Apple Watch competitions & motivation theory

Two things at the same time— Apple Watch competition and motivation theory session.

A few weeks ago I’ve got an Apple Watch SE to track my activity, figure out how active I am, what is my heart rate, and does the no-sugar diet affect me anyhow. Well, surely it does, only that now I treat bananas as candies.

This week I’ve attended the session on Motivation & Retention — how to keep my colleagues motivated, entertained, happy and willing to work with me. In the end, IMO every mature team player must understand that everyone is in charge of keeping the team spirit, in charge of motivating each other.

So, saying good words to your mates actually makes a great difference.

As we already mentioned bananas, let’s consider the following picture:

Did it motivate you? It challenges a big fear — FOMO, fear of missing out. Life is too short, one fears that he won’t complete all the things planned — so do it today! It’s like Nike, just do it!

Not that I’m saying it’s always a good idea to challenge this to your coworkers (hey, no time to wait, let’s complete it since we have a whole backlog planned), but instead you can try to motivate them in some other way.

Some ways:

• Say nice words, appreciate their work (such as in pizza-money-welldone experiment performed by Duke University psychology professor Dan Ariely — really have that read, it’s showing so many insights on motivation)
• Reward your people with some physical things — just send them a postcard. Really, it works great, and is so memorable during the 21st century. It will keep ’em going, they will put that on their fridge and stare at it each morning.
• Build emotional connections between people — that helps great with commitment to some work being done. I’m much more resilient to go hanging out when I have some emotional commitment to my colleague — a promise that I will finish the work first.

Let me know if you use anything else in your daily routines :)

So the competition motivated me pretty much, and I can see that my opponents are also up to spend more time working out to beat me.

Isn’t it funny how our brain works in such competitions? Normally, we do not stress ourselves too much, even though there is a higher goal — to get yourself fit, to make yourself feel better. But now, at the competition, we start challenging ourselves not because of described reasons, but because of the game, emotional connection to the challenge… So, one motivates another via challenge to achieve more, to get better day by day.