How to motivate yourself from the inside-out

Feel more competent, connected, and in control of your life

Housekeeping: On this week’s episode of Being Well, I answered questions from our listeners with Dr. Rick. If you’d like to ask a question for a future episode of the podcast, leave a comment down below.

What do we mean when we say we “want” something?

Do we mean that it would be great if we woke up tomorrow and magically had it? Are we saying we deeply care about something, or expressing a passing whim? Are we trying to convince others that something is meaningful to us, or signaling that we value a certain kind of thing? Do we want the rewards that would come to us if we did this thing, or are we doing it because we love it for its own sake?

“Want” is a fuzzy word, and it can be helpful to sort our wants into two big categories. In the first category we want the rewards that flow from doing the thing, but don’t particularly care about the thing itself. We want people to praise us, to be accepted by a particular group, and perhaps most importantly to avoid punishment along the way. If those rewards vanished, so would the want.

These are known as extrinsic motivations, and they can take the form of tangible rewards (e.g., money, prizes) or social rewards (e.g., praise, recognition). Examples of extrinsic motivation include studying to get good grades, working to earn a salary, or competing in a sport to earn praise or validation from your coaches and peers. The alternative is intrinsic motivation, which is when we do something for its inherent satisfaction. Examples of intrinsic motivation include reading a book for pleasure, learning based on your interest in the subject, or participating in a sport because you genuinely enjoy it. The incentives are internal; if no one was watching, you’d do it anyway.

If you’re struggling to consistently pursue a goal, or feeling unfulfilled even while putting the effort in, it could be because most of your motivation is coming from extrinsic sources.

Why Does This Matter?

Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are not mutually exclusive, and we can be motivated by multiple ends simultaneously. For example, a student might be motivated to learn about a subject they find fascinating (intrinsic) while also working hard to achieve good grades and meet external expectations (extrinsic).

Extrinsic motivation gets a bad rap, but pursuing something for its extrinsic rewards isn’t inherently problematic. We’re the most social species on the planet, and are hardwired to care about how we’re perceived by others. Our ancestor’s ability to rise in the tribe’s esteem was a huge factor in their survival thousands of years ago, and it remains important to us today. The overwhelming majority of people are forced to do work they don’t really care about to receive the extrinsic reward of money. Regardless of what various self-help guru types tell you, most people need to pursue extrinsic motivations in order to survive.

That said, extrinsic motivations do have issues:

1. They diminish intrinsic motivation. Self-determination theory (SDT) is a theory of human motivation and personality that argues people are naturally intrinsically motivated. This intrinsic motivation is evident in children, who naturally exhibit curiosity, playfulness, and a seemingly innate desire to learn and master new skills even in the absence of specific rewards. If we naturally have that drive, why do so many people struggle to find intrinsic forms of task motivation? Because unsupportive environments and external influences get in the way of that natural motivation. As we increasingly focus on receiving an external reward, the more the task becomes about that reward.

2. They reduce agency and autonomy. Extrinsic motivations are usually tied to an external locus of control: someone else decides whether you receive the reward. Much as we may wish it, we don’t control whether other people praise us, include us, promote us, respect us, or find us attractive. We can take steps in our lives to increase the likelihood of those things, but doing so often means bowing to external pressure and prioritizing other people’s wants over our own. There’s a place for this from time to time, but when we feel constant pressure to perform or conform solely for external rewards it tends to lead to frustration, dissatisfaction, and a decreased sense of fulfillment. There’s a direct link between autonomy and motivation, and the less autonomous we become the less motivation we experience.

3. They lead to dependency. As we become increasingly hooked by external rewards, we become reliant on external reinforcement in order to stay motivated. That might be fine if those rewards were consistent, but our effort is often only loosely correlated with whether people reward us. The more rewards become about the responses others have to our effort, rather than the presence of effort itself, the less influence we have over them. When those rewards are removed, people tend to lose interest in the task - which has become about that reward.

4. They put us on an endless hamster wheel. The enjoyment point for extrinsic motivation is when we reach the destination. That’s when we “get to feel good” - the journey is just a slog we must get through to reach the destination. But that satisfaction is generally pretty short lived, and the brain immediately starts focusing on the next thing that’ll be “just a little bit better.” Hedonic adaptation is a hell of a drug, and the goalposts just keep on getting pushed back. Intrinsic motivations sidestep this issue by turning the journey into the destination.

Intrinsic motivations can feel “smaller” moment to moment than extrinsic motivations, but they’re sustainable, reliable, closely tied to long-term fulfillment, and might actually lead to higher levels of performance. Flow states, which are sustained states of high-performance, are more likely to occur when we’re engaged in an activity we find intrinsically rewarding. When we’re intrinsically motivated the rewards emerge naturally from engagement with the task, rather than being reliant on the mood of an external audience. This autonomy leads to greater satisfaction, happiness, and fulfillment. And some studies have shown that external rewards can actually diminish task performance. When we’re motivated by internal factors, we’re more likely to apply the creativity and problem-solving skills that help us persist in the face of challenges.

This begs an important question: how can we become more intrinsically motivated?

What Creates Intrinsic Motivation?

Let’s go back to self-determination theory. SDT proposes that people have three basic psychological needs:

1. Competence: the need to feel effective and capable in our actions and endeavors.

2. Relatedness: the need for connection, belonging, and supportive relationships.

3. Autonomy: the need for personal agency, self-direction, and the freedom to make choices aligned with one's values and interests.

When these psychological needs are met, we’re more likely to experience intrinsic motivation. When they aren’t, we usually need some form of external motivation in order to perform a behavior. SDT particularly highlights the role our environments play in this process. When our environments support competence, they create opportunities for us to experience mastery and a related sense of accomplishment. When they foster relatedness, they facilitate social connection, support, and a sense of belonging. When they promote autonomy, they offer us the freedom to make choices and take ownership of our actions.

Think about it for a moment. Are there times in the past when you felt competent (like you were pretty good at something), connected (like others were friendly and supportive), and autonomous (like you could make your own choices)? How did you act in those environments?

Meeting those needs feeds intrinsic motivation in large part because it feels good, and we want to be in environments that help us do that. But the reality is that most people don’t spend their time in environments that support those key needs. Things get even grimmer when we dig into our personal history. How often are kids raised in a way that makes them feel competent, related, and autonomous? We’ve come a long way from “spare the rod, spoil the child,” but we’ve still got a ways to go.

Most of us can’t rely on our environments to meet those needs, so we have to find ways to meet them on our own if we’re going to maintain intrinsic motivation toward important goals. If you want to enhance intrinsic motivation by experiencing more competence, relatedness, and autonomy, try these suggestions.

Notice (and take in) Your Wins

Mastery motivation is an innate drive children have to accomplish tasks and learn new skills. We want to get good at things, but that natural desire is often trained out of us by unsupportive environments. It’s hard to feel competent without feeling successful, and kids are often taught that the key metric of success is whether they’re praised for whatever they’ve done. This is one of the reasons that people are often shockingly bad at noticing and absorbing all of their accomplishments - it’s pretty rare for adults to receive much praise even for fantastic accomplishments.

We can correct this by:

1. Getting better at noticing the things we’re already accomplishing.

2. Deliberately giving ourselves more opportunities to accomplish things.

Each day we accomplish hundreds of little goals. Getting out of bed in the morning is a kind of accomplishment, as is making it to the bus on time, saying something of value to a friend or co-worker, sending that annoying email you’ve been putting off, doing laundry, exercising or meditating if just for a few minutes, and so on and so on. Every day is full of accomplishment, and therefore full of opportunities to experience it. The problem for most people isn’t a lack of accomplishing, it’s a lack of experiencing those accomplishments. They win…and then fail to take it in.

When you notice that you’ve achieved a goal, how do you tend to respond? Do you experience a feeling of success? Do you slow down and give yourself a moment to let that feeling land? Or does it make you cringe and roll your eyes a little when I highlight all those little accomplishments? Does that habit of minimizing creep its way into your relationship with bigger goals?

It’s common for people to minimize their achievements, maybe due to fears of being ridiculed for standing, punished for thinking you’re somebody special, or having the thing you’ve achieved taken away from you. These fears can be worsened if you grew up with with a lot of criticism, or just by being part of a company – or an economy – that’s incentivized to keep people on the proverbial hamster wheel, with real success always slightly out of reach. Setting aside the amateur psychoanalysis, when people downplay what they’ve achieved it creates a thin soup of competence experiences. We need to thicken it up if it’s going to stick to our ribs.

Create More Wins

Alongside getting better at noticing what we’re already achieving, we can go out of our way to create more experiences of competency. A great way to do that is by learning how to calibrate difficulty, and one of the best ways to do that is by taking smaller bites.

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi was the pioneering psychologist behind the research on flow, a state of optimal performance characterized by a feeling of absorption, engagement, and fulfillment. Csikszentmihalyi found that flow states were more likely to emerge when the individual’s skill was appropriately matched to the challenges they were facing. In other words, situations where a task was either too easy or too difficult (both of which could cause a person to concentrate on the task more than they normally would) prevented flow from occurring. The better we get at picking tasks, habits, and goals that are well-matched to our current level of skill, the more likely we are to experience competency.

We tend to take bites that are far too big, and then get mad at ourselves when we aren’t able to chew and swallow. Even if you’re a strong person, most good workout programs recommend starting with no weight at all on the bar. Early sessions focus on technique, and you get to feel like you’re really crushing it from the very beginning. If you increase the weight by just 5-10lbs per workout, in short order you’ve both gotten a lot better at moving the bar and have identified the appropriate level of difficulty. It’s hard enough to help you grow some muscles, but not so hard that you’re going to hurt yourself.

Think about how you might apply this approach to different areas of your life. If you’ve struggled to build any kind of practice - from meditation to learning the guitar - could you start with committing to just one minute a day? If you increase the amount of time you’re spending each day by just a minute, you’re doing 20 minutes a day in just a few weeks. Make it too easy to fail, and then increase the difficulty slowly until you’ve found the optimal level of challenge.

In much the same way, we can break up any goal into many smaller tasks. Writing a book is a biiiiig bite, and it feels impossible when taken as a whole. Writing an article on Substack is better, but it’s still pretty big. But writing a paragraph like this one? Writing a small section? That starts to feel more doable. When we focus on taking smaller bites, we experience more wins, which gives us the self-confidence we need to take on more challenging tasks.

Change Your Relationship with Failure

Agency is the feeling that we can affect change on the world, and we can think of it as a kind of combination of autonomy and competence. We express our agency when we make choices, assume responsibility, take the initiative, and generally feel like we have our hand on the wheel of our lives. Funnily enough, we also express agency when we accept that some aspect of our life just isn’t going to change.

Expressing agency inherently means braving experiences of failure, because on the path to figuring out what we can change we’re going to bump into all kinds of things we can’t. This means that a huge part of agency is:

1. Learning how to differentiate between what we can and can’t influence, and not becoming defeated by what we can’t influence.

2. How we interpret, understand, and integrate “failure” experiences.

Think of a child learning how to play with their toys: it might take a little while, but they eventually learn that no amount of force will make the square peg fit in the round hole. How do they respond to that? They typically either keep looking until they find the right place for the peg to go, which helps them understand that becoming more skillful tends to drive results. Or maybe if they’re having a particularly rough day they toss the blocks around the room and have a nice ‘lil tantrum. What they don’t seem to do is become particularly self-critical about the whole thing.

They’ve accurately attributed the locus of difficulty. The problem isn’t their core nature as an incompetent create, it’s the freaking blocks. If they learn how to move the blocks a bit better, their situation will improve. And even if they move the blocks perfectly, some things are what they are.

There are a few skills that tend to really improve people’s relationship with failure experiences:

• Taking things less personally. Don’t be obsessed with yourself. We’re biased to assume that everything’s about us, but problems exist everywhere. We’re often only a tiny part of the whole picture. Take a step back, and see if you can locate the key issues, the things where if they changed everything would change with them.

• Self-compassion. Getting that some things are just hard, and that self-criticism is rarely an effective tactic for improvement.

• Patience. Knowing that the first step to being good at something is being almost unbearably bad at it.

• Sense of perspective. You’re probably not the first person to deal with these issues, and if it’s a common problem a lot of smart people have spent a lot of time trying to figure it out. There’s a difference between being new and being bad. If it helps, remember that we’re all gonna die and the hours pass anyway so why not.

Take-aways:

• It’s normal to crave external rewards, but external motivation tends to lead to inconsistent task engagement, lower performance, and less fulfillment.

• Intrinsic motivation is self-sustaining, leads to more consistent performance, and tends to be more fulfilling over the long-term.

• Practically, we need some external rewards to survive. This means that a superpower is being able to find what’s intrinsically enjoyable even about things that we don’t naturally gravitate toward.

• We can improve intrinsic motivation by finding more opportunities to feel competence, autonomous, and connected to other people. It’s particularly important to focus on these key values.

• The problem for most people isn’t a lack of accomplishment, it’s noticing and absorbing all the things they’re already achieving.