A Motivation Re-evaluation
This morning over our hotel breakfast I read this interesting article in Psychology Today about motivation (link pending because my hotel internet is being frustratingly slow).
The piece was about how we motivate others most effectively when don’t argue with them about why they should do the thing. The authors, Joanna Grover and Karol Nedza, explain the state of ambivalence we experience when trying to change. Essentially lack of motivation is, more often than not, an internal battle between two inner voices: the one that wants to go to the gym/apply for that course/have that difficult conversation and the other that doesn’t. Being reminded of various extrinsic reasons to act doesn’t actually make people more motivated to make necessary changes in their lives.
This was all fascinating reading over this mornings Coco Pops.
The article and the research it was based on focused on motivation from a third party (specifically medical staff motivating patients to attend their appointments). But this got me thinking about what we often get wrong when trying to motivate ourselves (at least in my own experience).
Firstly we don’t treat ourselves with compassion. It’s fairly common that we find it much easier to treat others with kindness rather than ourselves. When we lack motivation, we tell ourselves that we’re lazy and berate ourselves for not doing things that should be easy. We struggle to meet ourselves where we’re at because we’re too busy comparing us now to our future self that doesn’t exist yet.
Which leads on to my second point, which is more of a conjecture. In my opinion, our culture is so results orientated that we don’t pause to diagnose the cause of our blocks. Or, if we do, we lack the patience to give the answers time to reveal themselves. Sometimes this is out of necessity; if you need a job now because you’re facing eviction, you don’t have time to figure out why you can’t seem to update your CV. But I suspect that half the time we can give ourselves the grace to listen to the wisdom of our procrastination. Are we scared? Is this what we actually want to do? Is there another way of achieving this that would feel safer/more fun/more authentic? Opening ourselves up to the wisdom our blocks provide, can help us find solutions. Instead, we bang our heads against a brick wall and get mad when we get a headache.
My third hypothesis, based on the original article, is that not listening to the wisdom of our blocks and adapting accordingly robs us of our feeling of autonomy. Much of the time, the methods we go to to achieve our goals are from previous knowledge. This can be personal experience (“this worked at this stage of my life, so it should work now”) or received wisdom (“this is the way it’s done”). But when we get stuck thinking the way we know is the only way, we don’t allow ourselves to find our way. How do we find our way? It comes back to listening to and building trust with ourselves.
To be clear, I’m not an expert at thins by any means. This post is just my immediate musings. And doing the above would take self-awareness, which isn’t easy. But some awareness is a step in the right direction. If anything I’ll be more conscious of my self-talk when I’m feeling less than enthused about doing my taxes.