Vol. 35, No. 12 _ December 2004
by Charles W. Martin

Most people feel they don’t have enough motivation. We know enough about motivation to understand it helps us feel fulfilled, responsible for ourselves, and in control. Psycholo-gists tell us motivation is fundamental to personal develop-ment, contentment, and success. Without motivation, either our potential for good and God remains untapped, or we end up where chance takes us, not following God and not allowing Him to take control of our life. In either case we can be left with a sense of disappointment, a feeling of "if only..." that can eat away at our self-respect and contentment.

If their children don’t seem motivated parents worry they might not do themselves justice, that they might be led astray, or even waste their lives. Many parents feel guilty wondering whether their child’s lack of purpose has something to do with them, despite the fact they find ready excuses in unsuitable friends, poor teachers, absent partners, television, etc. On a purely practical level, life is much less stressful and more pleasurable if we feel our children are motivated.

Motivation has been likened to an inner fire, a source of energy that sustains our commitment. But like fire, motiva-tion requires fuel. When we are children usually our parents and teachers provide some of that fuel. But, as with real fires, too much fuel cuts out the life-giving oxygen, smothers the fire, and extinguishes it. This is true for both children and adults. Thus, it is important for us to be constantly aware of the difference between intrinsic (self) motivation and external or extrinsic motivation (parents, others). Failure to understand this difference can backfire our effort to motivate, so the more we understand the better.

Motivation has always been a popular topic in education, sales, and psychology. Today self-motivation especially, or "intrinsic motivation," as it is often called, is a hot topic. It is the focus of psychological academic studies, such as Edward Deci’s and Richard Ryan’s Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior (Kluwer Academic/Plenium, 1985) and church leadership studies, such as Paul Baard’s and Chris Aridas’ Motivating Your Church: How Any Leader Can Ignite Intrinsic Motivation and Growth (Crossroad, 2001). Self-motivation is the seventh of the ten steps for turning attitude into action in Keith Harrell’s Attitude is Everything (Cliff Street, 2000).

Further, motivation is one of the chief topics among educators, with there be some debate as to how teachers should "properly" motivate their students. For example, in his book, The Will to Learn: A Guide to Motivating Young People, professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and research psychologist at the Institute of Social and Personality Research at Berkeley, Martin Covington, argues against the popular notion that the problems existing in schools today stem primarily from a lack of student motiva-tion. Instead, he asserts that students are motivated, some-times even overly motivated, but often for the wrong reasons. Covington feels that many traditional teaching methods, in-cluding conventional grading procedures and an emphasis on competition, encourage these wrong reasons.

A survey of the literature today suggests most of us have relatively little self-motivation. Rather we are motivated externally. That is, our motivation for why we do what we do usually has more to do with some reward that is offered. For example, most of us go to work to earn money. While some people may say that they don’t work "just for the money," relatively few people who are independently wealthy work. If your employer tells you tomorrow he cannot continue to provide you with a salary and benefits, chances are you will not continue to work for him or her, even though you have said that you don’t work "just for the money" (cf. Intrinsic Motivation at Work by Kenneth Thomas, 2000). At home and school children are often rewarded for doing their homework. At school they are motivated to study by the giving of tests and grades. Martin Covington, Edward Deci, and Alfie Kohn are among those psychologists and educators who warn that grades, standardized testing, gold stars, etc. in schools - in other words, extrinsic motivation - is hurting education. They point to scores of studies demonstrating that "the more people are rewarded for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward" (Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Standardized Testing, Heinemann, 2000, 22-23).

In college most students become acquainted with Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. At its base are our physiologi-cal needs, such as those for food and water. Only if these needs are met are we prompted to meet our need for safety (the next level), and then to meet the uniquely human needs to give and receive love (the next level) and to enjoy self-esteem (the next level). Beyond this, Maslow said, lies the highest of human needs: to actualize one’s full potential.

Since Maslow’s studies in the early 1970s psychologists have found his hierarchy somewhat arbitrary. Further, the order of such needs is not universally fixed. Even so, the simple idea that some motives are more compelling than others does provide a framework for thinking about motivation.