MOTIVATION

Blog 10: Motivation

On 12th April, 2011, Arunima Sinha boarded the Padmavathi Express Train at Lucknow station to travel to Delhi for the CISF Examination. During her travel three robbers attacked and tried to take away her bag and chain. When she resisted, they threw her off the moving train. She was lying beside the train track, while her leg was on another track. Another train passing on the parallel track went on her legs crushing her leg below knee. During the night, many rats ran over her, more than 30 trains passed on her broken leg. However, she was unconscious. She lost her left leg and she was just 23 years old when this tragic incident altered her life forever. Just after two years to the incident in 2013 she became the first Indian amputee to climb Mt Everest and creating history in the process, receiving Padma Shri in 2015. No motivation blog can start without mentioning her name. She showed us the epitome of intrinsic motivation. Motivation can be seen from two different perspectives, one from the learner perspective and the other from the employee/work context. Motivation is primarily of two types, one as mentioned earlier intrinsic motivation which comes from inside and the other being extrinsic motivation which comes from an external force. I was not surprised to see that our Professor is a firm believer of intrinsic motivation, may be most of us too believe that intrinsic motivation triumphs over extrinsic motivation. But hardly do we admit it! Here our Professor also mentioned of ABC model, which was created by Dr Albert Ellis where A stands for adversity; B stands for belief and C stands for consequence.

                                      Adversity             Beliefs           Consequences

Factors which builds our motivation:

1)     Focus

2)     Goal orientation

3)     Energy

4)     Passion

5)     Curiosity

6)     Inspiration

7)     Flow

8)     Experience

The list is not exhaustive! So, motivation is when we reach our peak experiences. Yes, Maslow won’t leave us so easily, here it points to the temporal nature of motivation. In fact, intrinsic motivation comes down when there is extrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation will only work under conditions like money, company perks, punishments etc. In our discussion in class we were mostly concerned with the intrinsic motivation from the learner perspective. We formed groups in class and discussed it briefly. My fellow German friend Sebastian pointed out some interesting point about the drivers of intrinsic motivation from learner perspective. They are as follows:

1)     Improvement

2)     An interactive learning Model

3)     Autonomy (The new A in the ABC model)

4)     Competence (The new C in the ABC model)

Our Professor also mentioned about the Self-determination theory by Deci and Ryan (1985). SDT articulates a meta-theory for framing motivational studies, a formal theory that defines intrinsic and varied extrinsic sources of motivation. It also describes the respective roles of intrinsic and types of extrinsic motivation in cognitive and social development and in individual differences.