Motivation & Building Teams in Latter-day Saint Councils | Guest Post by Blake Dalton

Blake Dalton is a full-time teacher from West Valley City, Utah. He served a full-time mission in Eugene, Oregon. He has served as an elder’s quorum president, a high councilman, executive secretary, and currently serves as the bishop of his ward. Also, be sure to listen to Blake's How I Lead interview. Enter Blake… In April and May of 2016, Freakanomics Radio did a series of episodes on self-improvement. This seemed right up my ally because, as a self-proclaimed “lazy perfectionist,” I am always looking for ways to improve. While listening to these episodes I could not help notice what was being discussed through the filter of serving in Church callings. One episode, in particular, piqued my interest. The episode was titled How to be More Productive. The interview involved two main guests, author Charles Duhigg who wrote the book Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business and Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of People Operations at Google. One main aspect of the episode I want to share with you was in relation to a major study that Google conducted called Project Aristotle, You can find more information about that study in the article What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team. Project Aristotle was implemented because Google wanted to discover the best way to build the perfect team. This Project was a topic of discussion in Charles Duhigg’s recent book (referenced above). I could not stop thinking about Ward Councils and presidency meetings while listening to this episode and how some of these concepts could help our attitudes as we participate in those meetings. There were many topics discussed in the episode but the two I want to focus on here relate to our callings: Motivation and Building Teams. Motivation Duhigg explains that our motivation or lack of motivation stems from how much we feel we can control the outcome of any situation. Psychology calls this the Locus of Control (Latin for location of control). There is an internal and external locus of control, meaning that we believe that we are in control of an outcome (internal) or we believe our environment or other people are in control of the outcomes we desire (external). So in short if we feel we can dictate outcomes then we are more motivated to do it. If we feel we have no control in a situation we are more likely to give up or perform at less than full capacity. Think of how this works in our daily lives, starting a new diet for example. We exercise and eat right and don’t see any change in our waistline, so we blame genetics, lack of willpower or the holidays for our inability to lose weight… and then we give up. This would be an example of an external locus of control. I think it's safe to say that most of us would rather be in control of our own outcomes rather than waiting and relying on others to accomplish them for us. However, gaining an external locus of control can become a habit. Just look at the child who is told to clean their room and sits on the floor waiting to be told how to clean it, or for a frustrated parent to come in and clean it for them. Or the ministering companion who never sets the appointment or hopes that his companion forgets about ministering all together. While gaining an external locus of control can be habit-forming and a bad one at that, building an internal locus of control can be habit-forming as well. Perhaps Elder David A.