What a Seventh Grader Taught Me About Motivation

Issue #106

What a Seventh Grader Taught Me About Motivation

His name was DeShawn and he did not want to be in school.

Not my school specifically. School generally. The whole enterprise. He’d decided somewhere around fifth grade that it wasn’t built for him, and he’d been quietly, consistently proving that theory ever since. Failed classes. Missed assignments. A guidance file that was starting to get thick.

Every adult in the building had tried something. Tutoring. Parent meetings. Incentive programs. Stern conversations followed by encouraging ones. DeShawn was pleasant about all of it. He’d nod, agree, and then return to doing exactly what he’d been doing — which was essentially nothing.

I decided to try one thing nobody had tried yet. I stopped talking about school.

I pulled him out of study hall one Tuesday afternoon, brought him down to my office, and told him straight up that I wasn’t going to talk about his grades or his attendance or his future plans. I just wanted to know what he was actually good at. Not what he was supposed to be good at. What he knew, in his bones, he could do.

He looked at me like I’d switched languages.

Then he told me he could fix anything with an engine. Dirt bikes, go-karts, his uncle’s pickup truck. He’d been doing it since he was nine. He described pulling apart a carburetor with a confidence and a precision I had never heard from him in any classroom. He was a completely different person talking about that engine than he was sitting in eighth period math.

I didn’t fix DeShawn. I want to be honest about that. He still had hard days. He still struggled with classes that felt disconnected from anything he cared about. But something shifted after that conversation — because for the first time, at least one adult in that building had gotten genuinely curious about who he actually was, rather than who the gradebook said he wasn’t.

He started showing up more. Not perfectly. More.

I started asking that question differently with every student and every staff member I worked with after that. Not “what do you need to improve” but “what are you already good at, and how do we build from there.” It sounds like common sense. It is common sense. It is also not how most schools — or most organizations — actually operate. Most systems are built around deficits. The gap. The missing standard. The thing that needs to be fixed.

But motivation almost never starts with what’s broken. It starts with what’s already alive.

THE TRANSFERABLE PRINCIPLE THIS WEEK

Before you try to move someone forward, find out what they’re already moving toward. In schools and in boardrooms, the leaders who figure that out first are the ones who get the most out of the people around them. Motivation isn’t something you install in a person. It’s something you find — and then connect to the work that needs to be done.

Until next time — the chair is yours.

Next issue: The parent meeting that changed how I think about conflict — permanently.

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