Motivation: If I don’t yell, how will anything get done?

Yes, we can motivate people by yelling at them. (How else would we explain the existence of Little League?) It does motivate people to do something, but it may not be their best. It may motivate them to hide. It may motivate them to do what it takes to get us to stop yelling. If our goal is to help cultivate a lasting and positive change in someone, we don’t want to start with showing them that we are out of control ourselves. Remember that no matter what the words are that come out, the message of yelling is, “Please, someone calm me down because I can’t calm myself down.”

You may be expecting me to go on to talk about parenting or marriage or coaching or employee management, since all of us have seen yelling involved in those contexts. But I’m thinking about a quiet form of yelling. It’s so quiet that no one can hear it but you. I’m talking about that little dialogue each of us have inside our head, where we keep a running commentary on our performance. We can even yell from time to time, right? Silently, of course. There may be a facial expression that goes along with it. Someone may see that if they happen to be watching us closely. They can’t hear the yelling. But, we can.

Every time you yell at yourself, you hear it. I suspect that if we hooked up equipment to measure our physiological response, we would see a response similar to what we have when someone else yells at us.

But, hey! We deserve it, right? We need to get in gear and get going. Do better! Work faster! Be smarter! Stop making mistakes! Sure we need to do those things. But we might be able to do them without being yelled at. In fact, we may have a better chance at doing them if we aren’t yelled at.

Yes, we do things wrong. We should even cry out to God for forgiveness for the things we do or the things we leave undone. But, let’s not confuse yelling with reminding, encouraging, promising, repenting… motivating. We really can do all of those things without yelling at ourselves.

Sometimes we need to be able to work without the noise of the crowd, or coach, or ref, or judge. It’s okay if our head is a nice quiet neighborhood to be in. It doesn’t mean that we will just fall asleep on the couch with a bag of potato chips. We actually do that potato chip thing to avoid the yelling.

If you don’t believe me, try it.

Quiet that critical voice inside your head for a while and see if you end up more productive or asleep with the bag of potato chips.

If it doesn’t work you can always go back to yelling.

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Dr. David Hamilton is a clinical psychologist at the Christian Counseling Center of West Michigan