Motivation

Reflect

Think of a time when, despite your motivation and the best of intentions, you just could not continue a behaviour. –

Splurging on that treadmill which is now a very expensive clothes dryer/airer.

The fancy juicer that you swore you would use every morning, which sits in the back of the cupboard.

That gym membership which you pay every week for a gym you only went to twice.

What one-time behaviour has a large surge of motivation led you to doing? Why do you think we struggle to take that second step after the first was so easy?

The Role of Motivation

Motivation is the fickle master of our behaviour. It is often likened to a wave – it builds up inside of us, giving us the desire to do difficult things that are normally out of reach, only to crest and come crashing down again.

Motivation plays a critical role in the behaviour model. We could manipulate motivation by punishing (i.e., making a student stay in at lunch or not allowing them to do an activity) or by rewarding (i.e., with a sticker chart or pizza party), but the human brain is very bad at attributing appropriate significance to rewards and consequences that are in the future. Our brains often attribute too much value to immediate rewards, and seek an immediate or short-term dopamine spike over far-off, larger rewards.

The best and most common example of this concept is the behaviour of smoking.

It is without doubt that smoking has disastrous long-term consequences, and yet many smokers cannot quit regardless of their understanding of these long-term outcomes. This is partly due to the reward paradox: the smoker does not see the long-term impact of their behaviours as impactful on their current health as they are so far off in the future, whereas smoking a cigarette will give their bodies the dopamine spike they are craving – which motivates the smoking behaviour – right now.

At schools, we are masters of using motivation to effect behaviour change. In fact, we have almost exclusively relied on manipulating students’ motivation to effect behaviour change.

Consider all the different interventions you use in your class when a student is exhibiting challenging behaviours. Which aspect of the B=MAP model are they attempting to manipulate?

Is your intervention trying to make a behaviour desirable? is it affecting motivation?

Does the intervention increase or decrease the student’s ability to do the desired behaviour? Does it make the act easier or harder?

Does the intervention add an intervening prompt? Does it remove the instigating prompt altogether?

Our school system uses almost exclusively motivation-based interventions. In the most challenging of situations, suspension, exclusion, and expulsion are used as interventions in student behaviour.

I am not here to disregard the use of manipulating motivation to effect behaviour change. High motivation is useful in getting people to expend a lot of energy to achieve a one-time change, or to doing a challenging behaviour for a short period of time. However, a one-time or short-term change rarely achieves our desired, sustained behaviour change and, if it does, it is only sustainable until the motivation wave comes crashing back down.

A more effective method is to take a behaviour that a person already wants to do, and that they are already motivated to do, and to make sure that even on their most unmotivated days they still can do the behaviour. We do this through first supporting that person’s engagement by reducing how challenging the behaviour is (raising ability), then gradually increasing the complexity of that behaviour. For example, if your goal is to make sure you eat breakfast every morning, you could start by simply getting out a bowl from the cupboard. This way, a person will develop the capacity to do the desired behaviour regardless of where they are on the motivation wave as they are supported by small, regular instances of success which make them feel good about doing the behaviour

The Willpower Battery

I find a simple and relatable analogy for motivation is the willpower battery.

Have you ever wondered why you find it harder and harder to ignore those chips sitting on the counter as the day goes on? Or why, at the end of the day, it seems so much easier to sit on the couch watching Netflix and eating ice-cream than to go to the gym? –

At the start of the day, you have a full willpower battery (motivation), and this spurs you on to do behaviours that are challenging through the day – like going to work and resisting that biscuit with your afternoon coffee. Unfortunately, as the day goes on and you drain your willpower battery your behaviour triggers start to move up and down the motivation axis of the behaviour model. This leads to you having less motivation to ignore behaviour triggers, causing you to do more of the behaviours that will result in short-term rewards and to struggle to maintain behaviour change.

Like a battery, you can recharge your willpower battery with sleep, relaxation or motivation to regain the willpower that the day’s activities have drained from you. Similarly, you can supercharge your motivation battery to get yourself to do challenging behaviours for a short time, but this drains the battery fast and is not sustainable. Challenging behaviours lead to a degradation of your willpower battery over time, as it becomes less and less able to hold charge the more these challenging behaviours happen. This is what we call stress.

Aspirations vs Goals

A short word about aspirations, setting goals, and behaviours.

Often, we misattribute goals, behaviours, and aspirations. It is a common pitfall in behaviour design that, instead of designing for a behaviour, we attempt to design for an aspiration.

It is relatively easy to design a ‘put on shoes’ behaviour, as that is an explicit behaviour that has no compound actions. Whereas, a ‘run every morning’ behaviour is an aspiration comprised of a multitude of different behaviours that need to be designed for before the aspiration of ‘run every morning’ can be achieved.

As an aspiration, ‘run every morning’ comprises of a lot of little actions that ‘make up’ going on a run – getting changed, planning a route, making time/having enough time? putting on your shoes, making a workout playlist. Furthermore, to complicate things even further the ‘run every morning’ aspiration may also itself be a part of a ‘get healthy/fit´ aspiration. So, you can see that unless we are being explicit about the behaviour we wish to change/effect (bring about), behaviour design/goal setting can get confusingly vague and seem so large that the motivation required to enact the behaviour is impossible to attain.

Think about the number of times teachers and parents ask a student ‘Why can’t you just be good?’. How often do you think ‘I just want them to be a good student’, or ‘a good person’? This idea of ‘good’ is an aspiration that is comprised of a large list of smaller behaviours that are done regularly or in response to specific prompts. It is not possible to just ‘be good’ on command – one must learn and practice a set of behaviours and mindsets over time.

Reflect on the goal you made earlier. Is it an explicit behaviour you are trying to achieve, or an aspiration? If it is an aspiration, how can you turn it into an explicit behaviour you can design for?

Plan

Examine your goal behaviour from the start of the unit.

Is it an aspiration, or a goal?

What are your motivators for doing this behaviour?

Is your motivation high or low for doing this behaviour?

Write out an aspiration you wish to achieve. Record three or more explicit behaviours that you would be motivated to do that will help you achieve this aspiration.

Now record all the demotivating factors that are getting in the way of achieving your desired behaviour. Is there a time of day when you are particularly motivated or demotivated to do this behaviour?

Act

Find, create, or download a habit tracker that suits you.

You can find many examples on YouTube and Google, or make your own. Alternatively, you can find a habit tracker at

https://jamesclear.com/habit-tracker

https://evermorepaperco.com/blog/2017/free-printable-habit-tracker

Spend a week tracking whether you are engaging in your desired behaviour or not, and reflect on the factors impacting whether you’re doing or not doing the behaviour.

What are some of the factors that have motivated or demotivated your behaviour?

Time

Place

Space

Money

Effort

etc.

Review

I encourage you to write your reflections in a journal or Word document using these guiding questions: The last time I was motivated to do a behaviour but did not follow through consistently was…

I gained this motivation because of…

In my life, I try to manipulate my own or others’ motivation by…

I know my willpower battery is drained when I...

I recharge my willpower battery by…

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