What’s Your Motivation?

Many actors often ask a director, “what’s my motivation?”  “Getting paid” would be my response.

But oftentimes in life we need to ask ourselves the same thing – why am I doing this?   Recently there was a decision with an organization that I am a part of that took both time, effort and money from our already overextended volunteer base.  During the course of the project, they made it abundantly clear that whatever I was doing had priority and they would try to work around me.   After a few weeks of things not going as fast as I wanted, I found myself getting more and more upset about the project, so much so that I was deliberately trying to find ways that could cause probelems.

“Will setting up chairs on the floor, where they need to work, sufficiently disrupt their day?  Should I find a way  to “need” the space at the same time they need it, just because I have priority?  Then I asked myself “why” – and the short answer was simply “to be difficult.”

I realized that wasn’t a very good answer.  Even if I was upset about the project, deliberately sabotaging it was not in the best interest of the organization.

There are a lot of mean people in the world, and I would rather not be one of them.  Next time you do something out of spite, maybe you should ask yourself  -What’s my motivation?