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Hi, everyone and thanks for listening to another GUS audio blog post.
This one falls under the sport and exercise psychology category
and is about the word motivation.
Have you ever heard of pop-psychology?
Ever heard of psychobabble?
Well, for sports and exercise psychology,
the word motivation is a part of that.
People throw around the word as if it is a simple thing
and as if just saying the word means
they are 'doing something about psychology.'
Some psychologists have argued that the term motivation
is vague and overused when it comes to the gym,
the locker room, and life. I agree.
Every article, speech, or utterance about the word
tends to come from a different definition.
Motivation has become a sports psychology buzzword
for those who don't really have
any other words to choose from.
It's either so broad it pretty much encompasses
the whole field of sports psychology
or so narrow it becomes useless.
Did you know that there are over 30 theories of motivation?
If not more.
That means, 30 different organizational definitions.
The main thing to realize is that motivation
is not a distinct thing.
It's not as if you are motivated or you are NOT motivated.
It's more a process.
If you go to the gym, then you must be motivated to do that, right?
So to say 'I lack motivation'
doesn't quite describe your problem,
if you have a problem.
Goals are a part of motivation.
You go to the gym.
Showing up doesn't mean you are motivated
to have a good session.
So what did you hope to achieve by showing up?
Perhaps your primary goal, on the day,
was to avoid guilt!
The avoidance of guilt is not exactly the same
as the desire to achieve something positive.
And this is, by the way,
part of why I reject the use of guilt tactics
to get people to exercise.
The 'motivation' that guilt brings is to
AVOID THE NEGATIVE EMOTION OF GUILT
as much as it is to achieve something.
And this brings us to one big problem
with all this talk of motivation.
People think that motivation is general.
And they think that attitude is general.
NO. They are not.
They are both very specific.
Your attitudes about the specific actions and tasks
you undertake in your training are specific to those things.
Your motivation is a part of your attitude, as well.
Therefore motivation is specific.
The more meaningful the task is to you,
the more motivated you will be to achieve within that task!
I really want this to hit home.
You see all these articles about which exercises
or what kind of training is the most effective:
Exercising is not like buying an appliance
and checking consumer reports for all the low-down.
I guarantee that the thing you enjoy more
will be more effective if that enjoyment means
you will stick to it.
But effective for what?
Well, that's another story...
This brings me to the many contests and other incentives
on many websites, etc. that seek to motivate
through an incentive-based approach.
What you'll find is that while a person might be attracted to,
say, a fat loss challenge,
they may not be attracted to a lifting challenge.
This underscores that their perceptions
and beliefs about the two things are different,
and their 'theory of achievement' are different for those things.
I have talked about task-oriented behavior
and being intrinsically motivated
and extrinsically motivated.
This is the difference between being self, or inner motivated
or other, or outside motivated.
This is also sometimes called an internal or external locus of control.
As you can see, many terms, many theories.
The terms task involvement and ego involvement
are also used, as by Nicholls.
Ego involvement should not be confused
with other forms of extrinsic motivation
such as incentives (reward based).
Other labels and slightly different concepts
have also been developed by some theorists,
such as learning oriented versus performance oriented;
or mastery focused versus ability focused.
Ames and Archer have used the terms
mastery goals and performance goals.
First, notice that even though we are discussing motivation,
the term goal is used in describing the theories.
You are motivated to do something
because of the desire for a certain type of outcome,
or a goal.
Performance goal orientation, an extrinsic motivation
similar to outcome oriented,
is described as 'a concern with being judged able,
and one shows evidence of ability by being successful,
by outperforming others,
or by achieving success with little effort.'
Big numbers, and making it look easy,
is what is important for this type of trainee.
as displayed by performance,
more than the process of mastery that leads to that performance.
The opposite of this, according to Ames and Archer,
is a mastery goal orientation.
Here, more importance is placed
on developing new skills and the process of learning
and the effort put into the mastery of these skills is valued.
Situational demands can have a lot to do with
what type of achievement goal orientation we adopt.
For example, the web-based incentive challenges
I mentioned before have placed a high value
on social comparison and so this may lead an individual
to focus more on ability and how others perceive that ability,
rather than some absolute standard of self-improvement.
This will affect performance
and thus affect the outcome of the effort.
You can read more about this
and I will provide some sources
on the written version of this blog.
but the point is, motivation is not a one off thing.
We tend to think of a person as either being motivated to exercise,
or not motivated to exercise,
but it is highly contingent on the situation, the environment,
and the specific tasks involved.
As well, motivation to learn,
and motivation to perform,
can be quite different.
If you are a trainer,
you know the frustration of trainees
that don't have the patience to learn something new,
they want to skip right to mastery.
Load up the bar and go for broke.
Clearly, they are motivated to lift,
they just aren't motivated to learn the lift
and spend some time mastering it
before demonstrating that mastery.
Some people may not have a general motivation to learn.
This does not mean that they cannot have a 'state' motivation
when the importance of learning a specific thing
is conveyed to them.
You may wonder why I suddenly started focusing
on your motivation to learn.
Well, it seems to me that while many people join a gym
with a great deal of motivation to achieve something,
they lack something just as important.
Long term success in whatever fitness or performance pursuit
you are into involves a process of self-discovery and learning.
Experimentation itself is a type of learning.
If you are motivated to achieve a certain type of goal,
but are not motivated to engage in a process of discovery
that leads to that achievement,
you may ultimately fail to adhere to the pursuit of your goal.
I hear the phrase 'just do it' all the time.
Well, then what?
It all comes down to trying to shove people
in the right direction.
Let's back up and talk about incentives some more.
I don't want to sound like I am completely against this.
They are big for fat loss and all of that,
and of sites are continually doing promotions
and 'body transformation' challenges
or other contests or incentive based inititiatives
to motivate people.
I know some people whom I respect who do this kind of thing.
So the contestants get some reward like a free book.
Sometimes incentives are a short term means
to help achieve something more long term but sometimes,
to me, ultimately, it's a lack of what people really need.
And it is usually a short term thing, which...
once it's over...the value is fleeting
and its impact is fleeting.
No contest no motivation.
I am not saying that people are wrong
for doing that kind of thing
and it is certainly fun...and...you may attract the...attention
of a few people here and there who will end up
internalizing some of it and achieve lasting change.
But I think that people have been misguided into
thinking that motivation equals excitement.
And vice versa.
However, while excitement can be an impetus once the excitement (novelty)
is gone where is the impetus?
To me the mistake in that kind of thinking
is believing that what people really need
is a little shove in the right direction.
If that is all things were about then everybody
everybody would be in shape
and nobody would be obese.
Because we get little shoves all the time.
Just seeing somebody in shape
when you're out of shape
is a little shove.
A bunch of little shoves end up backfiring after a while.
People end up pushing back.
With attitudes that are the opposite
of what the incentives were supposed to cultivate.
I picked out two words that I think
are key to what I said just now.
Value, and fun.
I am all about strength training or fitness pursuits being fun.
In fact, I think that is one of the main keys.
But the way I go about making it fun,
is to do things that have personal value.
I said that it doesn't give them what they need.
So what do I think strength trainees need?
Well number one: tools.
If you don't have the things you need to be successful
but have to rely on others for it then
it is a bit difficult to be continually motivated.
You know people think I rail against cookie cutters
for practical training reasons.
No. I rail against them because they
don't give you the tools.
They don't allow you to experience your training.
You cannot be intrinsically motivated
or certainly long-term motivated
by your training
if you are a spectator to it.
It must be experiential.
Number two is non-monotony.
If it is not, at some level, a creative process
you can never hope to be internally motivated by it,
and again, motivated for the long-term.
Something that involves a creative component is,
by definition, non-monotonous.
The experience and the rewards it brings must be sufficiently varied.
Number three: You have to be in charge.
At least some of the time.
Daily, I get messages asking 'what should I do.'
Sometimes I reply, 'what do you want to do?'
Most don't want to hear that
and I could just go on giving instructions,
to the best of my ability.
If I were getting paid I'd do that.
But when I was no longer in the employ of the trainee,
where would they be if they'd never made a decision?
They might have reached their initial goals,
after all, they have me as a trainer!
But they would be beholden to me or others
to reach further goals.
Making a decision and then living with
and learning from the consequences of that decision
is another part of becoming intrinsically motivated.
Ah, number four is...THE number one thing to me...
Performance goals.
This is the biggest thing that I always talk about,
This is the one I repeat over and over.
Setting performance related goals is the number one key.
You had this challenge with pullups that you had to solve.
You set a goal to fix the issue.
This is a performance related goal
and you HAD to be motivated internally to do that!
Nobody was waiting to carry you out of the gym in triumph
and you didn't have your own string and horn section
playing in the background.
I was writing a post related to achieving goals
and I called these Rudy moments.
There are very few Rudy moments in life and in training.
Most of what we accomplish only
we ourselves are aware of or even care about.
If you don't get that how can you hope to keep going?
To sum it up, motivation is not about catchy slogans.
It's highly complex and individualistic.
It's so complex that the very word motivation
can be useless unless we are very clear on the why's and wherefore's.
I could go around telling people to just do it
and stop making excuses, too.
My next psychology post, by the way,
is on the word excuse.
Telling people to just do it and stop making excuses,
would really be more about me and how I feel
than about other people.
What do you want to do?
What is meaningful to you?
All these catchy slogans are other people expressing themselves.
How do YOU want to express yourself?
That is the first question to answer.