** Motivation is a matter of the heart.** If you want your employees or students to be engaged with their work energetically, enthusiastically, and creatively, you must learn to engage their hearts and feelings.

**If your job feels like hard work to you, naturally it’s a sign that your heart isn’t in it. **But the answer is not in stopping it altogether, it’s possible that your heart is seeking emotional healing and a deeper reconnection with purpose.

**Work doesn’t have to be hard. ** When you’re feeling great about what you’re doing, you’re capable of persistent effort and extraordinary feats with ease. But if resentment creeps in, the same task becomes burdensome.

**Unfortunately, our educational system and parenting practices kill curiosity and transform learning into drudgery. **Children are forced into an educational context in which studying is a necessity for survival and success. These fear-driven reasons drain the joy out of learning. The mentality of when you’ve made it, you can rest hardly inspires anyone to persist with great enthusiasm or creativity. The same pattern is repeated in the workplace. People spend their lives working hard to build reserves that they can spend during vacation or after retirement.

**You may be able to force yourself to work on something you don’t like for a while, it’s unlikely to be sustainable. **The 'ego depletion' research and subsequent work suggest that willpower is an exhausting resource if your resentment brings you to that emotional mindset.

Willpower works like emotion, and we need to listen to our willpower just as we should listen to our emotions — as a source of insight.

In his Harvard Business Review article Nir Eyal, the former Stanford lecturer and author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, argues that our feelings are our body’s way of conveying information that our conscious minds might miss. He writes -

“Our flagging energies and wandering minds are trying to tell us something. We can power through tasks that we don’t enjoy for a while, but we’ll never be our best if we ignore what our feelings are telling us.”

Rewards and punishment don’t work well if the goal is to nurture enthusiasm and creativity in learning or work. In his remarkable book Why We Do We Do, psychologist, Edward Deci writes that-

“Rewards and punishments may get students to do what we want them to do, but they also undermine students’ intrinsic motivation.”

Motivation is a matter of the heart

If you want your students or employees to be engaged with their work energetically, enthusiastically, and creatively, you must learn to engage their hearts and feelings. Examine what is turning them off emotionally and weed it out of your culture. Bring back love, genuine care, and curiosity, and develop a culture in which human connections and self-expression are nurtured. Otherwise, you’ll have their time, but not their hearts.

If you’re an employee or a student and want to enjoy and do persistently well at your work or studies, discover a higher purpose for them and connect with it emotionally. Consider a cause bigger than serving your own ambitions, one that can give meaning and purpose to your work.

• Whose well-being can you bring yourself to be concerned about?
• Whose lives do you want to make better?

It’s okay if you can’t bring yourself to be concerned about the entire society. Start by developing a deep concern and commitment for your family or even for yourself. If you want to be happy yourself so that you can share your ease with others, that can be a meaningful purpose as well, provided you connect with it soulfully.