You Need Intrinsic Motivation
Enjoying the process is much more important than focusing on the end results.
A healthy appetite by Luigi Bechi
Intrinsic Motivation is the key to achieving goals, forming/breaking habits, and having a happier life. People often begin endeavors with a goal or effect they want to achieve in mind. Unfortunately people don’t usually want to do what it takes to get those results. Otherwise, they would already be doing that activity and wouldn’t need the goal to push them in the first place. Afterall, people do what they see as providing the most value or happiness in the moment, even if that just means choosing the better of two poor choices. A practical example of all of this could be a person who has the goal or desire to be a healthy person, but enjoys doing things that harm their health and doesn’t enjoy the things that promote health. If you really love smoking cigarrettes, hate exercise, love junk food, and hate fruits and veggies, then getting the end result of “being healthy” will require you to actively go against all of your desires. That’s extremely difficult, and even if you can pull it off for awhile, it is not sustainable. Instead of focusing on just the desired end result, focusing on deriving pleasure from a different lifestyle or changing your short term desires, will be an easier, more succesful, and happier journey.
People find value, happiness, and drive intrinsically in activities or lifestyles through all kinds of ways like a sense of meaning, synergy, familiarity, a flow state, or mastery. Tying something to your values or identity is how you can derive meaning from something. This is similar to creating synergy which is the act of tying something to multiple different aspects of your life. For example, instead of just running, why not use running as a chance to catch up on that podcast, music album, or audiobook? You could even use the time as a chance to get some comprehensible input on your language learning journey. Another example of synergy would be to go to a group yoga session with friends, instead of just doing it alone. These are just a couple of examples of ways to find more intrinsic motivation within a new activity or lifestyle. Adopting an open mind to whatever it is you are trying and continuing to expose yourself to the activity in different contexts will create familiarity, and will naturally make the activity more enjoyable. This is called the “Mere Exposure Effect” and has proven that more exposure to something allows us to enjoy it more. There are countless strategies to cultivate intrinsic motivation for whatever it is you set your mind to.
Finding the motivation or enjoyment from within ourselves as opposed to external sources is what will keep us going and happy. In fact, relying on external motivation can actually take away from our inherent enjoyment of something. This effect has been well documented as the “Over Justification Effect”, and shows us that activities which once were intrinsically enjoyable such as a hobby can become tedious and unenjoyable once an extrinsic motivation is tied to it. Everyone has habits they’d like to build or break, or things they do only for extrinsic purposes. Finding Intrinsic motivation for these things will leave us happier and more successful. People can do this by harnessing the flow state, synergy, personal meaning, intentional exposure, curiosity, and an open mind.
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Tags: life