Motivation for sale?
 A young woman contacted me the other day
because she wanted some coaching in feature writing. This was, she explained, part of
her launch into a new lifestyle.
Her first step towards this had been to
engage a personal trainer. After several weeks of help, she was now satisfied with
her healthy exercise/diet routine.
Then she‘d sought the advice of a
personal coach to sort out the kind of career she should follow. The coach helped
her define her personality, potential and goals through a series of tests and
questionnaires. Her profile came out as ‘independent and creative, with a gift for
writing’. The signs, she decided, pointed to freelance journalism.
And now, what exactly did she want from
me?
Motivation, she said. Ah yes, of
course. She’d got it from her personal trainer and from her coach. So why
not from me, a journalist?
I asked her what she wanted to write
about. She didn’t know. After exploring some of her interests and
providing basic information, I suggested some feature topics that she might develop,
suggested ways to go about it and invited her to email them to me. I never heard from her
again.
Which got me thinking: how did we get
motivated in our not-necessarily-good old days? We had school careers advisers
(hopeless, especially for girls). There were also a few adult careers consultants
around, consulted mainly by those made redundant and paid for by the company. As for
personal trainers, they were strictly for athletes.
I asked a few of my contemporaries -
where did we get our motivation from?
School, said one. Example of peers,
said another. Psychotherapy and those Sixties gurus with their paths to
enlightenment said a third.
Not the same thing at all. Schools and
peer groups were haphazard routes to motivation. Psychotherapy and gurus promise
inner growth, which may lead to motivation but are not the focus of the services offered
today.
Now, it seems, there’s an
expectation that money can buy motivation, and indeed there’s an industry out there
supplying it: hence the fitness trainer and the life coach, people who help you plan
and run your life in a pro-active, motivated, committed way.
Are they effective? Probably
no more nor less than psychotherapists or gurus. To some extent, it’s the
faith in them that counts. They provide a contemporary antidote to personal problems and
dilemmas, a modern attempt to solve life’s difficulties.
There’s just one little thing that
bothers me (and I grant it is an age thing). People want a quick-fix, and they want
it to be pain-free. Television is brimming with quick-fix, pain-free advice. How
to dress, how to clean your house, how to cook, how to run a dinner party, how to renovate
a room in a couple of days. Just get in an expert and your troubles are over.
 That’s why I can’t help feeling iffy
about the idea of trying to buy motivation. Every generation seeks its own
solutions, and every previous generation doesn’t quite get it. All the same, I
can’t help feeling that she had come to the wrong person. Motivation is a vital
part of being a freelance writer. No one else can do it for you. And I speak
from sometimes painful experience.
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Talkback is a regular
feature in laterlife.com run by journalist and author Helen Franks. 
