Beyond Words: Navigating Motivational Dynamics

Welcome to Super Connections. I am your host, Jennifer K. Hill, helping you with the Golden Triangle of Connection, where you will super connect to yourself, others, and your purpose. Join me each week as I will share from some of my favorite tips and tools for super connecting, and I'll bring in some of my favorite friends and thought leaders to help support you on your journey to super connecting to the life of your dreams. Hello, Super Connections Tribe, and welcome back for another episode. Today we're going to deep dive in episode 7 into your motivators. Each week I'm going to continue to bring you different tools on how to super connect to yourself, others, and your purpose. And today is one of my favorite tools that I have made my life's work, which is understanding what motivates us. Do you ever find yourself sometimes in a relationship with somebody romantically or friendship, and sometimes it just feels like person A is speaking apple and person B is speaking orange? And even though you might be friends and you both might speak English or the same language, whatever that language is, you literally cannot understand each other. Anybody ever had that happen? Well, for me, I don't know if I've shared this yet on the show, but people often ask me how did I come to study all of this and why do I do this. Well, there's a little secret you should know about me. When I was a little girl, to me it was like you got a book on how to be a human being and he and she got books on how to be a human being. But when I opened my book, it was blank inside. So when I was a little girl, I could not make heads or tails of people. This led to decades of broken relationships, misunderstandings, hurt feelings for myself and others, until finally I began to ask myself, there must be a better way. And that began this journey of understanding what motivates us. I started by looking at myself and began to reflect on my own motivations. What was I motivated by every day? When I was very young, I was very motivated by achievement and money and doing all the things. And then over time, I evolved and became motivated by a variety of other things. Well, as I was building my last company in the recruiting space, I prominently began to see this play out in job hunt— job hunting and job seekers. You would have person A who, say, person A might be motivated by facts or information. Maybe they were a bit more analytical than most. And you'd have person B who'd be motivated by fun. And they'd put them in an interview together and one literally couldn't hear the other. And even though the skills might have been right for the person, for the job, there was not the chemistry there. So I'm going to backtrack for a moment and tell you how this even got studied by Google in 2012 in a project they did called Project Aristotle. So Google, huge company, I think a few of us have heard of them, went out to find out why is it some teams are more successful than others. Like, what is the secret to success in teams? Well, after studying, I believe it was 38,000 people and 180+ teams across all of Google, they found out it was not people who had similar interests or people who hung out together, went for drinks, or worked in the same area. It was psychological safety. That was the number one factor in team success. So that got me curious. After I sold my last company in the legal recruiting space, my business coach at the time, Julian Adler, came to me and said, Jen, why don't we create an algorithm that mirrors your intuition for matching people? And me, never having done anything in technology, I barely even recruited in the space. I was like, Wow, could we really do that? And thank goodness Julian is a brilliant mathematical genius. So Julian and myself and our original co-founder Moon spent about 8 months developing a questionnaire that you can now find for free. Anybody can go and take it at om.app/survey. So I'll be sure it's in the show notes. Again, om.app/survey, and anybody can take it. And we developed this questionnaire that tells you How are you motivated? So I'm going to give you a fun deep dive now into motivations and why it matters in all of our relationships, our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with others. So what are the 4 main motivator types that we look at? Well, type number 1 we call lychee. Now again, going back to that old adage that I started the show with of one person speaking apple and another speaking orange, We were inspired to call our motivational types fruits. So I'll walk you through what they are. So you have lychees, which are motivated by achievement. You have apples, which are motivated by information. Mangoes are motivated by fun. And pears are motivated by other people's needs. So we call it our LAMP assessment, L-A-M-P, for lychee, apple, mango, pear. So in terms of how we understand ourselves and how we understand others. Step 1 is you can take the quiz and you can find out, oh, how am I motivated? Is this how I thought I was motivated? Are you surprised by how you're motivated? Self-awareness is one of the greatest ways that we can be more connected to other people and to even our higher self and our higher calling and our purpose in life. I'll get more into things like Gene Keys in later episodes, which is another one of my favorite tools. So let's talk about these motivating types. What does it mean? So for me, I've been taking our own survey for 4 years now since we developed it in beta 4 years ago in 2021. And every single time I've taken it, 100% of the time, I've always tested high lychee. So if you are taking tests right now, or say if you want to pause and stop and go take the test and come back and finish listening to the episode, I encourage you to do so and I'll help you to interpret your results right now. And to use that so that you can better communicate with those around you. So I'll give you a moment. Go ahead and pause. And then let's come back. So let's talk about the results. Let's imagine right now that you have your OptiMatch results in front of you, or if you just want to continue the conversation without taking the survey, that works just as well. And I can still give you insights to help you better understand how you and others are motivated and how to bridge the gap of communication so you and the people around you can hear one another better. And have less what I call accidental adversarial relationships. So in OptiMatch, the way our scale works is you have from 0 to 40, 0 being the lowest number that you could have in terms of lychee, apple, mango, pear, and 40 being the highest number that you could have, with 20 being right down the middle in the average. So what we consider to be a high type, like a high lychee, which I always test as, would be 25 or above. So between 25 to 40 is high. And what we consider to be low is 15 or lower. So 0 to 15 would be considered low. Now there is one type, in case you want to check it out, called the harmonizer type. Now the harmonizer type is a very special type because they are— all of their numbers, the lychee, apple, mango, and pear, are between 16 to 24. That means they're neither high nor low, so they tend to be more what we call a harmonizer. Which means they get along well with more types of people. It's just like you would imagine if you were looking at a bell curve. If you looked at a bell curve, there's going to be a lot more people in the average. So if you have a Harmonizer type, because they're right in the middle, they're going to naturally get along better with more types of people around them, and there's going to be more people right in the middle than you will get out there on the further edges of 0 or 39, for example. Okay, so let's go back to your results now. So let's say that you have, you get your results back and you're a high Mango and it says you're motivated by fun. So that means your score was a 25 or higher in that particular category. What does that mean? Well, let's imagine that you are high Mango and yet your Apple, Apple is motivated by information, is low. Let's just say hypothetically that your Apple was a 12 instead of, you know, 20 or 15, it's 12. So it's on the low end that we just talked about. When you have a high mango and a low apple, there's now a gap of information. So what we tend to say is an OptiMatch, meaning you'll have natural psychological safety like what we're talking about with Google's Project Aristotle, that's going to be a number 0 to 5 points above or below your number. So let's imagine you were 20 across the board, so your OptiMatches would be between 15 to 25, 5 points above you or 5 points below you. That's what we consider an OptiMatch. Now the funny thing is people are begging us to do this in dating. We haven't yet gone down that route, but we've had many, many people in the thousands of people who have taken it who are happy couples, and it does seem to work for that. But that's a different topic that I'll cover in a later episode if it interests you. So put in the comments if that is something you want. I will do a full deep dive episode for you just on how this plays out romantically. So let's imagine going back to the example of this person that we have who's a high Mango. They're very motivated by fun. And they're lower motivated by information. Now let's imagine that they're working with somebody, or romantically involved, you can take your pick, but they're working with somebody who is a high apples. That person is above a 25. Let's just call them a 27 apples, 7 points above average. And they're a low mango. Let's call them a 10 in the mango. So that's 5 points below the lowest— or sorry, 10 points below average. So now you have these 2 people, one motivated by fun and one motivated by information. Anybody see any potentials for friction here? This is our lives. This is why so many of us have conflict with one another, is because number one, we're not aware even that we're motivated in a certain way. And number two, if we do become aware, then we don't consider how does the other person want to be spoken to. So let's imagine that you are in the hiring position And that you're about to hire this person. So you're the high mango, you're motivated by fun and not as motivated by information, but you need to hire somebody who is very analytical. Let's imagine that maybe they're an engineer and you need somebody very thorough and detail-oriented. I actually had this exact same thing happen in the recruitment world years ago. I had a client of mine that needed to hire a real estate paralegal. They were a large law firm in Los Angeles, and for 7 or 8 months they'd been looking for a certain person. Now, this was long before we had developed the survey, but again, intuitively I would cold read people and I used to be able to tell this. So you had this HR person who was super fun and bubbly and motivated by fun, and you had this candidate who was very analytical and thorough, and that's what you had to do to be good at her job. Well, I will always remember that how this played out is that the client called me and she was so frustrated. She was about to rescind the job offer for this particular candidate. This is ridiculous. She's asking me 100 questions. I'm not going to put up with this. We're going to rescind the job offer. Now, that's what it looks like when you have a 25 or higher— I'm just saying Mango as a hypothetical in this case— Mango talking to a high Apple where their numbers are opposite to each other. So what happened in that particular case— we'll use this real-world example since I thought of it— in this real-world example, what happened was I Educated the client, and I said, "Listen, you've been seeking somebody like this for eight or nine months now. It's been a pain in your behind. These people are very hard to find, and you want somebody who's detail-oriented. If you have somebody who's analyzing leases or deeds or titles or surveys, which are all real estate-related items, you want to be sure that person is not going to miss one little thing. Wouldn't you want that person to ask?" questions to be sure that you and the law firm don't lose money. Well, that stopped the high mango in her tracks. She said, oh, well, I guess you're right. So in that moment, instead of being frustrated, angry, resentful, about ready to pull the job offer, and then this person would have had to go through months and months more— they didn't have a second person, a runner-up for it— of going through more pain, she was able to avoid all of that pain By pausing, by understanding that this other woman, the woman they had given the offer to, was what we call in our language a high apple, or somebody motivated by information. And she was able to cultivate compassion and empathy and understanding. Now, what was beautiful that turned out? It all worked out great. Now, it wasn't like those two people were reporting to each other. This was just the person facilitating the offer. And of course, once the person got in the job, the person she was According to, was similarly motivated, similar to what we learned in the Google study. They had psychological safety together, and they worked together for many, many years, even almost a decade if I recall correctly. So I invite you to look at in your life, where do you have times where it feels like somebody is being a jerk? You're like, they're just not listening to me, right? And you're sure, you're 100% sure that you know what's going on. I want you to pause the next time that happens and consider, what if the person that you're speaking with might be motivated differently? Now, of course, you're not going to have every person out there go out and take our OptiMatch survey, but just like I used to do when I would cold read people in the recruiting business long before we developed the software, you can quickly ask a handful of questions to begin to ascertain how is this person motivated. So let's imagine that maybe you're having a disagreement with your team member or your person that you might want to hire for a job, then I invite you to pause and get curious. Instead of assuming that the person is misbehaving or being obstinate or just not listening, see if you can ask some clarifying questions. As we talked about back in episode 3, great partners go through a process of clarification. So the more that we can clarify, the more that we can understand we're all motivated differently, where there's beautiful spectrum and rainbow of individuals that all have these different motivations playing out in the workplace, romantically, etc., then it's from that place that you can begin to cultivate better communication and better understanding. And remember, it all starts with yourself. So I invite you, look at your results. You can even do it— again, we haven't added this feature yet, but it's something we're exploring where you'll be able to tell how you match with anybody. Right now we use OptiMatch just for businesses who want to look at alignment of teams or communities who want to align their members together. Though I invite you to look at your own results. If you did take the om.app/survey test, you can go on the left side and there are actually questions that you can journal with and you can reflect and you can ask yourself. In my case, I'm a high light chi and high light chi is my number is always between 27 to 32 on the light chi side. And in my case, I have to ask myself, am I moving too quickly? Is there something I haven't considered? Should I have asked more deep questions? And the more that you cultivate this curiosity, this sense of inquiry about yourself and about others and how each of us is motivated, the more you're going to mitigate any potential accidental adversarial relationships, and you're going to cultivate greater harmony and partnership in all of your relationships. So I am Jennifer Cahill. I'm so grateful that you took this little time to deep dive into motivators. If this interests you, I could spend hours teaching you about this and helping you to better understand motivators and how your motivators and other people can create greater alignment and harmony in your life. So put it in the comments, or feel free, you can go to superconnectionspodcast.com or thesuperconnectionspodcast.com. And you can subscribe to my newsletter, and I personally respond and email to people there. So if you have topics that you want me to cover, or if you want to deep dive on this or one of the other topics, or if you have a particular guest that you'd love to have on the show, then please let us know. And we want to listen to you and be sure that this is as valuable as it can be for you. So enjoy going out there, exploring your motivators, and finding out what motivates you and what motivates them. Thank you. the people around you.