Why is Motivation Important
Check out this great read from Positive Psychology. To read the entire article on their website, click here.
Why is Motivation Important?
Why is it important to understand motivation? Why do we care about what people want and why they want it? How about because it can improve our lives.
Understanding motivation gives us many valuable insights into human nature. It explains why we set goals, strive for achievement and power, why we have desires for psychological intimacy and biological sex, why we experience emotions like fear, anger, and compassion.
Learning about motivation is valuable because it helps us understand where motivation comes from, why it changes, what increases and decreases it, what aspects of it can and cannot be changed, and helps us answer the question of why some types of motivation are more beneficial than others.
Motivation reflects something unique about each one of us and allows us to gain valued outcomes like improved performance, enhanced wellbeing, personal growth, or a sense of purpose. Motivation is a pathway to change our way of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
Benefits of Motivation
Finding ways to increase motivation is crucial because it allows us to change behavior, develop competencies, be creative, set goals, grow interests, make plans, develop talents, and boost engagement. Applying motivational science to everyday life helps us to motivate employees, coach athletes, raise children, counsel clients, and engage students.
The benefits of motivation are visible in how we live our lives. As we are constantly responding to changes in our environment, we need motivation to take corrective action in the face of fluctuating circumstances. Motivation is a vital resource that allows us to adapt, function productively, and maintain wellbeing in the face of a constantly changing stream of opportunities and threats.
I have learned from my mistakes, and I am sure I can repeat them exactly.
Peter Cook
There are many health benefits of increased motivation. Motivation as a psychological state is linked to our physiology. When our motivation is depleted, our functioning and well-being suffer.
Some studies show that when we feel helpless in exerting control for example, we tend to give up quickly when challenged (Peterson, Maier, & Seligman, 1993). Others have proven than when we find ourselves coerced, we lose access to our inner motivational resources (Deci, 1995).
High-quality motivation allows us to thrive, while its deficit causes us to flounder. Societal benefits of increased motivation are visible in greater student engagement, better job satisfaction in employees, flourishing relationships, and institutions.
But unhealthy fluctuations in motivation also explain addiction, gambling, risk-taking, and excessive internet usage. The motivation that underlies addictive behaviors shares the neurological underpinning associated with dopamine centric rewards system and tricky inner working of the pleasure cycle.
This makes it challenging and often difficult to change behavior in situations involving addiction. See our article on Motivational Interviewing to learn more about the stages of change and motivational interviewing techniques practitioners use to motivate clients to change unwanted behaviors.
