Preface

Mapping Motivation for Coaching is a practical guide to understanding how personal and career development is underpinned by motivation, and how coaching and Motivational Mapping (“Mapping”) are perfectly complementary activities. Also, this work is cumulative: it builds on the foundation of Mapping Motivation,¹ the primary source book published by Gower in 2016. But it is also a standalone, and one need not have read the previous book in order to derive enormous benefit from this one. Those readers, however, who have the Expert motivator in their top three profile will almost certainly want to study the former publication after they complete this volume, if only to deepen their understanding further!

But having referred to the “Expert” motivator in their top three profile, we are immediately guilty of using the jargon – the lingo – of Motivational Maps before having explained it in an ordered sequence. So, each book in the new Complete Guide to Mapping Motivation series will contain a brief introductory and summary chapter explaining the basics of Motivational Maps; this will be distilled from Mapping Motivation. This overview of the Motivational Maps’ structure and meaning should enable any coach to be able to understand pretty quickly what this is all about.

It is also important to say at this point – given the limitations of space in this (or any) book – that we are not attempting to cover how to be a coach in its entirety. There are other books on the market that do that, and we refer to some of them in our text, and there is more follow-through information at the end. No, the key to understanding what this book is fundamentally about is this: if you currently are a coach, or if you are a manager who actively coaches others within your organisation, or even if you are a manager with wide experience of using coaches and maybe seeking to change career and become a coach yourself, then this book is for you; it is also for the reader who may not be a professional coach but wishes to self-coach and embark on some career or personal development. For all of you this book is a goldmine of information and techniques, any one of which might prove transformational. And underpinning it all is the Motivational Map, which we give full access to in note 12 of the Introduction – you may wish to go there immediately in order to activate your personal Motivational Map as a prelude to reading this book. Certainly, the contents will make even more sense to you if you do.

This leads on to one final point in this Preface: namely, that this book has not been written in a sequential way, but rather topologically; it is entirely possible to dip in and out of it as one’s interests dictate. There are powerful ideas to be found here, as well as transformative techniques and tools to be deployed; some can be used in a standalone kind of way, others require Motivational Map technology. But we are not prescriptive; on the contrary, pragmatism rules – will it work for you? If so, use it. At the end of the day we all need to understand that management and psychological models are not reality²: they are a map of reality, and all maps suffer from the deficiency of being incomplete to a greater or lesser extent. As it happens, Motivational Maps, as a model, is extremely accurate,³ and the results it produces at the individual level have been nothing short of astonishing and revelatory to the individuals concerned. We hope that you, too, will enjoy a similar sense of astonishment and revelation as you read through this work – and ultimately will want to become more involved.