Why everything you know about motivation is wrong

And a great example of how to get it right...

Hello Wayfinders, and welcome to a new series of posts exploring how we balance doing, feeling and being. It’s a little foray into topics that come up repeatedly in my work and discussions about life and leadership - and we’re starting with motivation.

What is motivation, psychologically?
What are the myths and misbeliefs about motivation?
And how do we cultivate more of it (if that’s what we want)?

Okay, so how do we define motivation?

Motivation is the desire to do something.

It's as simple as that.

But it's not simple. Anyone who's ever tried to motivate themselves to develop a new habit, start an exercise regime, change their diet or even learn a new skill knows that motivation is not a simple thing. From a psychological point of view, it's far more complex than most of us anticipate - or want.

One cause of this complexity is the unhelpful beliefs that many of us hold about motivation. Here are the Top 5.

We need to find motivation. Often, when we’re faced with an activity like going to the gym, cleaning the house, or doing our taxes, we lament that we, ‘Just can’t find the motivation’ as if our motivation is lost down the back of the sofa and if we could only find it, we'd be up and running. That's not how motivation works.
We are either motivated or we are not, as though it's an on-off, ‘you’ve got it or you haven’t’ situation. This belief holds no room for degrees of motivation or acknowledgement that our motivation ebbs and flows or can be generated from multiple sources.
Lacking motivation is bad and being motivated is good. We attach value to motivation, which affects our mood. I’m bouyant when motivated but flat when not, which is an unhelpful way to think about it. Motivation is not necessarily a good or bad thing. It’s just a thing.
Punishment and rewards work to motivate ourselves and others. Bonuses for grownups or star charts for kids fuel motivation, while suspension for grownups and withdrawal of screen privileges for kids motivate behaviour change. Sure this works in the short term, but at what cost?
We can motivate other people - people you manage at work, as a coach, or a leader, or maybe the people with whom you share a home. Sorry. We can't motivate anyone else. That’s a myth that I’ll talk about in a moment.

So there's plenty that we think we know about motivation, but it's mostly outdated, and unhelpful.

Where did these myths or misbeliefs about motivation come from?

Let’s take a little history tour.

Psychologists didn't really start studying motivation in any systematic way until the 1950s, which is really not that long ago as far as being human is concerned.

Prior to the 50s there were management theorists like Frederick Taylor who observed behaviour in workplaces early in the 20th century and developed theories about motivation based on what he saw. This led to what’s referred to as Taylorism or scientific management.

Taylorism breaks work into individual tasks performed by individual workers. The idea was to optimise processes so that employees need as little time and energy as possible to complete the tasks. It has led to decades of work in task optimisation and automation.

From a motivation perspective, Taylor believed that if you paid people x amount, you could expect a certain output level (y) from them. People would act accordingly if you managed the tasks and provided the right pay. This seems simplistic now but it was quite revolutionary at the time.

We can still see the hangover effects of this approach to motivation in workplaces today. Examples are performance-based bonuses and productivity monitoring software tracking mouse movements and keyboard strokes.

Working life in Taylor’s time - AI generated image

In the 1920s, Elton Mayo examined work and developed what’s now known as the Hawthorne effect. Mayo noted that people's behaviour changed at work when they were being observed. He concluded that the best way to boost productivity was to keep an eye on people. (There’s that productivity monitoring again.)

In parallel to this research in business management, behaviorists such as B.F. Skinner were running experiments in labs to explore learning. Skinner developed what he called operant conditioning, based on Thorndike’s law of effect (1905). Operant conditioning states that learning happens through action and consequence.

This is where rewards emerge as motivators. Do the thing right and you get the reward. The positive reinforcement drives the desired behaviour.

On the flip side, don’t do the thing and you get nothing, or do the thing wrong and you’re punished. This is intended to dissuade behaviour.

There’s a little bit of nuance in this. If we anticipate being rewarded, we'll do whatever we think we need to do to get the reward. This can lead to haphazard results.

Sometimes we do the thing to stop a negative consequence. Nag someone for long enough and they might do the task just to make the nagging stop. This is negative reinforcement.

This reward-and-punishment approach to driving behaviour has really stuck with us across many realms. We use treats to train dogs, star charts to reward toddlers and detention (or threats of) to dissuade behaviour in schools.

For adults we use bonuses, promotions and public recognition like employee of the month to elicit action, and warnings, demotions, suspensions, even public humiliation to punish the behaviour we don’t like.

Humans aren’t pigeons

Operant conditioning is also the premise behind poker machines (slot machines if you’re not Australian). If you keep putting your money in and pressing the button, you might get rewarded and that encourages you to keep going.

Except some people know better than to play the pokies at all. The reward system doesn’t work for them. Others keep playing despite knowing that it’s doing them financial, psychological and emotional harm. The consequence is negative, yet the behaviour continues.

This is where punishment and reward, or conditioning, falls over as a driver of behaviour change. You see, Skinner’s experiments were undertaken using pigeons and rats, and the results were extrapolated to humans*.

Humans aren’t pigeons or rats. Human beings are complicated. We do things, or don’t do things, for complex and intertwined reasons. Sometimes we're not even conscious of those reasons. As a colleague of mine says, we are a bundle of motivations.

Yet these ideas and approaches to motivation or driving new behaviour have stuck, precisely because they are simple. Humans like simple and predictable and linear. It’s easier on our brains (we call this cognitive ease). Tell us that people work for pay or work better when someone’s watching, or that cause and effect drives motivation and we’re happy with that. It’s simple, straightforward to understand - and so many of these outdated approaches to motivation and engagement stick around today.

What works? Enter curiosity

Fast forward to the mid-1970s, and two researchers, Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, based at the University of Rochester, New York, got curious about motivation. They noticed that people don't always have to be prodded or cajoled into action using rewards and punishment.

They recognised that humans sometimes do crazy things that defy logic. We risk our lives climbing icy mountains where there's very little oxygen. We surf giant waves, risking life and limb. We donate hours to charities and volunteer work with no monetary reward.

They wondered, ‘Are there other forms of motivation? If so, where do they come from?’

Their approach to motivation arose from a very different philosophical perspective than those who had studied it before. They were interested in what energises people and inspires them to take action rather than just the simple learning or behavioural response process. They theorised that people want to learn and grow given the right conditions. They want to try new things, test themselves, push themselves, explore and experience. They’re not just pigeons or rats seeking food rewards.

This is what they call high-quality motivation. It’s what propels us to wholeheartedly engage in an activity, enabling us to have both our best experience and produce our best performance. It’s this high-quality motivation that helps us to perform in complex environments.

By the mid-1980s, Deci and Ryan had developed Self Determination Theory, now the world's most cited motivation framework within psychology and related fields. It's the undisputed king of our understanding of motivation and how it works, and has been for the better part of 40 years. It just hasn't made it into the mainstream in any significant way. We're still stuck with the rewards and punishments in workplaces, schools and parenting - and we’re still ‘looking for motivation’ and beating ourselves up in our attempts to change our habits and behaviour.

Low-quality motivation risks relationships

When we nag our kids to do their homework, which is a form of negative reinforcement, or we threaten to take away screen time privileges (punishment), or we pay them to help around the house (reward), they tend to do what we want, initially. But the effect wears off, and to have the same effect, we have to shout more, or take away more privileges, or pay them more. It escalates in an unhelpful way.

It’s the same in workplaces. If you're using reward and punishment to get people to respond to you, you’re using control. You, or the mechanisms you are using, are external forces prompting the desired behaviour. It doesn’t come from the individuals themselves. It’s not high-quality motivation. It’s arguable that it’s not motivation at all. It’s control, and that comes with fallout.

Why?

You have to keep escalating the rewards and the punishments to maintain momentum 👆
It damages relationships.

When we shout at our kids or remove privileges or punish them, what happens? Beyond the early years of tempers and tantrums, you get eye-rolling and resentment. They do what you want just to shut you up, to stop you nagging, or they flat-out ignore you. It ceases to be an interaction based on trust and respect.

A workplace culture based on control quickly becomes an unpleasant place to be. It creates an environment where people do the bare minimum rather than go the extra mile. Just enough to get you off their back. Nothing more.

It’s kryptonite for psychological flourishing

Consider how you approach motivating yourself. If you set yourself a goal to exercise and you use reward and punishment as your motivator, which many of us do, you'll find that your external rewards work for a while until you don't care anymore.

‘If I go for a run, I can reward myself with a coffee at the cafe afterwards,’

becomes

‘You know what, I can get the coffee anyway. Why bother with the run when I can stay tucked up in my warm bed for a bit longer, or maybe get to work a little earlier and get on top of my email? 🤷‍♀️’

Let’s be realistic. We all grapple with competing demands, and if the benefit of the external reward doesn't outweigh these other competing demands at that moment, you don't change the behaviour.

Hands up if you beat yourself up verbally when you don't stick to your gym plan. Do you tell yourself that you're hopeless, you're useless, what's the point? That you never stick to anything?

Do these internal conversations help drive motivation?

No.

Now, you’re not just not going to the gym. You're also feeling terrible about yourself. Those mini conversations, filled with guilt, recrimination and shame, harm our feelings of self-worth. It's an unproductive form of self-abuse, driven by a reward-punishment motivational approach. That’s a long way from thriving and flourishing.

How do we create high-quality positive motivation?

In one of Deci and Ryan’s early studies, they asked two groups of students to solve a puzzle. One group was paid to do it and they found that this group lost interest in the task quickly. The puzzle’s difficulty was such that participants determined that the money they were being paid wasn't worth the effort they had to put in to solve the puzzle - those competing demands again.

The second group, however, wasn’t paid to solve the puzzle, and what Deci and Ryan found was that these participants persevered. It was the same puzzle, with same level of challenge, but in the absence of payment the second group tapped into something else, some other motivation to persevere and solve the puzzle, even though it required effort.

What's fascinating about this, and very informative when we think about what drives and motivates us as human beings, is that, not only did the external motivator not work, it undermined motivation. It reduced it. When paid, the participants lost motivation.

Instead, the second group demonstrated that people will undertake a challenge and persevere when they can tap into something deeper, something more intrinsic to who they are, to complete a task.

Cue Deci and Ryan exploring what those other deeper factors might be.

This is what they found…

#1 Competence. Humans have a deep psychological need for competence, or a drive to develop skills and master tasks. We see this in babies and toddlers. They're driven to keep reaching for the toy, to move even when it takes all of their physical effort. If you've watched a baby rolling over for the first time, you know something deep within them is driving that behaviour because it’s hard work. Toddlers do the same when they’re mastering walking. They keep falling over. They hurt themselves, but they get back up, keep trying, and persevere until they succeed.

As we get older, we develop what we call self-limiting beliefs about what we can and can't do or what we should or shouldn't do. These beliefs can cloud our inner drive for competence, but there will be a task that you pursue, or a project that you complete that you persevere with, no matter how much effort it takes. Maybe you learn an instrument, fix a leaking tap or work on a jigsaw puzzle that takes you months and months. Why do such things? To see the task through or master that skill. That’s your inner drive for competence.

#2 Autonomy. The second psychological need that drives behaviour is the need to act from free will, otherwise known as autonomy. Anyone who's tried to help a toddler do up a jacket or put on shoes has been met with a stern, “I do it myself.” There’s a steely determination that you are not going to help them. This is their emerging need to feel a sense of control and agency - a feeling that sticks around for life.

As adults, we feel a sense of autonomy and agency when we can take ownership of our tasks or work and make decisions that align with our interests and values. This helps us to foster a sense of personal investment and responsibility that drives satisfaction and motivation.

Flip that around, and a lack of autonomy explains our frustration when we participate in ‘box ticking’ activities or when we’re micromanaged. With no ownership or ability to be self-directed, we feel stifled, trapped and lack motivation to act.

#3 Relatedness. The third psychological need that rounds out self-determination as a motivational approach is the need for relatedness or connection to others.

Humans are social creatures. Like our forebears, we function in tribes - families, work teams, social groups and communities. We need to feel connected, trusted and respected by other people. We want to feel that we're important to them and to convey that they are important to us.

That plays out in our behaviour. We respond to praise, recognition and mutual celebration of what we've done well. We'll respond less well, via thoughts, feelings and behaviour, when we feel unrecognised, treated with disrespect, or a lack of care.

This is why cultures that value and respect diversity and foster a sense of acceptance and connection are so important. It’s why psychological safety - the belief that we can share our thoughts, feelings and needs with others without fear of negative consequences - is critical to well-functioning teams and societies.

The all important ‘How To’ section

So, how do we use our understanding of Self Determination Theory (SDT) to motivate ourselves or others?

Let’s start with a critical premise: We can't motivate others. High-quality motivation has to come from within. Individuals must feel that one, two or all three of these needs are being met, usually in an interrelated, intermingled manner. It’s not linear.

It is also worth noting that we are all driven, inspired, interested, and motivated by different things. The fundamental needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness might apply to each of us, but how these play out will differ. I might strongly need autonomy in certain work activities, but be less fussed by others. You might have a singular hobby that drives a need for mastery - but 1,000 other hobbies hold no interest for you.

The key to creating high-quality, intrinsic motivation is not in triggering specific behaviour but in creating conditions that allow our self-determination needs to be met through whatever activities or actions align with our interests and values.

What does that mean?

Here are some examples:

#1 Supporting autonomy

Autonomy is about feeling like we have control over what we do and when and how we do it. So, to help someone build motivation, let them choose what they'll do and how they'll do it within the task's parameters. If you’re a leader or manager, focus on the outcome that you want, not how you want a task done. The outcome can be big or small, depending on the task and the individual's skill level, but it's up to them to decide how they will get to the outcome. They have autonomy in completing the task.

You can support them by encouraging collaboration and communication. Use coaching questions, offer your support and feedback, and empower and encourage decision-making. There will be moments when you want to jump in to help or course-correct, but resist the temptation. Learning through mistakes is key to creating the conditions for self-determined motivation!

#2 Supporting competence

Competence is about mastering a skill, to fulfil our need to grow, develop and further ourselves. Your goal here is to allow people to test themselves and try new things to find the approach that motivates and inspires them. Encourage experimentation and exploration. Create a culture of thinking beyond the usual and feeling safe to fail.

When we pursue a goal, we often do so with a fixed idea about how to achieve it. Our social conditioning and expectations get in the way, but we can reach the same goal by many routes. The approach that I find motivating and drives me to mastery, won’t necessarily be what works for you, and that's okay.

To support competence, discuss development goals often. Ask people about their challenges - big and small - and encourage them to push outside their comfort zone and try something new. Celebrate experimentation and learning from failure. Be curious about the skills they are seeking to master and which avenues to mastery inspire and excite them. Don’t forget to model curiosity, experimentation and mastery yourself!

#3 Supporting relatedness

An environment that supports relatedness is one in which we feel connected and share a sense of belonging, mutual trust, and respect with others.

This allows us to share our thoughts, feelings and ideas, and know that others are listening. There is a free flow of relevant information. We feel a sense of camaraderie or a bond forged by equal contribution, support and reciprocity. We know others have our back, allowing us to venture beyond our comfort zone.

People feel engaged and inspired when we get this right in a workplace or any other environment. They collaborate, share, and innovate. They’re driven, productive and motivated.

How do we create this environment?

By modelling it yourself. Be willing to communicate openly, even when you’re uncertain or dabbling in new territory. Be honest about that. Recognise others’ contributions and accomplishments and encourage others to do the same. Involve others in decision-making. Explore and ideate together. Listen to and value input. Co-create a culture in which everyone feels they’re working together for the greater good.

Pulling it all together - Job crafting

The three psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness rarely function independently of each other. They overlap and interact, bouncing off one another to build motivation and engagement in a task.

We can see this in job crafting. Job crafting, usually is a process of actively shaping and redefining your job role and tasks to better align with your personal strengths, interests, and values. This process is motivated by satisfying the three basic psychological needs outlined in SDT.

This video is a great example:

Watch flight attendant Michael McAdam show the world how a safety video should be done via job crafting 👆

Autonomy in how he conducts his task? ✅

Competence through developing his craft? ✅

Relatedness via connecting with others ✅

Productive, effective, engaged? ✅

Did someone tell him what to do, how and why? Probably not. He had the license and support required to craft his task to suit his skills, talents and fulfil his psychological needs. The result? A motivated individual and a job well done.

Want more?

I regularly show this animated excerpt of author Daniel Pink’s TED Talk, ‘The Puzzle of Motivation,’ to groups I'm working with. He doesn’t reference Self Determination Theory but now that you know it, you’ll recognise it.

*Human studies have been conducted in recent years, focusing on simple behaviour change.

How will you change your approach to motivation now? Let me know