Our motivation is our most valuable commodity. Multiplied only by action, its value fluctuates with how we invest our attention. In our world of exponential change and ever-increasing complexity, the power rests with those who act with self-determination and persistence. Why is it that we are born with limitless potential, yet few people fulfill those possibilities? Abraham Maslow
Types of Motivation
Motivation can be experienced as either internal in the form of push motivation or external as in the case of pull motivation
- Push motivation is described in terms of biological variables originating in a person’s brain and nervous system and psychological variables that represent properties of a person’s mind, such as psychological needs
- Pull motivation is understood as environmental variables that describe external sources of motivation, like incentives or goals
- Our evolutionary history also explains aspects of motivated behavior, and our individual personal histories shed light on how our lifelong experiences shape our motives
Happiness Motivation
Can happiness be a motivating factor?
- Positive psychology brings attention to the proactive building of personal strengths and competencies, and these cannot be bad for motivation
- The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living
- A meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power or goodness
Drive Motivation
Needs are internal motives that energize, direct and sustain behavior
- They generate strivings necessary for the maintenance of life as in physiological needs, and for the promotion of growth and wellbeing as in psychological and implicit needs
- The drive theory of motivation tells us that physiological needs originate in our bodies
- As our physiological system attempts to maintain health, it registers in our brain a psychological drive to satisfy a physiological craving and motivates us to bring the system from deficiency toward homeostasis
Motivation for Change
Change is rarely simple or linear
- It is difficult to find the motivation to engage in activities that are not intrinsically motivating
- What we need is to move away from extrinsically motivated action, e.g., when we have to do something because we fear consequences, and toward introjected and fully self-determined regulation, where we value the new behavior and align it with other aspects of our life
- Stage-based approaches to behavioral changes have proven to be particularly effective in increasing motivation toward the pursuit of difficult and non-intrinsically motivating goals
Goal Motivation
Goals, like mindset, beliefs, expectations, or self-concept, are sources of internal motives and are together referred to as cognition
- As a cognitive mental event, a goal is a “spring to action” that functions like a moving force that energizes and directs our behavior in purposive ways
- Goal setting translates into performance only when the goals are challenging, specific, and congruent with the self
- Motivation at its best is spontaneous
- Other factors such as ability and resources also influence performance, and there is no direct correspondence between goals and performance
Maslow Motivation
Abraham Maslow believed that all psychological problems stemmed from a lack of meaning and anxiety about these needs not being met
- He warned us that when we set low aims for ourselves and do only as much as necessary to be competent, we set ourselves up for deep unhappiness in life
- When his students shivered with weakness at the thought of becoming remarkable, Maslow would recall Nietzsche’s idea of the law of eternal recurrence
A Take-Home Message
Understanding the principles of motivation gives us the capacity to find workable solutions to real-world motivational problems
- Studying and applying motivational science can also help us reverse or cope with impulsive urges, habitual experience, goal failure, counterproductive functioning, negative emotion, boredom, maladaptive or dysfunctional development, and fragile sense of self
Motivation and Emotion
Emotions are considered motivational states because they generate bursts of energy that get our attention and cause our reactions to significant events in our lives
- They synchronize four interrelated aspects of experience
- Feelings
- Arousal
- Purpose
- Expression
- Different emotions elicit different action tendencies
Motivation and Personality
Personality theory and research show that we are, in fact, motivated in different ways based on our personality traits
- A high level of a particular trait will often make us act as the trait implies: we will be more open to experience, conscientious, extraverted, agreeable, and neurotic
- We will be motivated by different incentives, goals, and activities but also choose to be in different situations
- The task of psychology is to determine what those situations and behaviors are
- If we exhibit characteristics at one end of a personality dimension we will seek out, create, or modify situations differently than do individuals at the other end of the spectrum
