What Keeps You From Feeling Motivated and How to Overcome It as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

What’s keeps you from feeling truly motivated in your humanitarian and/or international development work?

In today's episode, we tackle a common struggle: the disconnect that can arise when day-to-day tasks overshadow your purpose.

Many humanitarian and international development leaders find themselves overwhelmed, losing sight of the impact you originally set out to make. This episode speaks directly to that feeling, offering insights on how to reignite your motivation by refocusing on your team’s development and the meaningful differences you can create in their lives.

Listen in to discover how prioritizing your team’s growth can not only enhance your leadership skills but also bring a renewed sense of purpose to your work. You’ll learn how to shift your focus from operational tasks to nurturing relationships, leading to profound impacts both within your team and the wider community.

Don't miss this opportunity to transform your approach—hit play now and start making a lasting difference!

WHAT IS YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE? QUIZ

Want to know how to lead better?  It starts by understanding your leadership style.   To find out yours, take my free quiz “What Is Your Leadership Style” - you’ll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.  Just click on the link fill out your quiz and click submit.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

What keeps you from feeling motivated and inspired and what to do about it in today's quick quote episode.

Welcome to The Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader podcast, the podcast, helping humanitarian and development supervisors make a greater impact by taking control of your time, leading more inclusively and empowering your team all the while avoiding stress, burnout, and overwhelm. I'm your host, leadership coach and former aid worker, Torrey Peace.

Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hello, my aspiring modern humanitarian and development leader. I hope you're having a great week. And today, our quick quote is by Michelle Obama, the former first lady of the president of the United States. Barack Obama. And the quote is: "success isn't about the money you make. It's about the difference you make in people's lives."

And I think that when we feel demotivated or uninspired in our work, or we feel disconnected from when we originally became involved in humanitarian and development work. I think that this is one reason why, and maybe not having even to do with money. But more about just getting caught up in all the day-to-day busy-ness and our day to day work. And losing focus on what's really important to us. And I think for most of you, you want to make an impact.

That's also why you're listening to this podcast. And I've spoke about this before, but I think it's worth reminding you that the greatest impact that you will make in humanitarian and international development work is on those you work with. And what I mean by that is your team. The people you influence the most, the people you work with the most are your team members.

The ones that you can really have a tremendous impact on. And that should be our focus, which is why. On Monday we talked about the importance of developing our team and making it as kind of like a way of leading as a modern, humanitarian and development leader. We develop our team daily, by the way we lead. And it's important to prioritize our team's development, because this is the impact we're going to make.

We get so focused sometimes on project management or budget management or operations and admin and whatever, which are important of course, those are a part of our job descriptions and whatever, but when we talk about impact and when we talk about what motivates and inspires us, It's the impact we make on people. And the people that we work most closely with are the ones that we can really truly make an impact.

And the interesting thing is too, when we prioritize that, when we prioritize our team's development, when we prioritize making an impact on them, And really, truly helping them grow and learn then we naturally benefit from that. We naturally make more of an impact at the community level. We naturally make an and produce better quality work.

We naturally address our workload and overwhelm issues and we become more motivated and inspired just by shifting our focus. Because let's face it 10 years from now what are you going to remember? What are you going to remember when you look back on these moments? Are you going to remember all the meetings that you sat through?

All the government meetings, the cluster meetings, the proposal development meetings. Or are you going to remember the impact you had on a team member when they were able to become promoted to a higher level and achieve their dream of becoming a project manager? So. Don't lose sight of your, why, like we talked about also in Monday's episode, it's important to know and have this leadership vision, this impact goal that you want so that you can make decisions

and how to use your time, how to prioritize things and your way of leading, even when you get busy, because you realize that by doing that, you will achieve more impact, you will step away and actually address your overwhelm and overwork and you will grow your team and yourself. And so it's a win win, win.. So. Once again, this quote "success isn't about the money you make. It's about the difference you make in people's lives" by Michelle Obama, We are talking not about success in terms of the amount of things that you do, because that's what I think what a lot of us focus on. But about the difference you make for your team.

And that means prioritizing your team's development. All right until next time. Keep evolving. Bye for now.

Are you the type of leader that tells others what to do? Or do you let them figure it out for themselves? Understanding your leadership style is the first step to deciding what's working for you and what's not. To find out your leadership style, take my free quiz "what is your leadership style?" You'll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team, and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.

Just click on the link in the show notes, www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz fill out your quiz and click submit. So what are you waiting for? Go to www.aidforaidworkers.com.Quiz and discover your leadership style now. Your team will thank you for it!