The Little But Significant Differences Between Inspiration And Motivation
Inspiration and motivation are always being used interchangeably but there are really little but very significant differences between them.
Inspiration deals with being able to get yourself into a position where you are willing to get to the best of your potentials in life. It can be through the life that a particular person led which will serve as a source of inspiration to you or it can even be an inward urge to get yourself up and strive for the best in life. Examples of such inspirational people include Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Mahatma Gandhi, Al Gore, Oprah Winfrey, and Nelson Mandela among many others. These people were able to inspire a lot of people to always strive for the best that they can be.
Motivation, on the other hand, deals with the feeling of joy or excitement to the extent that a person is ready and willing to undertake an activity and ensure that it is performed to satisfaction. This is something that has always been associated with leadership roles as they are seen as being able to get people to put in their best. An example can be made of those times when things are really not going according to plan in a game of football and a player gets up to make a very resounding speech that gets each and every individual in the room fired up and ready to put in all that they have within in order to walk away with the chests out and their heads raised high. This is what motivation is really about – being spurred into performing an activity by giving in your best. Such speeches have also been made by people like Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Mahatma Gandhi, Desmond Tutu, Martin Luther King Jnr, and others.
Although to inspire and to motivate are most at times used interchangeably, they are not that similar. The following paragraph will throw more light on how different they each are even though most people see them be about the same thing:
Motivation requires the performance of action whilst inspiration does not necessarily require an action to be performed: Motivation influences an individual to get into a good mood in order to perform an action and be actively and fully committed to whatever activity that he or she is performing. This means that to be motivated means you are in the mood to put in your ‘all’ in a particular activity or you can get people to put in their best through a speech that you will make. This makes the motivation to be centered or geared towards the performance of an activity. However, to be inspired requires something that is totally different from what motivation seeks to achieve. It deals with those moments when an individual does not have anybody who will make a motivational speech in order to get him or her fired up to tackle life and all that it entails. This is when inspiration comes in as it is only through being inspired by how some people were able to do it even with resources nowhere near what you have that gets you into the mood to forge your way through thick and thin. Inspiration is therefore what gets you going during those moments when you are all alone and you really need to push yourself to reach your target whilst motivation is when you are already fired up and willing to perform whatever activity you are expected to.
Motivation always comes after inspiration: This simply means that for an individual to be motivated, he or she must first be inspired. It is only after getting inspired that an individual will be willing to put in his or her maximum best in whatever task he or she is asked to perform. Motivation, therefore, feeds off from the inspiration that an individual already has in order for a particular target or goal to be achieved. It is therefore very right to say that inspiration is the foundation on which motivation is built. Any individual who is inspired automatically becomes motivated but a motivated person can never be said to be motivated.
Inspiration sustains motivation: Inspiration is inner energy that an individual utilizes when all hope seems to be lost whilst motivation is the result of pulling out that inner energy. To be able to look deep into oneself in order to forge your way ahead is what it means to be inspired and the benefits of being inspired are getting into that mood of being ready to give everything that you have in order to succeed at what you are going to do. The inspirational energy from within an individual is what sustains the fire of motivation.
To get to this point means that you are now equipped with all the little but significant differences between inspiration and motivation.
About the Author
Dr. Jeff Evans
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