What Motivates You?

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Time for a bit of motivation Monday.

It can be hard, to stay motivated and find a drive to carry on sometimes. Maybe you’re testing a product that you don’t feel engaged with. Maybe you just feel like you’ve fallen out of your testing groove.

How do you stay motivated?

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For the managers who are looking to keep testers motivated, I offer this:

From the article, you can find a partial version of my personal list (even though I didn’t write it…

  • Do I have a purpose?
  • Am I training, learning constantly?
  • Are my own leaders people I look up to?
  • Is someone paying attention to me?
  • Do I have exciting challenges?
  • Do I have a clear path?
  • Is the company growing with me?
  • Who believes in me?
  • Do I have the courage to face difficult situations and tough conversations?

When I was motivated, but am losing my groove, it could be for a lot of reasons…
Most often, it’s because I don’t feel like I have a clear path to a particular goal. That is, my goals are not well defined at that moment. It’s those moments that I can do one of two things. First, I can reflect on my own what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, and how this could help me with a particular goal or deadline. For example, “If I finish this task, the testing story will be good enough to present something worthwhile to the team.” If that doesn’t help, then I would lay out the trouble to someone I trust. If that someone is a leader in the team, then maybe they could help clarify my purpose in that task at that time. (Note: the trust-figure isn’t always a team leader. If it’s not, then there are more serious problems in the future)

Sometimes, it may help to focus on a useful task which isn’t the one I’m losing my groove on, then I can come back later with a frest perspective. But this may also be a problem, especially if it happens a lot… then I could lose too much time to focus-shifting.

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