The Motivation Code Revealed

The next time you’re trying to get a particular behavior out of somebody else, or trying to build a strong internal motivation for yourself, ask yourself: which strategy will work best for the future?

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.
— Eleanor Roosevelt

Donald Trump paints a dark and frightening picture of America for his followers; President Biden, on the other hand, is optimistic that there are no challenges that American’s can’t meet:

“Our history need not dictate our future,” Biden said. “With a concerted leadership, adversaries can become partners, overwhelming challenges can be resolved, and deep wounds can heal. When we choose to stand together, we hold in our hands the power to bend the arc of history.”

Each is trying to motivate his own voters, but their approaches are quite different. And this is nothing new and not even unique to America.

In the spring of 2007, France was preparing for the most important national election in many years, an election people believed would decide the direction of their country for years to come. The two candidates who made it to the final round represented the right and left wings of French politics. Nicolas Sarkozy, the candidate of the Union for a Popular Movement, and Ségolène Royal, the candidate of the Socialist Party.

Compared with American politicians, Sarkozy and Royal may seem more alike than different. Both, for example, support what conservatives here would call “big government.” In their worldviews, however, these two French politicians are quite different, and they used very different motivational strategies for their listeners.

Speaking at a celebration of his first-round voting victory, Sarkozy spoke of his deepest aspiration:

“I want to tell all the French who are scared, who are scared of the future, who feel fragile, vulnerable, who find life harder and harder, I want to tell them that I want to protect them.”

Royal, by contrast, speaking on the same day to her supporters, said, she wants to “lead the fight for change, so that France can stand up again, to get optimism back.”

In these two voices, like in Trump versus Biden, we hear the conservative and liberal stories: the conservative story that the world is evil place where we must be protected, and the liberal story that the world is a good place where we can achieve our fullest aspirations.

The aim of these two speeches, however, was not just for the politicians to convey their core stories. Each politician was aiming to motivate voters to choose him or her on election day.

Sarkozy chose to motivate his listeners by reminding them what they wanted to leave behind: I know you are afraid of pain, he said, but if you vote for me, I will protect you: you will be able to leave that fear and pain behind.

Royal chose to motivate her listeners by reminding them of what they wanted to move toward: I know you want more from this country, she said, and if you vote for me, I will lead you into a brighter future where your wishes will be fulfilled.

Toward pleasure or away from pain, toward hope or away from fear: mentally and emotionally we never stand still.

NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) teaches that we are always doing one of these two things: either moving toward something we want or moving away from something we don’t want.

We are always moving toward pleasure or away from pain, and we develop and use strategies that include both of these to motivate ourselves and others.

The Moving-away-from-pain Strategy

In the short run, the most effective strategy for persuasive communication is to motivate someone to move away from pain. The reason is simple: it’s physiological. If you get an electric shock, you pull your finger out of the wall socket. If you’re barefoot and step on glass, you lift up your foot. “Wow!” “Gotta do something!” Causing people to experience or even imagine pain gets an immediate response.

Moving-away-from-pain strategies are very powerful because they’re among the first we learn as children. Many children’s first spoken word is “No!” because they so strongly experienced parental admonishments to avoid pain: “No, don’t pull on the tablecloth!” “No, don’t touch the hot stove!” “No, don’t go into the street!” And by the age of two, most children have experienced enough pain, accidental or unintentionally self-inflicted, that they know well the association between “No!” and pain or the threat of pain.

As adults we internalize these moving-away-from-pain strategies and use them to motivate ourselves and others. Dick Cheney famously motivated voters in 2004 using the pain strategy when he suggested that if Americans voted for Democrats, terrorists would attack the United States again. Vote for Democrats — feel pain. Vote for Republicans — avoid pain.

The downside of the moving-away-from-pain strategy is that over time it stops working or produces terribly dysfunctional results. It’s like whipping a horse to keep it going. At first it works, but after a while, if you keep whipping the horse over and over, harder and harder, eventually the horse will drop dead of exhaustion, or it will give up and stop trying to avoid the pain and just sit there and whimper. When overused, the moving-away-from-pain strategy eventually becomes ineffective.

The Moving-toward-pleasure Strategy

At the other end of the motivational spectrum is moving toward pleasure.

Pleasure is typically nowhere near as extreme as pain. Prick your finger with a pin: it’s hard to produce an experience of pleasure that is as strong and as brief as that common experience of momentary pain. Probably the closest we get to such intense feelings of pleasure are either drug-induced experiences (studies with rats show that they’ll push a bar to get cocaine until they starve to death) or sexual orgasm (which regularly causes humans and other animals to risk their lives).

But broadly, setting aside drug-induced and sexual experiences, the vast majority of our moving-toward-pleasure behaviors are very gentle and subtle. Getting a pay raise, having a good conversation, or enjoying a nice lunch: none of that, in terms of the intensity of the sensation, comes even close to the short-term power of the experience of having somebody poke you with a pin. If somebody pokes you, you’ll jump immediately. But most of us have never involuntarily jumped for a meal or a nice conversation.

Moving toward pleasure is like the natural force of gravity. Just as gravity is the weakest of the natural forces, it is also the most steady and constant. It’s keeping you and me glued to our seats as you read these words. It steadily acts throughout our lives, never varying. Although moving-toward-pleasure strategies don’t always produce immediate changes in behavior like moving-away-from-pain strategies do, they can last over the long haul, and they can motivate people throughout their entire lives.

Saving up for a house is a moving-toward-pleasure strategy we practice when we are young adults. We could rent all our lives, but we look forward to home ownership. It’s the same with saving for a college education for your kids or for a special vacation. In public life we invest money in schools because we look forward to the bright, well-educated workers and citizens those schools will produce. All of these are moving-toward-pleasure strategies.

How the Motivation Code Works

How do we motivate ourselves? How do we motivate other people? Anyone who has ever tried to diet knows that motivation is not as easy as it seems, even when you have both strategies (the pleasure of getting thinner and the pain of getting diabetes or heart disease) to motivate you.

Understanding how motivation works leads to two immediate outcomes.

The first is that we can change our own internal motivation systems and decision-making strategies to move ourselves in the directions that we want to move. We begin to more consciously make motivation-based decisions: how to better set goals and how to affect our own present and future behavior.

Second, we have a better handle on, a better view of, and a better story for how to help other people at least understand clearly what it is we’re suggesting in a political context so they can decide whether or not to be motivated by it.

And there’s a built-in bonus: Once you know how motivational strategies work, when such strategies are being intentionally but surreptitiously inflicted on you, you can spot them coming and internally diffuse them. In other words, it provides us with a defense system.

In my opening examples, conservatives used the moving-away-from-pain strategy and liberals used the moving-toward-pleasure strategy. It makes sense that conservatives, who tend to think that the world is an evil place (Hobbes), would tend toward a moving-away-from-pain strategy; likewise, liberals, who tend to think the world is a good place (Rousseau), tend toward a moving-toward-pleasure strategy.

The fact is, however, that to be maximally competent in the world, we all need to have both types of motivational strategies available to us, both internally to motivate ourselves and externally to motivate others.

We want a safe nation (moving away from the pain of danger) and a nation where every person can fulfill their greatest potential (moving toward the pleasure of fulfillment). We want the same for our friends and family. From a communication perspective, both types of motivational strategies have their uses.

The Two-strategy Solution

One of the most significant communication problems most people face is that they don’t have a lot of flexibility when they’re developing internal or external motivational strategies.

Back in 1978, I was the executive director of a residential treatment facility for abused and emotionally disturbed kids in New Hampshire. A majority of the kids who came to us were the victims of severe abuse. But they were also the victims of parents who really had only one tool. They had just one way to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish, and that was using the moving-away-from-pain motivational strategy. It was the only strategy that they understood, and so they would inflict pain on their children to motivate them.

The parents would yell at them when they were very young, and that worked for a little while. But then it stopped working, so then they hit them, and that worked for a little while, and then that stopped working. And then they hit them harder, and that worked for a little while, and then that stopped working.

And then they started hitting them with things, and it would escalate to the point where one of the first kids we took in, a little boy named Tony, came to us because his brother had been starved to death by his parents, tied to a pole in the basement. His brother literally died, and his parents insisted they were doing it to try to teach him to behave.

Virtually every severely abusive parent I’ve ever talked to lacked a complete set of motivational strategies or the ability to use them.

Child abuse may seem like an extreme example, but it’s all too typical of the way most of us Americans learn to motivate ourselves.

At the office, managers tend to manage by moving people away from pain. They yell. They bang their fists on the desk. Some CEOs are not-so-secretly admired in the business pages for going on rampages to get what they want. Americans value short-terms gains, so they value a short-term strategy like moving away from pain.

But anyone who has worked in such an environment knows that moving-away-from-pain strategies generally make for lousy management and low morale. It’s much more effective to motivate people by offering them pleasure.

Carrots work better over the long term than sticks. Good managers understand that their job is to “catch people doing things right” (to quote Dale Carnegie) and reward or publicly praise them: if you catch people doing things right, they’ll want to do more of it and they’ll grow in competence while getting better and better.

It’s no coincidence that a company that offers its employees health care, good food in the cafeteria, and on-site childcare has posted soaring profits. Google, for example, knows how to motivate its employees toward pleasure and thus gets great productivity.

On the other hand, many companies that are in the process of preparing for buyouts or are being managed by people whose compensation is tied to quarterly profits squeeze their employees so hard that very little pleasure is left. In the short term, it produces profit spikes, but over the long term employee turnover and loss of a supportive corporate culture harm the business.

The bottom line here is that from managing a business to a household to simply running our own lives, we’re most effective when we understand that there are two very different ways — that are each appropriate at different times — to motivate ourselves and others.

So, the next time you’re trying to get a particular behavior out of somebody else, or trying to build a strong internal motivation for yourself, ask yourself: which strategy will work best, both now and for the long term?

And with this new tool, this new knowledge of one of the most basic aspects of human behavior, you’ll discover a whole world of new successes as you move forward into a bright and better future.