Are All Motives Equal When It Comes To Motivation?
by Anth Quinn
Motivation requires motive, is a nice catchy little phrase, but are all motives equal?
Did you know that motives for change come in two broad categories, moving towards something you want, or away from something you don’t?
If you are someone who naturally is naturally goal orientated, then chances are that you have a clear idea of what you want and find setting clear goals and achieving them comes pretty easy to you.
If you are someone who has gotten used to moving away from what you don’t want, then chances are that you could easily tell me what you don’t want, or what you want to stop doing. But if I ask you what you want, you’ll struggle to answer.
"Away from" motivation is very powerful but makes a poor long term motivation strategy for a number of reasons.
How many of these have you experienced?
1. Away from motivation is directionless, if you hate where you are then jumping in any direction might be preferable - ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ could apply perfectly here.
2. Away from motivation is cyclical, meaning that while you’re in pain you will be very motivated to move, but once you move away and the pain begins to subside, your motivation will decrease too. A typical example could be losing weight, if you feel fat you may in so much ‘pain’ that you can stick to that diet. But as your weight drops your motivation drops too and pretty soon ‘one cake’ won’t hurt will it? And the weight starts to creep back etc.
3. Away from motivation can move you towards what you don’t want! You will tend to move towards what you think about, so setting an away from goal means you have to think about what you don’t want, in order to avoid it. This means that you will be unconsciously focusing on and moving towards what you don’t want! Bad move!
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