On goals and self-determination

[00:00:00] Well, hello. This is The Daily Five with Aurooba, that's me, where we reflect on creating our best lives a little bit every day. Here we go.

[00:00:15] We've spent about six episodes looking inward to examine our motivations and reasons for goal setting. We've taken an inventory of where we are, thought about the stress cycle, given consideration to where our attention goes. evaluated our values, the role of desire, and touched lightly on the value of saying no to some things so we can say yes to the right things.

[00:00:44] The start of the start should start intrinsically. It's quite a sentence. Or it can. You know, I spent the first season of The Daily Five starting the start extrinsically, and the results weren't bad. But the results eventually tapered off because I believe intrinsic motivation can be more reliable than any extrinsic factors outside my control.

[00:01:12] Within the study of psychology, motivation is an understood and accepted concept that underlies our actions. However, it's often examined from the lens of external factors. While intrinsic motivation is acknowledged, it's poorly understood and there's no real consensus around its contribution to behavior or how it works.

[00:01:36] When I think about motivation and productivity and creating a better life, the first theory that comes to mind is the self determination theory, or SDT as people in the know call it. It emerged from studies on this exact thing, intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. SDT argues that, in order to be motivated, sustainably motivated that is, we need three basic needs met, consistently, autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

[00:02:09] When I was younger, like 19 or 20, something around that, I thought SDT could only really be fulfilled by being an entrepreneur, and that's why most people who had jobs were so unhappy. Obviously, I was wrong. In the last decade or so, I've met entrepreneurs who are happy, and others who aren't. Office workers who are happy, and others who aren't. While the type of work you do doesn't necessarily determine SDT fulfillment, Your relationship with it definitely does. Cal Newport's book, by the way, So Good They Can't Ignore You, goes into this a lot as well, and if expertise and mastery are your ballgame, you'll enjoy that book.

[00:02:56] When you view goals you've met and goals you fail to meet from the lens of SDT, the reasons for success and failure both feel a lot clearer.

[00:03:07] Goals that don't meet your SDT needs and values are the ones you often fail to achieve. You've chosen them for the wrong reason. Or you experience them as not meeting one of your core needs of autonomy, competence, or relatedness. If you chose a goal that the world says should be important to you, you have robbed yourself of your sense of autonomy.

[00:03:32] Because, you know, you don't personally want to do this goal. If you start too hard and too quickly you rob yourself of your sense of competence and when your goals don't have some kind of social component to them, however small, you often lose your sense of relatedness I think SDT is a supremely compelling theory, and while it doesn't necessarily cover the complex nuances of motivation, it says enough, succinctly, that the results of considering it are often positive.

[00:04:09] The more I think about goals and why I choose them, I consider them from the lens of SDT more and more. So my question for you today is, do your goals and your plan to achieve them meet your needs from the lens of the self determination theory? And if not, what can you address so that they do? Because if they do meet that, theory, those needs, your likelihood of achieving your goals sustainably and over the long term are probably going to go up, you know?

[00:04:45] Thanks for listening. Same time tomorrow?