The Business of Learning, Episode 98: The Psychology of Motivation

And I'd love to get started in how to define motivation kind of in the context of the workplace.

I would say I think

the first thing that I would think about in motivation is what your first thought is when your alarm goes off.

When your alarm goes off in the morning, is it this dreaded...

which I can't believe, like Groundhog Day?

Or is it, oh, I'm really excited.

I know what I'm doing.

I'm contributing.

And so I think motivation starts like when our alarm goes off and how we talk to ourselves.

You know, there was this really interesting study in the Harvard Business Review about willpower.

And for a while we thought willpower was like, you know, gas in the tank.

Like this is how much willpower you have in a

day.

And

each time you do something, it gets less and less.

And this study showed that willpower isn't as much of a resource that gets depleted over time.

It's more of an emotion that we feel.

It's an emotion that is like triggered by something.

And so we've all experienced a time where we had motivation in times that maybe we typically don't.

Like, I'm going to get up early on a Sunday before my kids wake up to work on this idea, or I'm going to stay late and train this person, even though it's outside of my role.

That wasn't willpower.

It was like this emotion that we felt.

And so that's the kind of motivation that I'm interested in is one that is connected to an intrinsic feeling.

And that starts our alarm.

Yeah.