Raise Your Awareness
What is “Self-motivation”?
“Self-motivation is, in its simplest form, the force that drives you to do things”
- > It’s the drive you have to work toward your goals, to put effort into self-development, and to achieve personal fulfillment.
- > Self-motivation is generally driven by intrinsic motivation, a kind of motivation that comes from sincerely wanting to achieve and desiring the inherent rewards associated with it.
- > Self-motivation can also be driven by extrinsic motivation, the drive to achieve that comes from wanting the external rewards (like money, power, status, or recognition), although it’s clear that intrinsic motivation is usually a more effective and fulfilling drive.
4 Components of Motivation
Goleman states that there are four components of motivation:
- Achievement drive, or the personal drive to achieve, improve, and meet certain standards
- Commitment to your own personal goals
- Initiative, or the “readiness to act on opportunities”
- Optimism, or the tendency to look ahead and persevere with the belief that you can reach your goals
Types of Motivation
Are you “intrinsically” or “extrinsically” motivated?
Fill in this brief questionnaire to find out!
https://richardstep.com/self-motivation-quiz-test/
https://knilt.arcc.albany.edu/images/a/a5/Motivationassessment.pdf
Interpret your results:
The motivation that makes us aware of what we “want”.
It comes from within us when you focus on your satisfaction.
It can be seen that when you have fun, you complete any personal challenge or anything related to it. This can be referred to as Intrinsic Self-motivation
Examples of Intrinsic Motivation
You have actually experienced a lot of intrinsic motivation throughout your life. Let’s go through some of them:
- Drawing a picture as you feel relaxed, rather than drawing it with a thought of selling.
- Exercising regularly as you love to be physically fit and not because you want to lose your weight.
- Learning a new language because you enjoy experiencing new things, and not because you need them for your existence.
- Volunteering because you have a sense of self-satisfaction, rather than doing it to meet a work requirement.
- Cleaning your room only because you like to keep it clean, and not because your mom asked you to.
Benefits of “Intrinsic Motivation”
- Persistence: Your persistence is directly proportional to the intrinsic motivation in you.
- Creativity: The more creative you are, the higher will be your interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and challenge of the work.
- Conceptual understanding: Intrinsic Motivation is flexible thinking, which paves the way for an active information process, leading to a conceptual way of learning.
- Optimal functioning and well-being: This motivation gives us greater self-actualization, self-esteem, subjective vitality, reduces anxiety and depression.
- Internal satisfaction: Doing something for pure enjoyment is only because of intrinsic motivation. And this gives us a positive emotion with internal satisfaction.
The motivation that helps us in realizing what we “need”.
When a person thinks of achieving any target, it can be money, power, or related to academics.
And if you seek motivation from things that are present outside that source can be any person, a place or anything, then it is termed as extrinsic self-motivation.
When you do something out of extrinsic motivation, you do it because you want a reward or want to avoid punishment. For example, if you solely go to work to earn money.
This does not mean that extrinsic motivation is always bad.
Examples of Extrinsic Motivation:
- Going to work because you must earn money
- Studying because you want to get a good grade
- Helping others because you hope for praise from friends or family
- Doing a certain work because you are looking for attention.