DESIGNING YOUR (MOTIVATION) LIFE “What do you want to be when you grow up? What’s your number one passion? If you could do anything in the world, what would you do?”
“What do you want to be when you grow up? What’s your number one passion? If you could do anything in the world, what would you do?”
I cannot help but cringe and have a Homer Simpson “doh!” reaction when I overhear parents and professors ask students these pigeon-holey questions. Heck, at the age of 32, I’m still figuring out what I want to do! If only the clouds would open up and a beam of light would shine down and say, “Brie – you were meant to be a dolphin trainer” (my 11-year-old dream job). On the verge of burnout at 29 from a highly demanding, and overly cutthroat job in the big-wig corporate world, I decided to quit and apply for graduate school in hopes of connecting to the big purpose and passion questions. As I was figuring out my own journey back in 2019, I came across Bill Evans and Dave Burnett’s book Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life (DYL). After taking part in the exercises and gobbling the book up within two sittings, I found myself blown away by the aha and insight gained and immediately thought, “Where was this when I was 18?” I then set out on a mission to bring this work to my campus Career Center since there were only a few very basic resources to help students with major exploration.
Using DYL to help redesign our coaching appointment curriculum, our Center piloted this work with freshmen deciding students in the summer of 2019. While students found the activities helpful, they had expressed something was still missing when it came to figuring out who they are, how they show up in the world, and why. We had been using a variety of assessment tools, yet students would express conflict and/or continued confusion around the results as it misleadingly miscategorized them into four letters, an animal, a color, or a number – (I always considered myself more of a pink unicorn than a blue bear!). One student shared, “I really enjoyed the DYL exercises. However, I feel like I could have benefited from them even more if I had a foundation about myself to pull from – like, why I am the way I am and getting to the root (core) or what makes me tick.” Many of my students still struggled with being placed in a box that wasn’t unique to them, and even if they did have a better understanding of their interests, strengths, and personality, they still weren’t grasping why they show in the world the way they do. “I like so many things and do so many things,” one student shared. “It’s confusing to know the thread that ties them all together.”
And then came TruMotivate, an assessment that helps individuals discover their top motivations using their own stories. I was introduced to the concept back in fall 2020 after posting a callout for career center assessments on a NACE discussion board. Intrigued by the use of story as a way to tap into my motivational flow, I began using it as a supportive tool to complement students’ DYL journey. While many of the DYL activities intersect beautifully with TruMotivate, there are a few I’d like to highlight that amplify students’ experiences.
A concept DYL spotlights is finding one’s way by focusing on activities that generate engagement, create flow, and establish excitement. Seeing as TruMotivate taps into an individual’s unique motivations, I thought it could be beneficial for students to create three separate mind maps centered around their top three motivations. From there, students continued through the traditional DYL Napkin Sketch activity and walked away from the activity with prototypes, projects, internships, and volunteer ideas tailored to and born out of their motivations.
Another key idea taught by DYL, the Energy Engagement Timeline, has individuals chart the activities they participated in throughout the day and in the order they happened while noting the energy or drain each caused. I took this opportunity to have students zoom in on their energizing activities and reflect on what motivations were present that created the energy spike. This generated a deeper understanding of which aspect of these activities gave them a sense of fulfillment.
Simultaneously, students also looked at those activities that drained their energy to see if they could lean in on any of their top motivations to readjust how the activity was experienced by them.
For example, I had a student that felt drained by their role at work, commenting that they felt very isolated from their team members. As one of their top motivations was “Collaborate,” this student realized that they weren’t doing it much in the new job.
This led to an aha moment about how they may be able to seek out roles within settings where this motivation was engaged. They ended up joining a club on campus that allowed them to be an active team member where they could contribute to the group.
Because it’s been beneficial in connecting the dots and providing the puzzle pieces to life’s big question, the whole “what’s my purpose” thing, I continue to use TruMotivate in my exploration appointments and with student employees as a development tool.
Going forward, we plan to implement TruMotivate into our first-year seminar courses as a helpful starting point for freshmen students.
By Brie Escobedo
Brie works as a Career Exploration Coach for the University of Colorado – Colorado Springs, where she dedicates her time to assisting students to find belonging and value in their major while helping them develop their own careers. Trained and certified by Stanford University as a Life Design Coach, Brie uses design thinking to resource tools that help students move from feeling stuck to feeling in flow around reaching personal, academic, and professional milestones. She is also a certified TruMotivate facilitator and integrates an individual’s own experiences, own stories, and their motivations into the Design Thinking process.
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