The four drivers of motivation: understanding why the drive fades

The alarm goes off, you know what you have to do, and nothing moves. It isn't laziness: you used to be motivated, sometimes deeply committed, and something has gone out. The four drivers of motivation I'm going to describe help you understand what happened and, above all, where to start again.

I'm a coach and sophrologist in Bordeaux. Before that I worked for years in start-ups, with an energy that seemed endless, until I burned out. I learnt the hard way that you can be highly motivated and still exhaust yourself, and that losing your drive isn't always a question of willpower.

Here I suggest we look at the four drivers of motivation (autonomy, competence, connection and meaning), do a quick check-up to spot the one you're missing, and then see when a drop in motivation should send you to a doctor rather than a coach.

Why you can't order yourself to be motivated

People often talk about motivation as a tank you just need to fill with willpower. In sessions I see the opposite: the people I work with who have lost their drive are rarely people without willpower. They're often the most conscientious, the ones who kept pushing long after the drive had dried up.

The psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci offered another way of looking at it with self-determination theory. According to them, we have three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness. When they're met, motivation and psychological wellbeing grow stronger. When they're thwarted, motivation falls, however good your intentions were at the start.

The theory also distinguishes two kinds of motivation. Intrinsic motivation means doing something because it interests you. Extrinsic motivation means doing it for a reward or to avoid a penalty. Everyone has both, and a meta-analysis of 183 studies involving more than 212,000 people shows they aren't opposed: interest in the task mainly predicts the quality of the work, incentives mainly its quantity.

To these three needs, in my practice, I add a fourth driver: meaning.

Autonomy: having a say in your work

Autonomy doesn't mean doing whatever you like. It means feeling that you choose, at least partly, how you do things: the order of tasks, the method, the pace. Even in a very constrained setting, that small margin matters enormously.

The INRS, France's occupational health and safety institute, lists lack of autonomy among the psychosocial risk factors at work: little room for manoeuvre, no say in decisions that affect you, few chances to use and develop your skills.

Signs it's missing

• You feel you carry out orders and never decide anything.
• Every step has to be approved, even the smallest.
• Your diary is filled by other people.

What helps

Spot what is still in your hands, even if it's not much: the order you deal with your files, when you read your emails, how you prepare for a meeting. Taking back those choices deliberately, rather than letting them happen to you, often changes more than you'd expect. And if there's truly no room at all, that's something to raise with your manager, with facts to back it up.

Competence: feeling that you're making progress

The second need is to feel capable. Not necessarily the best, but effective at what you do and still improving. Motivation collapses in two opposite situations: when tasks have been too easy and repetitive for too long, and when they're too difficult, with no training or support.

Signs it's missing

• You're bored and could do your job with your eyes closed.
• Or, on the contrary, you're constantly out of your depth, never with time to learn.
• You get no feedback on what you do well.

A lack of feeling competent often feeds another unease I come across a lot: the impression that you don't belong, which I describe in my article on feeling like an impostor.

What helps

Set yourself a learning goal, separate from your results targets: mastering a tool, running a meeting in a certain way, daring to speak up. At the end of each week, write down one thing you can do better than at the start of the month. It sounds modest. It's exactly what your brain needs to see to get its momentum back.

Connection: not working alone

The third need is to feel connected: to belong to a group, to matter to someone, to be able to ask for help. Remote working, scattered teams or a tense atmosphere have put this under real strain for many of the people I see.

Signs it's missing

• You only talk to colleagues about practical matters.
• There's nobody you can say "I can't manage" to.
• Your successes go unnoticed; nobody spots them or shares them.

On that last point, the INRS also lists lack of recognition among the risk factors.

What helps

Rebuilding connection doesn't take an away day. A coffee offered to a colleague, a question for someone whose work you admire, positive feedback you give a peer yourself. Connection works both ways, and it's often by recognising other people's work that you start being seen again.

Meaning: knowing what your work is for

The fourth driver isn't one of Ryan and Deci's three needs, but I find it in almost every coaching session about motivation. It's the question "what's the point?". When you can no longer see the use of what you do, or have to do things that go against your values, the drive disappears very quickly.

The INRS describes these situations as conflicts of values: doing work you consider pointless, having to defend a method you know doesn't work, not being able to do work you could be proud of.

What helps

Start by writing, in one sentence, who your work is for. Not the company in general: a real person, a client, a colleague, a service user. Then list what in your week brings you closer to that and what takes you further away. Sometimes the meaning is still there, just buried under admin. Sometimes it has genuinely gone, and the question becomes one of a deeper change, of role or of career.

A four-question check-up

Here's a short check-up I often use at the start of coaching. Take a sheet of paper and give yourself a score from 0 to 10 for each question.

1. Do I have some choice in how I do my work?
2. Do I feel capable, and am I still learning?
3. Is there at least one person at work I can talk to honestly?
4. Do I know who my work is for, and does that feel right to me?

Look at the lowest score. It's rarely where you expected. Someone who thought they lacked meaning discovers that what they really lack is connection, since they started working alone at home. Someone else who thought they were unmotivated realises they've had no autonomy since a new manager arrived.

Then choose one action, a small one, to raise that score by one point over the coming month. Not four projects at once: just one.

An exercise to get the body moving again

Motivation isn't only in your head. When the drive is missing, the body is often slumped and the breathing shallow. In the morning, before you open your computer, stand up with your feet hip-width apart. Breathe in as you slowly raise your arms above your head, hold for two seconds, then breathe out as you let them come down. Three times. Next, think of the first task of the day and imagine yourself finishing it: where you'll be, how you'll feel. It's a very short sophrology exercise that helps you move from intention to action.

When a lack of motivation hides something else

A passing dip in motivation is part of life. But sometimes it isn't really about motivation any more.

If the drive has gone in every area of life, not just at work, if you no longer enjoy what you used to love, if you're sleeping badly or exhausted from the moment you wake up, take it seriously. The World Health Organization points out that depression is different from ordinary changes in mood: it involves a low mood or loss of pleasure or interest in activities for long periods of time. In that case, your doctor is the first person to see.

In the same way, losing your drive after months of over-commitment can be a sign of burnout, and of what may be going wrong in how the work is organised, which I discuss in my article on distress at work. Coaching does not replace medical advice: it comes after it, or alongside it, never instead.

Getting your drive back with support

When it really is about motivation, working it through with someone else often makes things clearer. In life coaching, we start from your check-up, identify the driver that's missing and build concrete actions between sessions. If your body is tense or your sleep disrupted, I add sophrology exercises.

I see people at my practice on rue Ducau for life coaching in Bordeaux, or remotely through online life coaching. You can read about my background on the about page.