Motivation Is The Key To Improvement
Motivation is the key to understanding why human beings remain tenacious in pursuit of certain achievements that bear no short-term fruit. It is the necessary condition to achieve our goals, to improve ourselves. But how do we get motivated? Motivation is, in short, what makes an individual act and behave in a certain way. It is a generic term that is applied to a wide series of impulses, wants, needs and desires.
Authors like Bernard Weiner usually distinguish between two main types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsically motivated behavior is aimed at personal interest in doing it. This means that we do not need any external incentive such as money or prestige to do it.
Extrinsic motivation gives a preponderant role to those motivators of the behavior that come from outside and that are not usually correlative in a natural way to the behavior that they reward. Therefore, intrinsic motivation is what guides us. In addition, in this type of motivation, the reward is immanent to the action itself, to the enjoyment of it.
In today’s Western society we live in a constant evolution of external circumstances that, many times, immerse us in inertia. The path of inertia makes us let ourselves be carried away by circumstances and thus we end up acting in a dehumanized way. Living without motivation makes us enter a world that makes us mechanical and where we forget ourselves and our true motivations.
What is it that motivates us?
Let’s think: what leads us to act in one way or another and what are the true motives that lead us in the direction we are taking. Knowing what are the reasons that guide us will help us to really know what it is that leads us to make certain decisions or why we opted for one choice and not another.
Sometimes we act in the wrong way or regret our actions for not reflecting on what are the true motivations that drive our decisions. Knowing our motivations is knowing ourselves as people, it is the path to self-knowledge and self-improvement.
Choosing to live motivated is choosing a more satisfying existence. Motivation is what drives us and keeps us fighting for our dreams, despite everything we have to face to make them come true.
Obviously, you cannot always be as motivated and there are few paths that are completely bathed in rose petals, but motivation is the key to why there are people who achieve everything they set out to do while others resign themselves to living life. they have, even though they are not satisfied with it.
We can learn from how athletes are motivated
Motivation in sports activity is a determining factor for the good practice of physical activity and for the achievement of objectives in competitive sports. The intellectual, physiological and psychological processes that decide, activate and direct our behavior in physical activity are similar in their skeleton to those that function with other types of activities.
We are all competitive by nature although some more than others. In this case, the job of the psychologist is to take advantage of this trait of human nature and feed it. This process helps to maintain motivation in the short term, therefore, it must be combined with strategies that maintain motivation over time.
A scientifically proven way to stay motivated for long periods of time is visualization. Daily, at least for 5-10 minutes, it is good to visualize the procedure and the desired results so that our mind can have certain automatisms of the task we are focusing on ready.
This is very useful both for physical activity and for any other objective, especially when we talk about new tasks or that we have not faced in a long time. On the other hand, visualization is a way of training attention focus.
In general terms, to motivate a person – just like an athlete – to improve their performance, their effort and previous accumulated experiences must be evaluated. There are many athletes who unknowingly motivate themselves to perform poorly or less than what they could develop due to their possibilities.
These results often generate anger and sadness because they mean spoiling hard, consistent and well-enhanced previous work. An effort that can be tried due to a lack of motivation, but also due to an excess of it. Thus, in one way or another, motivation is a relevant factor in the final result and its control can tip the balance in our favor or against.
