How to Get Your Mojo Back
How to motivate yourself by connecting to happiness and meaning.
Reading author Marshall Goldsmith’s book MOJO: How to Get It, How to Keep It, and How to Get It Back if You Lose It, I realized my mojo had vanished. Last night, the zombie reanimation powder canister was almost empty, so I went to the kitchen to whip up a batch. While adding the monkey fur soaked in kerosene, I was suddenly struck by an overwhelming sense of futility. Why bother dominating the world, anyway? Can you imagine? You sit around all day and saying, “I’m king of the world!” B-O-R-I-N-G. When you discover you’re going through the motions, maybe you’ve lost your Mojo.
What Is Mojo?
Mojo is the combination of happiness and meaning that excites and motivates you. Marshall suggests using a daily mojo log to find out where your mojo has gone. When you’re done with an activity, jot down on your log how happy it made you, and how meaningful you found it. By the end of the day, you’ll have a good idea of where you have high and low mojo.
How to Use a Mojo Log
Bernice created a mojo log. Not surprisingly, filling out expense reports had low mojo. The task was not meaningful, nor did it make her happy. But her log brought some surprises: her Goddess rituals were meaningful, but didn’t make her happy, as they conflicted with her Sex and the City reruns. Eating ice cream Bon Bons made her happy, but didn’t seem meaningful. Offering me useful advice on how to do my job? She rated that as both happy and meaningful. Sigh. Great.
How to Get Your Mojo Back
When something you do is low mojo, get your mojo back by adding what’s missing, or by dropping the activity altogether.
Bernice easily boosted the mojo of her Goddess rituals by rescheduling them to be opposite the MacNeil/Lehrer Report instead of Sex and the City. She decided to fixed her Bon Bon mojo by dropping them from her diet altogether. The neighborhood kids began selling peanut butter cups to buy textbooks, so she buys a case every week. They make her happy and buying them supports a good cause, which gives her life meaning. As she would say, “The Goddess looks upon me with favor for all that I sacrifice for the good of others. Please hand me a napkin. This peanut butter cup is melting.”
Personal Mojo and Professional Mojo
Sometimes just looking at happiness and meaning isn’t enough. In that case, Marshall offers a much richer version of mojo tracking. You rate each activity on its professional mojo and its personal mojo. Professional mojo is what you bring to the activity. It’s your motivation, knowledge, ability, confidence, and authenticity. Activities that score high in all those areas will have greater mojo and help you engage more strongly.
Professional mojo isn’t enough, however. My friend Jordan is involved in a new product launch. With a long history of creating budgets, the group naturally voted Jordan to handle financials. But despite high skill, motivation to do well, deep knowledge, ability, confidence, and authentic desire to get it done, Jordan’s mojo is quite low. Why? Because doing budgets is no longer rewarding for Jordan. Years ago, creating budgets had high personal mojo for Jordan. It was new, rewarding, meaningful, had lots of learning, and Jordan was grateful at the chance to do something other than mop floors at the local S-mart store.
According to Marshall, professional mojo is what you bring to an activity, but personal mojo is what the activity brings to you: happiness, reward, meaning, learning, and gratitude.
How to Boost Your Mojo
Since Jordan’s personal mojo is low everywhere around budgeting, it might be best to ask the team to give budgets to someone else. But if not, Jordan can use the mojo profile to tune up specific areas of the job.
To boost happiness and learning, Jordan can stop looking to the task—creating budgets—and can find happiness and learning in how the task gets done. Perhaps there’s a new tool, website, or software package that would be fun to use, providing a chance to travel up a learning curve. Or maybe Jordan can budget by interviewing managers in person and preparing budgets. It will save the managers time, give Jordan more people contact, and provide a deeper glimpse into how the company works.
To boost reward, Jordan can concentrate on what the division’s success will mean personally. Good budgets will help lead to success, and then to promotions and bonuses. Those will be so impressive, Jordan will be voted Mayor in an unprecedented write-in campaign, then Governor, and ultimately will become the first world-wide Czar of an integrated world government.
How to Find Meaning to Boost Your Mojo
Meaning and gratitude are simply an attitude (hey, that rhymes!). Meaning can be found by thinking of the ultimate benefit the company will bring people. If the company makes financial software, maybe meaning comes from knowing you’re helping businesses succeed. If it makes tricycles, meaning comes from helping a generation of kids learn to ride. If it mummifies pets, the meaning is in keeping love alive for a lifetime.
You can also connect gratitude to something higher than the single activity. If you work for a non-profit, you may be grateful for the chance to work around passionate people on an important mission. If you work for an insurance company, you may be grateful you’re giving people piece of mind. If you work for an oil company, er, well, you get the idea.
The Mojo Bottom Line
If you’ve lost your mojo, get it back by using a mojo log. Rate every activity for happiness and meaning. Or if you want to be really hardcore, rate them along all the mojo dimensions. Then when you find exactly which activities are driving your mojo down, fix them, eliminate them, or delegate them to regain your mojo.
Marshall Goldsmith goes into more detail about mojo in an interview with me.
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Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
Resources:
mojo the book – The web site
Marshall Goldsmith – The interview with Marshall Goldsmith
about mojo book– Download the Mojo tracking sheet and resources.
Happy Employee image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
