If you've ever asked yourself "how do I
get motivated?" or "I start something but I
don't finish it," then stay tuned for this
next episode of Psych Reviews.
Many different thinkers have been trying to deal with motivation throughout the
centuries. What they end up doing is all converging on the self. At first this
seems self-evident, but as you will see, the below suggestions from some of the
great minds, include multiple selves and multiple angles to develop them.
There's the ego, wishes, a need for validation, a consciousness that watches,
and a habitual self. People who are trying to improve themselves will find
that they are good certain parts of their motivation and bad at others. For
Sigmund Freud, he felt that the wish had to at some point alter the reality in
some way with action in order to get out of neurosis and provide some sense of
satisfaction where the will has some control over the environment. Until there
are actions that create some small progress, the mind just spins in fantasy
and becomes depressed because the reality is moving farther and farther
away from the dream.
So the self needs to see some results to stay motivated, but for many, this may not
be enough to get started. There can be voices in the mind that say
"it's not going to work out! Nothing works for me! It will fail like
everything else that fails." Wishes we have can become a burden because of a sense of
entitlement that can creep in. Everything has to be perfect, or else we criticize
ourselves to death. This is a sign that the self has not been developed enough
yet. When people have a strong sense of self they can validate themselves and
tolerate ambiguity and imperfect results. Many personality disorders have a sense
of slavery connected to motivations and they don't know how to develop a sense
of wonder and curiosity. All endeavors become a chore to try and get a response
from parents or authority figures like in the workplace. Doing anything with a
loud command inside of the mind increases anxiety. Externally motivated
people are only left with ego defense mechanisms that trained psychologists
can attempt to heal. Intrinsic motivation experts Edward Deci and Richard Ryan
found that even money tended to reduce that playful sense of motivation. Anyone
who has ever gotten a promotion must have felt some pleasure at increasing
their pay only to be daunted at the amount of work in front of them. When
people choose jobs, few actually look at whether they have enough skills to do
the job, and therefore have the chance to enjoy them. In most cases people only
have some of the skills and the rest they will have to learn on the job.
The Neo-Freudian Donald Winnicott continued Freud's work and emphasized the
mirroring aspect of the mother towards her child, and even the mirroring
of the psychotherapist to the patient. If everything is about parents and authority figures, and
getting attention from them, then how does one develop an
autonomous self? For Winnicott the parent has to be patient enough so that the
child learns to make their own contributions in their own time. The
mother at first is not overly critical and perfectionist, but validates and
accepts the paintings of the child, and their creative endeavours for example.
This sends messages to the child that their contributions are of value and it
makes real a sense of self to the child. They exist and they impact the world in
a positive way. For an adult this may be difficult to develop. If they forgot that
sense of self and are so conditioned with command and obey voices, and needs
for validation from authority figures, it may be hard to feel play inside of one's
mind and body. Di Gammage in Playful Awakening quotes Bowen White on play
psychology. Bowen found that humans and animals have a 'play face' that is
recognizable in all cultures. One way to feel that sense of play is to make a
play face and try to feel how different that is from the usual feeling of
drudgery. Play has that element of learning orientation where people are
more accepting of imperfections and capable of learning from mistakes. Play
doesn't require insane perfectionism and accepts that skills can be developed.
A play face may seem silly but if you can feel those healing intentions in the
mind then one can remember to incline the mind in that way, without needing a
silly play face. The mental movements are felt and remembered and can become a
healthy habit. When people feel that they have trouble getting started on any
project, one of the reasons is that they have forgotten what it feels like to
play. Play reduces the entitlement and perfectionism that is found in many
forms of procrastination. It's the opposite of Yoda's "do or do not, there is
no try." Depressed people listening to
him would just "do not." How about "playfully try and you are more
likely to do." It's a form of inertia once
you get started it's easier to keep
going. Another important entrance into play is to simply prepare for it, as
Scott Eberle proposes.
When you are
playing some of the thoughts you might
find in your mind include...
This is satisfying one's own
curiosity for knowledge and the results of these actions provide feedback for
further learning and increased skill. Play though has to extend to difficult
areas of life where we are not usually willing to play. We have to develop
challenging projects like learning people skills, or starting a business. We
may be out of our depth, but that's where we have to be honest about our skill
deficits. In the end the most efficient way to get started is to play and get on
with it.
On the heels of these insights is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who focused on how this
play might turn into Flow states where there is a lot of continuity of
concentration and feedback on our skills that pleasantly reduces that feeling of
drag that we get when time feels slow. This is all based on how well we can
handle challenges and starts already in childhood. As challenges are given to the
children, parents and teachers are to modulate challenges so that they are not
too hard or too easy, to prevent stress and boredom. Everyone knows what it's
like when they play a game where it's too hard. The motivation created by
play diminishes, and then there is a desire to give up. When a child grows up
they move on from needing validation from parents, since they now truly
believe in their developed sense of self.  Then the search continues for projects
where they can now parent themselves and prove themselves to themselves. It's now
their responsibility to modulate challenges and skills. With a healthy
self, needing attention from others can be offset by wonder, curiosity and
private goals that are playful, but can also be serious. Yet some goals are so
intimidating, they require amazing skills that will test the most motivated
person. A lot of what interferes with the sense of Flow is not being able to
develop the required skills for big challenges, yet a few people still
manage to attain world class skill.
One of the main researchers on these high performers is Anders Ericsson. He
found general rules on how people can develop high performance. For him that's
where the generality ends. There are no general skills. Skills are specific and
require deliberate practice. The 10,000 hours of practice suggestion, that
Malcolm Gladwell learned from his research of Ericsson and others, doesn't
hurt, but 10,000 hours of mediocre practice only leads to conditioned
mediocrity. For Ericsson, one must move out of one's comfort zone to practice
skills at a higher level, and only then add the extraordinary levels of
repetition, so that a high level of skill is conditioned in the subject. Some
important elements of deliberate practice include following:
Now one of the weaknesses of
Ericsson's and Csikszentmihalyi's research is the fact that we have
imperfect environments. When we apply these techniques to workplaces, for
example, there are obstacles including office politics, barriers to knowledge,
and inadequate schooling. Ericsson found that without deliberate practice, what is
learned in school is forgotten. Most new professionals find that when they start
their careers so much knowledge is in people at the workplace. Textbooks leave
out so much. That knowledge is political and it's not easy to find mentors who may
share information to future competitors. A person may not be able to access all
the sub-skills that make up a total skill. That leaves them to figure it out
on their own or to curry favour from others and play political games. Until a
supervisor has a desperate need to fill a role, there's not much incentive for
people to "give away the farm" so to speak. With mobbing and bullying being a real
concern for many workplaces I'll just refer you to René Girard's work below to
learn more about that subject.
For those who are stuck in areas where they see no movement or prospects, Kim
and Mauborgne of the Blue Ocean Strategy would like you to give yourself a gut
check. Questions of redundancy can be asked. If your profession has too many
people, your high skills and effort may not add value. Employees can be a
replaceable commodity. The largest impact a person can make is to add their high
skill to areas that are neglected in the economy. Toxic workplaces, like Kim and
Mauborgne's Red Oceans miss opportunities for synergy between
businesses that can trade their technological advancements with each
other instead of competing for the same technology and methods that already
exist. Employees who feel that they don't have
the resources to start their own innovative businesses can target new
startups in other areas to apply for work. I would
also add from my own opinion that we live in a global economy and people may
have to think of different cultures that require your skills more than the place
where you were born. When the economy is in a boom everything looks great, but in
hard times, flexibility may be the only strategy left.
Lastly there are people who can make an impact, but feel it's all meaningless
and too much fuss for so little. One of the problems of modern society is the
feeling of Falleness where we enjoy comfortable distractions that kill time
and make us forget about our impending mortality. The philosopher Martin
Heidegger had three alternative methods of motivation different from play. One
was Authenticity where Heidegger would have a person bring the sense of
awareness of their mortality to consciousness and how death could happen
at any time. He emphasized how our personal death is
our "own most." This kind of motivation is another way that we can make our
decisions feel like we own them. Following other people,
Heidegger calls the they, can make us lose track of that authentic feeling. But
because our personal death is our own, and separate
from the they, and separate from any notion of a collective demise, then what we do with the time we have is
intrinsically motivated if we choose to see it that way. Similar to that idiom of
"seizing the day," a subject can think in the present moment and act with a sense
that we are leaving a legacy behind, and like the play method, it relieves that
sense of perfectionism. For example, if we want to write that book, we might as well
do it now because even if it's not a bestseller for the they, you are doing
it for your own most self. Authentic behaviour creates a relief because when
you put your goals behind you, the anxiety of an unfinished project, and the
negative self-talk you create, as you head towards death, disappears.
Heidegger's later work provided a second method that focused on our ability to be
aware of mental representations of objects of interest, and how addicted we
can be in following them. Whether thinking about the future,
or thinking about the past, we can lose the present moment motivation. By
meditating we can watch how our feeling of self and an object of desire can
arise at the same time, taking us from presence. He called this representing. The
sense of an addictive "me" arises with an object of desire in the imagination.
here is also an amount of stress arising at the same time motivating us to "act
now" on those desires. Heidegger suggested that we can relax it
and maintain that same presence of authenticity and use our time
differently. It becomes a weaning process where we can weaken the addiction to
thinking and all the actions that are connected with it. Abiding in the
awareness gives us a clean slate to direct our thinking instead. Here we can
actually create meaning in all we do. Heidegger created another form of
meaning where not all consumption has to be direct exploitation of people and the
environment. We can have pleasure in not using our
thoughts to consume all areas of the environment, but to instead enjoy beauty
from a distance. When you have so much presence the sense of wonder that
anything exists at all can enter the psyche. A lot of the stress in thinking
creates this dualism of subject and object and an emotional distance of
feeling alone and separate. Jumping from thought to thought doesn't change this
and can dull the mind to what is beautiful in of itself. This is because
of the inherent boredom of the practice of representing and exploitation. All we
end up caring about is what is useful to us. In his book Sojourns Heidegger
called this third method of motivation, Shining. It is a form of pleasure that
requires less exploitation, and to avoid any political correctness, this is not
any shaming on exploitation because we all need to do some in order
to survive, but there is a motivation inside all of us that would like to
preserve some things for posterity so we can enjoy their Shining instead. When the
mind is quiet and the lonely sense of separation leaves, with those negative thoughts, and the
thoughts, and the oneness connects with the location, the heart can feel a
thankfulness. A thankfulness that doesn't require a subject that is talking in
your mind saying "Thank You!" Concepts can keep controlling and
covering over the natural feelings and that's what we have to fight against.
How this oneness works is when you incline the quiet mind to notice how the
universe created you along with everything else in the environment. The
experience you are having starts to feel like a gift. The exact opposite of
entitlement and boredom. Entitlement comes from the stressful clinging and
boredom that the addictive mind gets trapped in for most people who don't
cultivate meditation. It's a difficult practice and it can't be cultivated at
all times, but we can sneak it in where we have the time. We can even do this
with technology or anything that helps us in some way. Eg. Perceiving
how a house protects us and feeling that sense of vulnerability and danger to all
the things we build, brings a healthy concern that can be buried with stress
in our rushed modern lives. That endearing feeling is empathy.
The motivation when in this state is to be responsible and take care of what you
have with a sense of love. For example, Sojourns highlights Heidegger's trip
to Greece, where his goal was to feel the presence of the ancient world.
His goal would be tested by modernity crowding the ancient ruins, including
modern mentalities interfering with the pleasure of Shining. Heidegger studied
the meaning of being, which included moods and intentions of people, but he
also looked into the meaning of objects. Heidegger, who was an expert on Greece, was
able to bring up narratives related to cultural locations and have the meaning
of those locations be disclosed and help the ruins to Shine for him. This blank
slate of presence allows one to reduce distractions and bring up appropriate
narratives for what one is presencing. Like with basic environmental practices,
we can preserve parks, and World Heritage Sites and let be the beings and watch
them Shine with meaning and purpose. Of course, one also doesn't have to go on lavish
vacations and tours to find Shining. We can see it in all people, objects and
animals when we can see meaning and purpose in them. The great thing is that
if you are being threatened, as we all are at one time or another, the nihilism
that Heidegger wanted to avoid is helped with that endearment and love. When we
love things we can use our anger in a healthy way to defend what we love.
