How to Fix Your Motive? All You Need is Love!
No matter how well someone may understand you, they can destroy your trust in a second, if you don’t vibe with their motive. And vice versa.
In this series on Trust, I’ve been sharing my thoughts from Dr. Henry Cloud’s book Trust and combining it with the metaphor of a diamond because Trust has not 1 but 5 facets. Understanding the different facets of trust can help us navigate relationships and foster meaningful connections. In this video, we'll be focusing on facet number 2: Motive.
Motive is defined as the underlying reason or intention behind a person's thoughts, actions, or behavior. It is the driving force that influences and guides behavior. Understanding one's motive is crucial in gaining insight into personal motivations, goals, and aspirations.
In the book Henry Cloud used his own personal story of searching for a doctor to diagnose his knee pain to determine if surgery was necessary. He went to three different doctors, all of whom understood his situation. Remember, in the previous video we learned that Understanding is the first facet of Trust. And in Henry Clouds story, all 3 doctors understood his situation, and all three recommended surgery. However, the first two doctors made him feel uneasy, causing him to search for the 3rd and final doctor who ended up doing his surgery.
It took him a little bit to figure out what was missing with the first 2 doctors when it dawned on him. “What was missing was me. I was missing. I was nowhere in the picture of what they cared about, it seemed.”
He said the first two doctors seemed to be motivated by their own ego and ambition with the practice they were building, not about how the surgery would effect him personally.
Have you ever felt that way? You just feel like there’s something else going on with someone that you can’t quiet put your finger on but it makes you uneasy? The culprit might very well be motive.
Unfortunately, understanding someone else’s motive can be extremely challenging. Just ask any prosecuting attorney. Not only that, it’s hard for us to understand our own motives.
As the saying goes,
"There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one's self." - Benjamin Franklin
Look, there’s no way to sugar coat this. Understanding others motives as well as our own takes a lifetime of development. But I can’t think of anything more valuable than becoming a person worthy of trust. And if that’s what you want to be known for, then understanding motive will always be on your to do list…
Real trust is built not only through understanding but making sure the other party’s motive is right, meaning that they are for your good. - Dr. Henry Cloud
So it seems to me that the question everyone is asking whether they realize it or not is…
“Do I trust their intention?”
If we believe a person’s intention is for our good, trust can grow. If we don’t, trust is DOA.
It doesn’t even matter if there are rules in place to keep everyone doing what they’re supposed to do. Because rules are about WHAT we do. Motive is about WHY we do it.
We all grow up learning moral codes… But, at some point, we all break a few rules. Rules are not powerful enough. - Dr. Henry Cloud
Can you see how big of a deal this is? If Trust is the currency of life, and Motive is a facet of trust which is difficult to see in other people and ourselves. What do we do?
Well, there is something much stronger than moral codes that we can use to help us understand our motive. Dr. Cloud calls it the Law of Love.
The Law of Love
The law of love plays a significant role in building trust because love is selfless by nature, or as 1 Corinthians 13 states, “love is not self-seeking.”
Two benefits I want to highlight here. The law of love makes:
1. Defenses go down
When we believe someone has our best interest in mind, we feel safe and don’t need to spend our limited energy into defending ourselves. Said another way,
“When I believe you have my back, I stop looking over my shoulder.”
2. Makes productivity go up
To get sci-nerdy for a second: Trusting someone’s motive allows me to take that extra energy from the shields and put it into the thrusters which causes all of us to move forward.
For me, the question I ask myself to check my Motive is this:
“Am I doing this to get, or am I doing this to give?”
And knowing the complexity of my own heart, it’s probably going to be a bit of both. However, as you hone your self awareness skills, you can get better at intuiting the ratio between the two. And in my opinion, anytime you sense you have more get than give, treat that like a red light on your dashboard, pop the hood of your heart and do some serious motive investigation. This is a skill that must be developed if you want to understand motive.
And when it comes to skills I tell my students “Skills are developed through habits over time.”
So if you’re serious about understanding your own motive to build trust, the number one habit I highly recommend is journaling. hands down. There are many of them out there from physical to digital so find one that motivates you to write and run with it.
My personal favorite is a journaling app called Day One because I can access it on my phone, my watch, my iPad, and desktop. If you’d like me to do a more in-depth review of DayOne, let me know.
But whether your using an app or pen and paper, you’ll know if you’re really serious about developing this habit if you put it in your calendar and set it to repeat because…
What gets scheduled gets done.
- Michael Hyatt
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