Showing posts with label motivation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label motivation. Show all posts

Sunday, March 19, 2023

Self-determination theory

 

In psychotherapy self determination theory is an underlying understanding of what makes people tick. It helps the therapist and the client to understand what motivates the clients to engage in psychotherapy. Often the initial motivating factors are extrinsic, but as the client becomes engaged in the process hopefully the motivation becomes intrinsic.


Wednesday, October 2, 2019

If your project doesn't have a deadline make one up

From Harvard Business Review Tip of the Day on 10/02/19
If Your Project Doesn’t Have a Deadline, Make One Up
It’s easy to prioritize projects that have deadlines — you know exactly when they’re due. But how do you motivate yourself when a project doesn’t have a deadline? Try making one up. Pick a date that you want the work done by, or set aside a certain amount of time for it each day or week. You can also create accountability by enlisting positive peer pressure. Tell a colleague what your deadline is (even if you picked it), and send them updates regularly. For additional motivation, incentivize yourself. For example, you might decide that after spending a morning on the project, you’ll treat yourself to lunch. Or you could let yourself work from your favorite coffee shop — as long as you finish the project’s next step. If those incentives aren’t powerful enough, try penalties. Decide that if you don’t complete the task as planned, you won’t be able to listen to your favorite podcast or watch your favorite TV show tonight.
This tip is adapted from How to Motivate Yourself When You Don’t Have a Deadline,” by Elizabeth Grace Saunders

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

What difference does locus of control make?



What the difference between saying to someone:

"Wow, you sure got lucky on that one!"

and

"You did a good job positioning yourself so you were in the right place and the right time."

Wednesday, March 6, 2019

Extrinsic rewards can squelch creativity and high quality performance


From Larry Ferlazzo's Web Sites Of The Day blog on 03/04/19
"One early and well known experiment found that children who were promised a reward were less interested in creating art than those who did not get that promise (it’s cited in just about every motivation study you can find).
In this Freakonomics episode from last October, though, Teresa Amabile talks about a variation on this experiment that she organized.  In it, students were told their artistic creations were going to be judged, and those children’s creations turned out to be much less creative than those from the control group.
She goes on to say:
I think that the biggest mistake we make in our schools, and I’m talking about everything from kindergarten now up through college, is to focus kids too much on how the work is going to be evaluated. Part of that is the extreme focus on testing in the United States right now and the past several years….
There’s too much focus on “what is the right answer, what are people going to think of what I’m about to say?” and too little focus on “what am I learning, what cool stuff do I know now that I didn’t know last week or a year ago, what cool things can I do now that I couldn’t do before?” And I think that if we could if we could switch that focus, we would do a lot to open up kids’ creativity.
In other words,  teacher judgment itself, especially, I assume, if it’s handled poorly, has the potential of being as damaging to student creativity as any other kind of more explicit reward."

For more click here.

Editor's note:
I noticed this phenomenon when teaching at a college level as an adjunct professor. When I asked students at our first class in the course they were taking what they wanted from the course, the immediate response was "An A." When I asked further, "Assume by virtue of the fact that you registered for this course you automatically get an A, now what would you like to learn and get out of it." Often students had difficulty answering this question.

Students have been well trained to adapt and accept the teacher's curriculum. Curiosity, creativity, motivation based on intrinsic rewards only created barriers to success in the course which is defined by the professor's grades. The effort, then, is to give the teacher what the teacher wants.

This phenomenon of being graded and grades dependent on compliance actually undermines human learning.