Achievement Motivation: How to Frame Goals to Increase Intrinsic Motivation

We all face times when we lack motivation. It turns out that there may be something similar about these times: the language we use to set goals. There are ways of framing goals that boost motivation and ways that sap motivation.

 

Today’s article is adapted from the chapter on building motivation in yourself, your supervisees, and your children in my book The Confident Leader.

 

If you’re a parent, this is particularly important for how you frame experiences with your kids because we learn intrinsic motivation early in life.

 

Enjoy and post questions or comments below.

 

You know goals are important, and may have heard that the best goals are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic, and Time-limited. What you may not know how important the language you use to frame your goal is. In 2002, motivation researchers from Rochester, NY and France learned something interesting from how teenagers dribbled basketballs.

 

 

3 Ways to Frame Goals

 

Students were randomly assigned to one of three groups. In the first group called “Performance-Approach,” they were told that their dribbling would be filmed to select those with the best dribbling, and the video would be shown to other students to teach dribbling. The second group, called “Performance-Avoidance” was told the opposite, that tapes of students with the worst dribbling would be selected to help other students learn what errors to avoid. A third group of students, called “Mastery Group” were told that the purpose was to assess the teaching of dribbling, and they would have two attempts to work on improving.

 

The only difference in the 3 groups was these 30-second instructions. Intrinsic motivation was measured by how long students continued to dribble when the evaluator told them they had free time.

 

Which Worked Best?

 

Results showed that students in the Performance-Approach and Mastery Group had equally high levels of intrinsic motivation, significantly higher than those in the Performance-Avoidance group. Three variables explained this:

 

1)   Competence (how capable you feel).

2)   State anxiety (how nervous you are in the moment).

3)   Task absorption (how much you’re concentrating on the activity).

 

When you focus on the prospect of failure (as in the Performance Avoidance group), you feel less confident, become more anxious, and are not engaged in the task.

 

Take Away Points

 

Here are lessons learned from these basketball dribblers:

 

1)   Create Performance Approach or Mastery goals for yourself or others to build optimal motivation and effort.

 

2)   Keep yourself and those you motivate (your supervisees, your employees, your children, your peers) focused on success rather than the prospect of failure. 

 

3)   Boost motivation by recognizing people for what they do well rather than publicly pointing out mistakes.

 

4)   Increase intrinsic motivation by allowing for unstructured time to continue a task.

 

5)   Keep in mind that while mastery goals can be quite motivating, there are times when they aren’t a good idea because they can encourage you to keep going down dead ends, rather than strategically moving on.

 

6)   And if you find yourself going into the Performance-Avoidance mentality, bring yourself back by getting absorbed in the task, and focusing on learning and the process.

 

Experiment with how you frame your goals and see if you feel differently and get better results.

 

Have a look at the book for more research-based tips on improving energy and motivation, making difficult decisions, and being the Confident Leader in your work and life.

Comments

[Mike Shippey]

This is very interesting, thanks for posting. It illustrates that how we communicate with ourselves when setting goals is crucial. It is amazing to think that we can give ourselves or those we work and live with a decided edge simply by the way we structure the goals and expectations. Great stuff!

[Ken]

Hi Larina,

I like the new look of the blog.
Good article, I guess I will have to read your book.

[Claudia]

Hello Larina,

I like your new look. It's always good to keep reinventing ourselves.

Can you give an example of the language we can use for a mastery goal?

[Larina]

Thanks Ken. If you read The Confident Leader, let me know what you think :)

[Larina]

Sure Claudia...

An example of a mastery goal (for yourself)is, "I'm going to spend the next 90 minutes learning about how to use this video editing software." (Rather than "I will have my entire video edited in the next hour.")

Or for someone else, "I'd like you to experiment with learning this tool. Give it 3 tries, and see if you can improve each time."

The idea is that the focus is on mastering a task through learning and improving, without focusing so much on the final destination.