her mission is on both a professional and a private level. And so, you learn from and with each other how to match your mission with the mission of your organization.

  1. Healthy finances

Healthy finances don’t necessarily mean wealth. But it does mean Enough! One of the greatest energy guzzlers in our society is that situation in which we ‘lose our grip on life or circumstances’. Regarding this Viktor Frankl said: “You can take everything away from me, but not the freedom how I react to it”. Part of motivation 3.0 is autonomy within a framework that suits you. Your financial situation is healthy when: you make enough to live, to save and to be able to give. This is strongly related to your ability to manage, classify and spend money with discipline. If your financial situation is healthy, you experience a basic ‘grip’ on the circumstances and a basic autonomy to make your own well-founded choices. And this provides a boost of resilience and intrinsic motivation. In the learning tribe you will find a safe place to learn together to manage finances meaningfully and in a healthy way. And here too, as with the element of challenging stress, it is easier to stay in good training if you do it together!

For today: Have fun building up your structural energy resources.

Choose one of them, and start working with it structurally. Because the advantage of all 5 social and 5 structural energy resources is, that they are all systematically connected to each other. So, the moment you consciously build up and expand one of the energy resources, it will immediately have a positive effect on all the others.

A warm invitation:

Sign up for the tribes starting 29 May 2020, and start your growth towards VUCA proof professionalism. Here are more information on the Leadership Tribe.

Contact us at info-sa@xpand.eu or 079  434 9030 to sign-up.

Sincere greetings,

Xpand South Africa Team

Empowering individuals and organizations to thrive.Â