Motivation, Part 2: The ABCs
Self-Determination Theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985 & 2000), as with many theories applied to sport, came from the study of education. It is a theory of motivation that tells us that, in order to feel intrinsically motivated – driven by factors inherently meaningful to them, unaffected by external factors, opinions, or expectations – a person needs to have fulfilled three important psychological needs. They are the ABCs of intrinsic motivation: Autonomy, Belonging, and Competence. I’m going to introduce them in reverse order.
Competence: “I have the skills to succeed in this space.”
Coaches and parents, workplace trainers and teachers, tend to focus heavily on teaching the skills required to perform a task. That skillset, whatever it is, is the foundation of competence. Often, we focus on physical and technical skills because they’re the most visible and easiest to understand. For those of us teaching or coaching, it is often more intuitive and easier to teach this relatively linear process: If there is a skill that someone needs that they don’t possess, I can show them how to do it and they can then learn and eventually master it through practice. We understand this type of skill acquisition, and that understanding also feeds into our obsession with “talent,” in sports and other arenas.
We can see competence, and it is the pursuit of competence that forms the basis of most recruiting, analysis, NIL and other sponsorship, and absurdly large contracts in sports. And, competence is unquestionably a good thing; if I know that I possess the skills to get something done, my confidence and motivation to do it are higher and I am more likely to say yes to the task. Competent people are generally more confident and successful, more willing to try new things and work to master them, and the experience of the resulting success often leads to higher levels of motivation.
Belonging: “There is a place for me here; I am valued for who I am.”
Something we talk a lot about, but don’t always know how to properly create, is a sense of belonging. In sport, we often mistake inviting someone into OUR thing to do it our way for inclusion. In fact, it’s totally ok – necessary – to have norms, to have a culture, to have guidelines for whatever space you’ve created; a free-for-all, where everyone just does whatever they want, also fails to create a secure space where those who wish to enter can do so as themselves, knowing that they will be free from ridicule – which is part of the ultimate goal.
According to SDT, belongingness is knowing that one can show up as themselves and be accepted; creating this sense of community means meeting people where they are – emotionally, cognitively, developmentally, personally – and accepting them for who they are, and then helping them find their place within a sense of shared purpose and/or identity. This creates relatability and helps them feel heard, seen, understood, and valued. When I feel like I belong, like “these are my people,” I’m much more willing to exert or stretch myself in service of whatever our shared purpose might be; my level of motivation is much higher, and I’m more willing to accept and embrace my role – even if it’s not my ideal – for the good of my team.
Autonomy: “I have voice and choice.”
This is where, in just about everything involving kids, we come up agonizingly short. In our culture of fear and distrust and in an effort to make sure that kids encounter no danger or obstacles to their success, we are wildly overzealous in controlling every minute of a child’s existence. From overscheduling to grade inflation, non-stop surveillance to authoritarian coaching and parenting, we have decided as a culture that the worst thing a child could experience is failure, that freedom is too dangerous because the world contains little more than a series of threats.
What began with “simple” helicopter parenting (surveillance, hovering, micromanagement, overscheduling) has grown to include bulldozer parenting (annihilate any obstacle in their path, smoothing the road so they never have to be uncomfortable) and what could be called “digital parenting,” in which you just stick your kids in front of an iPad to shut them up, depriving them of opportunities to learn real-world social and emotional skills. When in these scenarios does a child have a chance to fall down and learn to pick themselves back up, or to choose their activity (or lack thereof)? When does a kid get to feel like their life is something other than one adult-controlled activity after another?
Coaches have their own ways of eliminating autonomy, and their reasons for controlling every moment of practices and games. One of my favorites is, “They don’t know what they’re doing out there, so I have to constantly tell them what to do.” And ok, coaches do need to coach, but if all we’re doing is yelling and telling and directing, that young athlete has no opportunity to figure things out themselves. They never get into the flow of the game or develop skills organically in a way that helps them feel a sense of accomplishment and control over their own process; they miss the chance to build confidence and competence through trial, error, and eventual success. In being the absolute authority on everything, coaches disempower the kids they’re coaching and prevent the development of skills like compromise, adaptation, negotiation, resilience, self-reliance, emotional regulation, determination, problem solving, awareness, and conflict resolution.
Where to start?
Much of what I’ve described above stems from a lack of trust – in each other, in the world, and in our kids – and it is crucial that we begin to re-learn trust. It is impossible to engender healthy child and adolescent development – never mind competence and a sense of belonging – if we don’t first allow kids to have boundaried autonomy. Boundaried, because as I said above, it’s not a free-for-all, and kids still need support; autonomy doesn’t mean they get to do whatever they want. Rather, it means they have some choice, some sense of personal (emotional, action, sweat) equity in what they’re doing, with guidance. Remember, self-determination is about fostering intrinsic motivation. Adults who work with kids are always looking for the right buttons to push, the right pep talk to give, to motivate a kid to work hard in practice or do their homework or be nice to their little brother. We often focus heavily on rewards and consequences; what we miss is giving them CHOICE, allowing them to find a reason to do it that isn’t just “because I said so.”
Does extrinsic motivation work? Absolutely, to a certain point. We love trophies, recognition, medals, championships, good grades, accolades, and other forms of external validation. We also want to avoid negative outcomes and consequences. However, these fixed rewards and punishments come and go; as we discussed in Part 1, winning is great while it lasts, but it doesn’t last long. Most – all? – people need something more stable and reliable to keep them moving forward. Extrinsic motivators on their own are not enough; if all I truly care about is a championship, and then I lose a couple games along the way, I might consider everything I’m doing worthless – if I’m not winning, what’s the point? – and lose my motivation to continue and my willingness to stick with my process.
When combined with an intrinsic sense of purpose, external rewards can provide a dream, goal, and direction – but they need an intrinsic anchor to stabilize them in the inevitable storm.
Intrinsic motivation comes from a source inside of each person, and is not subject to the instability of the uncontrollable factors all around us. It doesn’t care about the opinions of the fans or the expectations of the media. It isn’t swayed by the mood my coach is in today or by the off day I had in practice yesterday, nor is it turned off by a big success. Truly intrinsic motivation comes from a place that speaks to meaning and purpose and love for what I’m doing because of what I want and feel underneath all the hoopla about results and the emotional ups and downs of daily life; there is something deep down that no one can take away from me, and accessing that place is where I get my anchor. The more consciously connected I am to that anchor, the more stable is my motivation when the outside stuff gets shaky.
Trustworthy, and Trust-willing
As an adult, I have some capability to find or create the ABCs of self-determination in my own life. If a sense of belonging is really important to me, I can seek out community; if it’s competence that I lack, I can teach myself (hello, YouTube) or find someone to teach me the skills I need, or I can go to school. Autonomy is a little trickier, but if I’m willing to accept the tradeoffs, I can work for myself. It’s different for kids, and if we want to create self-determined, resilient, conscious, and capable human beings – something we’re pretty bad at right now as a society – it begins with loosening the reins we’ve put on our kids in the real world while providing guardrails for them in the digital world. As I said, boundaried autonomy (to learn more about this, I highly recommend reading Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation).
So, what does autonomy look like if you’re an adult working or living with children? It begins with choosing to trust them.
The foundation of any strong, transformational relationship is trust. We expect kids to just trust us – parent, coach, teacher – because…why? We’re so-called grown-ups? I’ve heard a coach say that their “trust must be earned” by the players they coach, and then watched them turn around and expect it, unearned, from those players. I’ve written at some length about the importance of modeling behaviors for kids; trust is no different, and this is where the idea of trust-willingness comes in. I can show that I’m trustworthy, and that will help; I can also demonstrate that trusting someone is a choice that each of us makes. Giving kids some autonomy and control over their destiny – within the bounds of the space we’re creating together, and with support – shows them that I’m choosing to trust that they will use that autonomy as best they can.
This mutual trust in turn helps foster mutual confidence, which leads to courage and willingness to fail forward, leading to improvement, which boosts motivation. I’m also helping them feel valued (belonging) and giving them the opportunity to choose to develop skills in an environment of growth (competence).
What’s Your Foundation?
At the end of Part 1, I encouraged you to ask, “what are [athletes, kids, people] really looking for?” We could extend this already-long discussion, but instead I’m going to introduce two more theories that help form the foundation of the answer. The first is what has become known as Fun Integration Theory, or FIT (Visek et al, 2014 & 2017). FIT tells us that, fundamentally, kids want three things out of their sport experience: To develop, to belong, and to have fun. That’s it. While this growing collection of studies was and continues to examine a broad range of youth sport environments – reaching the same conclusions each time – FIT can also be applied to classrooms, after-school programs, and even to family or home environments.
Another important building block is called Zones of Proximal Development, or ZPD (Vygotsky, 1978), which tells us that in order for motivation and skill acquisition to occur, a person must be in an environment where the level of challenge is such that they are at the outer limit of their comfort zone, but can master it with specific assistance called scaffolding. If it’s too easy, they lose interest; if it’s too hard, they give up. Within the ZPD, they have the competence, scaffolded autonomy, and support to rise to the challenge in front of them. Sounds familiar? Once again, we’ve returned to the ABCs.
These theories of motivation give us aspirational goals and clear guidance in the formation of developmentally appropriate, kid-centered spaces – in sport, in school, and at home, and they open a door to further learning for adults who work with kids. What is required from us as the facilitators of those spaces is to educate ourselves, to collaborate, and to have the courage to go against the grain. Rather than giving in to our fear and common practice – exerting more and more control in our pursuit of external validation and the avoidance of failure – we have the opportunity to facilitate and co-create spaces in which kids are in a position to growth, thrive, and succeed.
References
1. Deci, E.L. & Ryan, R.M. (1985). Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. New York: Plenum.
2. Deci, E.L. & Ryan, R.M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227-268.
3. Visek, A.J., Achrati, S.M., Mannix, H.M., McDonnell, K., Harris, B.S., & DiPietro, L. (2014). The fun integration theory: Towards sustaining children and adolescents’ sport participation. Journal of Physical Activity and Health, 12(3), 424-433.
4. Visek, A.J., Mannix, H., Mann, d., & Jones, C. (2017). Integrating fun in young athletes’ sport experiences. In Knight, C.J., Harwood, C.J., & Gould, D. Sport Psychology for Young Athletes. Routledge.
5. Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.