GALT Consulting LLC

My good friend and business coach Randy Mayes and I were talking last week about motivation.  Science knows a lot about motivation that the business world has largely ignored.  In short, people feel very internally motivated to do something when they feel competent, autonomous, and related to that task at hand.  Randy asked a great question...  

...what about American Idol???

Randy pointed out that he had just watched several very motivated people on American Idol who were far from being "competent" singers.  How were they motivated?  After being stunned for a few minutes that Randy watches American Idol, I began to think about that one.

First of all, I want to point out that "competence" is a pretty weak word.  If I turned to my wife after dinner one night and said, "Honey, you are a competent cook!", she would likely not respond well.  The word "competent" is an unfortunate choice by Self-Determination Theorists.  Daniel Pink uses the word "Mastery".  Either way, language is powerful, but the meaning behind it is the same.  If you are really good at something, you probably love doing it (if you are also autonomous and related to the task).

Second point, you don't have to actually be "competent" to feel "competent".  Competence is a relative term with different definitions for different people (people are complex, remember?).  A high school orchestra has a different definition of a "great performance" than Maestro Spigelman would have at the Springfield Symphony.  At Northwest High School in Omaha, Nebraska I was a great tennis player (#1 and MVP two years in a row, baby!!!).  However, I lost most of my matches as I was not nearly as good as the other #1 players in other high schools.  Competence is relative.

My last point is that sometimes we do a competence "fake out".  I would say that many of the contestants on American Idol know they are not the best singers.  Some of them go to what they are competent at... being goofy or something else (remember Bikini Girl?...  I don't... I don't watch the show...).  

When you take all of these points into consideration, you realize the complexity of people, but it is all simple.  The person must feel competent at what they are doing to feel really motivated to do it, not actually be competent... or even good. 

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