The Steadfast Heart

motivation | ˌmōdəˈvāSH(ə)n | 

noun: the reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way: escape can be a strong motivation for travel. 

• the general desire or willingness of someone to do something: keep staff up to date and maintain interest and motivation.

New Oxford American Dictionary (American English)

Have you ever had someone ask you a question about yourself that you just didn’t seem to have an answer for? For the last year, I have developed a fascination for studying my own motives and the motivations of others. I’m always interested to learn what makes someone else tick, hoping to find explanations for why people are the way that they are. And maybe in a subconscious way, I look for clues about myself in the behaviors of other people. Sometimes in observing someone else, I can confirm or deny my own rationale for doing, thinking, and especially feeling things.

But I’ve only gotten so far with finding out who I really am below the surface with this approach. Shockingly, it has become way more challenging to come up with answers when I ask this question:

What is my why?

To take it one step further, the question I’ve been focusing on is, “What is my primary motivation in my work?” Before becoming a mom last April, I held a leadership position at a franchised fast-food restaurant. Due to the nature of the growing business, I wore many hats between the operations, restaurant marketing, human resources and administration, while serving as an assistant to the franchise owner. Out of all of my responsibilities, this role was what I was most proud of and where I kept most of my esteem.

If you’ve ever worked in food service, you’ll know that the business operates on food quality and guest satisfaction. Those two components seem straightforward until you add maintaining job fulfillment for the 100 employees who drive the business — who all come with diverse and sometimes undeclared motivations.

After staying home with Griffin, I transferred what job responsibilities I could into my new circumstances, but the basic human interaction I relied on so heavily began to shift. It’s not a surprising discovery, but somehow it shocked me at the time. Sales continued to aggressively climb into the summer and the effect of that particular cause was that the store got busier and turnover ran its course. As the hiring door kept revolving, my proximity to my co-workers dissipated. My boss, who I had worked closely with for two years was forced to focus on developing new leaders, anticipating business changes, and the growth of his second location.

Gradually, no one had unlimited time to spend on the phone with me to talk about the weather or laugh at my quotes from The Office. For someone who never likes conversations to end, I suddenly had to work on getting straight to what I needed to either ask or communicate in order to get the job done. My job became a virtual reality and I really failed at not taking things personally when my emails didn’t get returned. Abruptly, I no longer had a grip on what motivated my team and I absolutely had no idea what motivated me. Can I just tell you what naturally began to subtract from the work equation here?

Common ground.

And also a little bit of my rational mind.

The thing that saved me in the transition of becoming a mom and working from home was walking. I spent miles of pavement wrestling over who I mattered to and what responsibilities I could take on so that I could feel appreciated. I practically burned holes in my shoes as I brainstormed ways I could contribute to the business so that I wouldn’t be forgotten from home. What that produced was an insane amount of expectations that depended on everyone but myself.

• The expectation I set on my newborn baby to behave and stay quiet so that I could make it through my list of phone calls was the opposite of nurturing.

• The expectation that I placed on my husband to listen to what did or didn’t happen that really upset me about my work day drained both of us.

• The expectation I subconsciously placed on my boss to relay every decision in immense detail to me so that we could consult together before anything went into implementation was not just unrealistic, but truly theatrical.

The tragic reality of my expectations was that I believed with the utmost conviction that the world owed me all of the attention, the appreciation, and the affirmation for my efforts to be Superwoman. I ignored all of the small print underlined in my thoughts that I was motivated way more by what I gained and not what I could give.

Do you know what unraveled in the wake of my indisputable mindset?

• My son cried hours out of the day and I couldn’t even accomplish the simple tasks I used to do with my eyes shut.
  • Result: I felt like a failure at motherhood.

• My husband took a beating from my constant negativity and disappointment in unrealistic expectations of him.
  • Result: My problems understandably so fell on deaf ears and the idea that I could do everything on my own began to take root.

• My co-workers received promotions.
  • Result: I couldn’t be happy for them.

The business was succeeding, but I could only focus on what was failing for me. What wasn’t happening for me was receiving attention, appreciation, and affirmation in the exact way I had envisioned it being bestowed on me. My biggest drive was to prove how distinctive my work could be, how special my contributions to the world were, how no one else understood all that I did and all that I was, and just how unmatched and irreplaceable I was in the company.

I was so motivated by how other people could make me feel that I could be crushed by an email response, by my feedback not swaying a decision, or by an unanswered phone call in an instant. My productivity in both my work and my home life suffered, culminating into my newly developed skill of producing excuses in bulk for my behavior as if they came from a factory.

I couldn’t escape the question, “What’s my why?” anymore. My why stunk and I knew that I couldn’t go on living with my toxic motivations and expect to experience any happiness. It was never going to be enough. So I started praying that Jesus would help me to know his grace and his truth in his fullness. I began praying for a steadfast heart that produced sustainable joy. I am no overnight success story, not by a long shot. I will forever be a W.I.P. (that’s a work-in-progress).

Somewhere between a leadership podcast and my coffee kicking in one morning, the reminder hit me like a load of bricks that the most significant thing I can ever do in this life is what I do for other people. Dots started connecting one after the other after reading through Jesus’s parable of the talents (see Matthew 21, Luke 19). What struck me was that I don’t want to live a life wasting my work because I’m waiting for what I think I deserve first.

I don’t want to waste my job opportunity because I fear I don’t add enough value. I don’t want to get to the end of my life or this season and realize I had withheld my contributions or gifts from my company. And I really don’t want to see my work as anything less than a platform for the kingdom of God. The role I had in my mind for myself is not the role I’m in right now, which I believe with my entire heart is to learn how to be the supporting cast in a story that is much bigger than me.

It’s about time for me to own my role.

• And owning my role means I’m not going to feel sorry for myself.
• Owning my role means that I’m not going to focus on what I do or do not make, especially in comparison to someone else.
• Owning my role means I will not call out other people’s failures. It means I will seize every opportunity to help and assist others by offering my time and abilities.
• Owning my own oasis of excellence as Clay Scroggins writes means I’m not waiting around for someone to recognize what I’m doing, it means I am proactively seeking ways I can empower and encourage others.
• Owning my responsibilities means that the excuses for why something isn’t completed will never get blamed on someone other than myself.
• Taking ownership means that I will find joy in the success of others. That I will learn to celebrate and emotionally invest my very best in company wins, even if I am not part of the benefits they reap.
• Owning the moment, as Carl Lentz would say, means I will say no to my own reactionary responses and I will lean into both the grace and truth that Jesus wants to take over my mindset.

It’d be a pretty amazing story if I told you that I didn’t struggle with my strong feelings and my own significance. I would love to blow your socks off by telling you that after writing this, I’ll never wrestle with wanting to give my very best to my work ever again. Wish I could say I’ll never feel sorry for myself when people disappoint me or that I don’t hope for a bigger leadership position or a larger paycheck. I think I’ll always have to choose between pressing into the now and the not yet.

But I am coming to slowly understand that when I own my role and see it the way God sees it, my motivation changes. My why becomes because I want to produce quality work so that people may know that they are supported, encouraged, and loved for who they are, not what they do. My why becomes wanting to help others feel acknowledged, appreciated, and affirmed because when we all apply ourselves to our work, the whole organization wins.

Can I just say that I am so grateful that Jesus is showing me how to live out of a steadfast heart? I am profoundly aware at how much I need a road map for life. I am praying every day that God will expose my motives and remind me of my why, even as I doubt the importance of my work. The funny thing is that as I’ve been practicing owning my role of being on the support team, the same amount of my emails go unanswered, I am not clued in to every decision that gets made, and more co-workers are receiving raises and promotions. What’s changing is me–and I am finding more of myself and my purpose in what I can give rather than what more I can gain.

Take care & take heart,
Natalie