Mel Robbins on creating motivation out of anxiety

Do you know what motivates your medical practice staff? For that matter, do you know what motivates you?

Performance management has been a hot topic across numerous industries in recent years, in no small part due to the issues with it, according to Gallup’s Re-Engineering Performance Management report:

• Only 2 in 10 workers strongly agree that their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work.
• About 30% of employees “strongly agree that their manager involves them in goal setting.” Those employees are 3.6 times “more likely than other employees to be engaged.”

Author, attorney and CNN commentator Mel Robbins — who will speak at a general session at MGMA18 | The Annual Conference in Boston — offered some tips about confronting anxiety and hesitance to find motivation to improve your work life during an appearance on the Lifehacker podcast, The Upgrade.

Here are some of the key takeaways from her talk:

Trick your brain

It’s nothing nefarious. As Robbins explains, her “5-second rule” is very simple: It’s about the moment you’re in a situation where you know what you should do “but you start to hesitate, or excuses start to fill your mind.”

In that moment, Robbins recommends counting backwards — “5, 4, 3, 2, 1” — as a form of metacognition, “a fancy word for brain trick,” to interrupt the patterns that get encoded in your brain’s basal ganglia to draw focus back to your prefrontal cortex, which is often described as the brain’s center for executive functions. In that timeframe, you can arrive at a decision and “beat self-doubt” before it sets in.

Be excited, not anxious

Robbins rose to prominence as a motivational author and speaker after her speech about career change at a San Francisco TEDx event, which she described as a “21-minute panic attack.”

At the time, she did not have the benefit of A.W. Brooks’ Harvard Business School study from 2014, which offers a simple solution to dealing with feeling anxious in the workplace or elsewhere: Reappraise that anxiety as excitement.

“When you say you’re excited, it actually stabilizes your body,” Robbins says. “Even in situations where you’re nervous, if you say you’re excited, by blocking the flow of cortisol to your prefrontal cortex,” you can remain focused on what you’re about to do, “even though your body’s agitated.”

Spot your patterns that don’t work

Robbins acknowledges that she is not a therapist and takes a different approach to talking to people about their behavior: “Most therapists don’t actually tell you what to do; it’s a dialogue that is designed to get you to talk about things,” Robbins says. “That’s not me — I’m solutions-oriented.”

Those solutions often are based on her theory about how we behave as human beings: Strategies we develop as children to handle family life, school and other scenarios become habits throughout life. “What most adults are struggling with [are] habits that they developed when they were kids that they never actually changed and didn’t realize were still coming to the surface as adults.

“And when you start to look at the patterns that people repeat, whether it’s needing to be the center of attention, or quitting on life, or feeling like an impostor or being silent, you can see it everywhere,” Robbins says. Starting with those habits is a key way to revise your behavior and motive you toward better outcomes.