Over the last few weeks, and since I announced my book launch was fast approaching, many people have asked me the same question:
“Did you always want to write a book?
And
"Why now?”
Well, for years I have really enjoyed and benefited from sharing and using other people’s tools, theories and models to help my clients. In fact, they have been absolutely invaluable to me. When I was working with my coach Jen Leeming from Business Whisperer last year, she kept asking me when I was going to claim my ‘magic’.
Jen could see what I couldn’t; when I am working with clients, I am not simply just applying models, I am interpreting them, flexing them and wrapping them all up in a package of motivation. I realised what I had been doing for years was adding value to clients by bringing out the ‘space’ between the models. I had been lending my motivation to teams for years, and getting great results, but it was time to share how to harness their own motivation so more people could be self-fuelling.
This was why I decided to write a book.
Certainly, my original objective was to distil the insights and guidance from my leadership training into a format which would be accessible to anyone. However, life happened, times changed and perhaps most importantly of all, Covid-19 reared its very ugly head. This made me even more determined to push the book out as quickly as possible and deliver on my purpose to write CREATE Motivation.
And my goodness, I simply could not have foreseen how much the world would change in light of Covid-19, nor how many of us would find ourselves searching for motivation in our everyday roles. In fact, when I first wrote these five words at the start of the book, “how did we get here?”, I was expressing the picture of exhaustion I was already seeing in our organisations. I knew that we needed to shift from a need to dig deep and push through to instead harnessing motivation in the workplace. However, with the ever-changing landscape of coronavirus and the uncertainty we are all feeling, I believe that now, more than ever, the need for people to understand their motivations is essential. This means that they don’t just pay attention to their needs, but rather recognise their wants are very important too.
I do hope you will get a chance to read the book over the next few months and see for yourself just how CREATE can help you harness your motivation and hone your skills. But most of all, and given the current climate of coronavirus confusion, I truly hope it will allow you to become the leader that the world so badly needs right now.
To help with all of this, and for all those who have read the book, I have prepared a set of free resources as a companion guide to the book. These resources are designed to give extra nuance to some of the ideas covered in the book and to make it even easier to do the book's exercises.
The resources include new tools and techniques for exploring your leadership and motivations, such as:
- Being able to see how you measure up against my definition of leadership;
- Understanding the extent to which you have a fixed or growth mindset;
- Getting to know how to distinguish between (and manage) your needs and wants;
To download the free resources, click here: https://create-motivation.co.uk/resources and take a look.
Until then, stay well, stay safe and stay at home.