Motivation is the human condition which drives us towards our desires and goals. Of course motivation can be seen at many levels it might be the desire to go out and get food if we are hungry or it might be to give up smoking because of the health benefits. It is the latter type of motivation that concerns us here, the motivation to change ourselves for the better, for it is this type of motivation that so many say they lack.
There are of course many theories of motivation; many of us will have come across a carrot and stick type approach. That is consequences for achieving or not achieving results, for example a yearly bonus if we reach our targets in our employment. Indeed this is the paradigm which is most prevalent in today’s society and often we use it on ourselves when setting our own agendas and goals for the future.
Research such as the work of Glucksberg, has shown that when a task is highly structured with a clear goal this carrot and stick approach works well with people performing well and achieving their goals. Yet there is a problem; the same research shows that if the task is less structured or does not have a defined end then the rewards system is less effective at delivering results.
If we now consider our own lives, perhaps we see ourselves getting fitter, or eating more healthily. Perhaps our goal is to have a better relationship with our family or spouse. Perhaps it is even to have a better balance in our lives. Yet there is a problem here, because each of those goals is hard for us to define, indeed they might have multiple ways in which they might be solved. The model of beating ourselves up for not achieving it, will not be as effective at producing results.
Perhaps there is a different way to approach these goals and make a difference in our lives. We know that when left to work out approaches that direct our own lives people do better at these problem solving difficulties. We know that people want to improve to grow in a way that they see as positive. There is also a strong element that motivation has a component that is about a value which is greater than the self. We know for example that people find charity work very rewarding, often describing getting much more back than they offer.
That means for each of us making changes in our lives, we need to give ourselves the freedom to accept our own way in resolving our problems. Often diets that are less prescriptive and allow free choices (within reason) of what to eat have greater success. If we follow an interest we feel better about ourselves. As we improve we want to share our success with others wanting to share our success or motivate them to make a difference in their lives.
This is a much more organic approach to change, one which better matches the motivation to the task we most often meet in our own lives. When we do not have a specific goal to aim at the research shows that giving yourself the freedom to choose your own approach to get better and then share your results has a better rate of success than those who reward themselves or beat themselves up over the same goal.