Reliable Motivations Come From – Daily Meditation 3.29.23

Today’s quotation:

The only lifelong, reliable motivations come from within, and one of the strongest of those is the joy and pride that grow from knowing that you’ve just done something as well as you can do it.-Lloyd Dobens

Today’s Meditation:

As a teacher, I spend much of my class time trying to help and encourage students to develop intrinsic motivation rather than rely on the extrinsic motivation that our society values so much.  We should learn a topic because we want to learn it, not because someone else tells us we should or because there’s a reward involved in learning it.  Rewards are nice when they happen, but they’re not the most effective motivational tool for developing authentic learning and ability.

A person who is intrinsically motivated has many huge advantages over those people who depend upon outside sources for their motivation.  The former can wake up in the morning and find many exciting things to do on their own; the latter won’t find anything to do unless someone shows it to them.  When our motivation comes from within, we don’t have to depend upon others to give us reasons for doing what we do, and we thus have the freedom that the person whose motivation comes from without can’t experience.

I know that my students learn better when they want to learn than when someone else tells them they need to take a particular class.  I know they excel more often when they genuinely want to excel than when someone else tells them they must excel.  I try to help them develop their intrinsic motivation because I know that it will be a precious tool for them their entire lives, and I want to give them tools that will last a very long time, not just today or this week’s semester.

I’ve been very fortunate that most of my motivation has come from within during my life, for there was precious little of the external kind when I was young.  And that intrinsic motivation has helped me accomplish many extraordinary things that I certainly would not have accomplished without.

Questions to consider:

Are you more strongly motivated from within or from without?  Why?

How many people try to motivate us extrinsically through rewards or threats?  Does that motivate us for the long term or the short?

In what ways might you practice developing your own personal intrinsic motivation?

For further thought:

You can motivate by fear, and you can motivate by reward.  But both those methods are only temporary.  The only lasting thing is self-motivation.-Homer Rice

If you missed yesterday’s Daily Meditation, it is right here.