Episode: 583

Episode Title: The Light is the Why

The Light at the End of the Tunnel is the secret to motivating young people with their why rather than ours. More on that, next on The Perna Syndicate.

Ep 583 show:

You’re now in The Perna Syndicate—thanks for dropping by! Young people ask why a lot, and if we’re doing our job, we try to give them a real answer. And that’s good; we need to be doing that. 

But we also need to level up and not just give them our answers for why they need to do what we’re telling them to do. We need to help them find their own “why” for what they’re doing. 

I call this concept the Light at the End of the Tunnel and I touch on it often in my keynotes. The Light is the reward, the goal, the reason that a person would keep moving forward. The Tunnel represents the labor and effort and challenges they have to overcome in order to reach the Light. 

The Light is different for each person. What would motivate me to move through the Tunnel is probably different from what would drive you. It’s the same with our children, students, and younger coworkers. They are all motivated by different things. 

The secret of unlocking intrinsic, self-starting motivation in each young person is to help them find their why, their Light, the thing they desperately want that they can have—IF they will keep stepping through the Tunnel until they reach it. 

This takes intentional conversations, a commitment of not judging, and a level of trust for them to explore their why with you. And it’s all worth it. The Light is the why—and we can help them see it.

Tomorrow: how many young people are basing their future on hope alone? On the next episode of The Perna Syndicate, we’ll talk about why that rarely works and what they can do instead. See you then!