Are we there yet?
The other weekend, I was driving to Fresno. I had told my son that he could play the batman video game once we reach Fresno. I noticed that my son kept asking me at regular intervals, ” Are we there yet”?
At first when I heard the question, I was not sure as to why my son was asking the question at repeated intervals of time. However; when I reached Fresno, I realized that my son was asking the question as a part of his own validation mechanism and as a checkpoint as he knew that once we reached Fresno, my son could play the video game that had his favorite character Batman.
My son was motivated to play the game and because he could not play the game while I was driving, he wanted to reinforce that he is on track to play the game that he was promised earlier and the only way to ensure that the time was right was to check the time and verify with me.
The YALM for me was to learn from the real life situation and perhaps apply to my other roles in both personal and professional life.
We know that we can relish a reward (such as playing a batman video game) once we reach a milestone (such as reaching our destination Fresno), we adhere to the disciplinary rules ( like respecting parents in the car), and we may end up validating our reward with the authorities once we reach our destination as per the original plan.
The same principle applies to kids and adults and we may apply a similar principle but we may not notice the principle until a later point in time, and the only difference may be the motivating factor as our factor may be totally different than the Batman Video Game.
The question that remains is ” Do we know what motivates us and what rewards do we expect once we reach a milestone?”
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