Chapter 17 -Interventions/Conclusion

What have you learned?

• How can I motivate myself?
• How can I motivate my friend?
• Do I offer a monetary incentive? Talk about school or work? Explore my/their interests or goals or competence? What is the quality of the relationships in my life or their life?
• Motivation produces ?????

Understanding and Applying Motivation

• Can you explain motivation?
• Can you explain why we do what we do?
• Can you explain why we want what we want and fear what we fear?
• Can you predict changes?
• Can you forecast the conditions of your motivation level?
• Can you apply principles of motivation to what you’ve learned in class?
• Can you help empower yourself or others?
• Explaining Motivation: Why we do what we do
  • To explain the reasons for behavior, we need to understand the source of motivation
    • Motivation theories provide a means of understanding and explaining why we do what we do and why we want what we want
• Predicting Motivation: Identifying Antecedents
  • Understanding motivation and emotion includes the ability to predict what effect various conditions have on us
  • Antecedent examples – what predictions can you make from the following:
    • A genuine friend listens to you
    • You will be given a large amount of money to complete a task
    • You are given negative feedback on a paper

Applying Motivation: Solving Problems

• In order to solve problems you need to empower yourself or others toward optimal experiences, healthy development and positive functioning; and away from defenses, avoidance, and negative emotions
• Amplify strengths
  • Examples: What can you do to promote this motivational state in yourself or others:
    • Develop personal autonomy
    • Set difficult, specific goals
    • Encourage learning over performance goals
  • What can you do to overcome the pathology in yourself
    • Pessimistic expectancies
    • Identify immature defense mechanisms

Motivating Self

• Motivating Self
  • How do you motivate initiative in yourself? Competence over failure
  • Self-efficacy beliefs, mastery goals, and an optimistic explanatory style over avoidance and pessimism
  • Interest and hope over fear and anger
  • Optimal challenges and incentives over threats and boredom
• The effort to motivating the self is to examine and diagnose potentials and deficits in your own current needs, cognitions, emotions, environment, and interpersonal relationships

Motivating Others

• Motivating Others
  • Who you motivate will react passively, aggressively, or constructively
  • Most attempts to motivate others take place within the context of a relationship that has a power differential
  • If you productively motivate someone, then focus on the quality of the relationship
• Feedback on how the effort to motivate self and others is going
  • Clue into the person’s motivational energy
  • Pay attention to your and other’s overt behavior
    Designing Motivational Interventions