How to motivate yourself for a purpose?

  “Yes, I will finish the report by tonight,” I told myself and my boss in the morning. By afternoon I had not even started working on it.

I thought that by telling myself to do this task, I will be motivated to act on it. However, this positive declarative thought process didn’t help to fulfill my commitment.

This happens many times in our daily lives. We commit ourselves to do a particular task and usually fail to do it. If we cannot keep our promise of ‘I will’ to ourselves, then how can we motivate ourselves towards a task at hand?

The answer lies in changing the ‘self-talk’ from declarative form to an interrogative form. Thus, instead of saying “I will”, ask yourself “Will I?”.

This concept of interrogative self-talk was recently investigated by a research team from University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign and published in a recent article. In their article, the authors say,

… the interrogative compared to the declarative form of introspective talk may elicit more intrinsically motivated reasons for action resulting in goal-directed behavior.

In their experiment, the fifty three participants were divided into two groups and were asked to solve ten anagrams in ten minutes. However, before solving the anagrams, one group was asked to think for a minute whether they would work on the anagrams – question thought; where as the other group was asked to think that they would work on the anagrams – assertion thought.

Any guess on the outcome of the experiment?

As it turned out that the group which asked themselves the question that whether they would work on anagrams solved significantly more anagrams than the group which asserted that they would work on the anagrams.

So, why the group that questioned itself on whether they would work on a task performed better than the group that was committed to the task?

The authors believe that self-posed questions about a future behavior motivate us to pursue the goal and perform the behavior.

I believe that such introspective self-talk evokes two types of emotions within ourselves that motivates us to perform the intended task:

• Willingness: When we question ourselves “Will I?” and then perform the task, somewhere in our mind we have reinforced the willingness to do that task. This willingness is a form of intrinsic motivation that leads us to engage in the particular activity.
• Challenge: In the question “Will I?”, there is another question hidden “Can I?” which challenges us. And when there is a challenge facing us, generally we work harder to win it. Note that the effect of the interrogative form of other verbs, i.e., can, should, is not investigated yet.

So whenever you feel less motivated to perform a particular task, take a minute and ask yourself, “Will I?”.

 

Also read:

• Seney, I., Albarracin, D., & Noguchi, K. (in press). Motivating Goal-Directed Behavior through Introspective Self-Talk: The Role of the Interrogative Form of Simple Future Tense. Psychological Science.
• Will I? : The Frontal Cortex