Under Construction - MHWA Retreat

Well, my therapist and I have tried things like, "If you finish this assignment by 7pm, you can relax and watch a movie." Little external rewards like that are super helpful for some people because you're setting a hard deadline and giving yourself something to look forward to.

Unfortunately... I don't listen to myself. I'm like, oh, by 7pm? Cool. And then I don't do anything and I watch a movie anyway. If there's no one/nothing to enforce a rule, it's not going to work for me.

Other than money/praise, I'm really only motivated by fear. For your example, I can usually get work done because at some point I start getting scared that I'll be fired. Or at school, I'm afraid I'll fail if I don't start studying or working on the assignment. But it's always a very last minute, panic-induced thing.

As far as your situation with being intrinsically-motivated, we're discussing in my human resources class some of the things that are necessary for a job to be intrinsically motivating enough to retain workers. Some of them are obvious things like variety in what you're doing, autonomy to have independence in the role, etc...

One of them that was interesting to me was feedback- not from your boss or anyone around you, but from the job itself. For example, a programmer gets instant feedback from their job when the code they've written compiles. An auto mechanic gets feedback when a car they're working on starts running.

The reason I'm mentioning that is because I remember talking to you about your job and, if I'm remembering correctly, it seemed like something that was difficult to get that instant feedback from. Just a thought. It's hard to stay motivated that way.

Best,

Charlie


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