Unlock Your Potential: The Power of Intrinsic Motivation in Coaching.

How to Motivate Yourself: Tips for Building Intrinsic Motivation

If you’re looking to improve your career and life, you may be considering taking an online course. While many people enroll in online courses for extrinsic reasons like getting a promotion or increasing their salary, research shows that intrinsic motivation is the key to long-term success. In this article, we will explore a powerful method for discovering and leveraging your intrinsic motivation to achieve your goals.

A Brief Introduction to Motivation Science

Before we dive in, let’s take a quick look at motivation science. Motivation is the force that drives us to take action towards our goals, whether they are personal or professional. According to Self-Determination Theory (SDT), there are three basic psychological needs that must be met in order to build and maintain intrinsic motivation:

• Autonomy: the feeling of being in control of your life and decisions
• Competence: the sense that you are capable of achieving your goals
• Relatedness: the need to feel connected to others and part of a community

The 3D Model of Motivation

The 3D model of motivation is a helpful visual tool that illustrates how these three psychological needs intersect to create a sense of intrinsic motivation. By understanding this model, you can identify which needs are most important to you and focus on fulfilling them to increase your motivation.

Becoming a More Motivating Online Course

If you’re an online course creator, you can leverage the 3D model of motivation to create courses that foster intrinsic motivation in your students. By designing experiences that meet your students’ psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, you can help them overcome obstacles and achieve their goals.

The Most Successful Online Courses Foster Intrinsic Motivation

While many online course participants may sign up for extrinsic reasons, like earning a certificate or gaining new skills for their resume, research shows that intrinsic motivation is what leads to long-term success. As a student, focusing on your own intrinsic motives for taking a course can help you stay motivated and engaged throughout the learning process.

Tapping Into Your Natural Desires and Drive

To tap into your natural desires and drive, it’s important to understand what motivates you on a deeper level. By examining your core values, interests, and personal goals, you can discover what truly inspires you and use that knowledge to fuel your intrinsic motivation.

Conclusion

Whether you’re a course creator or a student, understanding and building intrinsic motivation is the key to success. By focusing on fulfilling your psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness, you can tap into your natural desires and drive to achieve your goals.

The Power of Intrinsic Motivation: A Guide to Developing Lasting Change

Motivation science has come a long way from the idea that extrinsic motivation is the best way to inspire employees. In fact, intrinsic motivation has proven to be more powerful than previously thought. Rather than focusing on external factors, researchers have explored what desires can drive individuals to develop new habits, even in the face of struggle. The Positive Psychology movement and Self-Determination Theory have revolutionized the coaching industry, leading to the development of new approaches that focus on boosting intrinsic motivation and providing positive reinforcement.

One such approach is the 3D Model of Motivation, a coaching philosophy and framework that helps individuals tap into their innate drive to achieve lasting change. Developed based on Motivational Interviewing techniques, this framework focuses on connecting individuals to their individual goals and desires, understanding what drives them to change and sparking motivation through small and incremental steps.

Effective coaches understand that if a client’s motivation comes solely from external sources, they won’t create lasting change or achieve the desired results. By understanding what individuals are committed to and how positive actions can get them closer to their goals, coaches can tap into the motivation needed to move forward.

Many individuals come into coaching with misconceptions about motivation, such as the belief that it’s something they either have or don’t have. However, shifting how individuals see themselves can fire up their intrinsic motivation and help them develop autonomy and competency to accomplish their individual goals.

The 3D Model of Motivation has three components: Discover and Decide, Develop Discrepancy, and Deepen the Drive. This approach helps coaches create a development plan, spark motivation in the individual, and help them practice maintaining their motivation when things get tough.

By understanding the power of intrinsic motivation and tapping into individuals’ innate drive, coaches can help their clients develop lasting change and achieve their goals.

Understanding the 3D Model of Motivation for Effective Online Coaching

Aspiring to improve our lives and achieve career success is what drives us to take online courses, but before diving in, coaches must understand their clients’ motivational makeup. Simply assuming that the client is already motivated enough to pursue change is often a mistake online coaches make.

To start, coaches must comprehend the client’s views about motivation, including their perception of personal motivation, their beliefs about motivation, and the myths they subscribe to. The goal is to understand what motivates the client to seek guidance from a coach. External factors may trigger a client’s pursuit of coaching even if they are not internally motivated to make changes. Online courses should address the root of a person’s motivation to instill lasting change, but it is essential to note that not all clients are ready for the mindset shifts required for change.

Willingness and ability are the factors that contribute to readiness, which is necessary for personal transformation. Clients must have the autonomy to recognize their desires and tap into intrinsic motivation. Taking these steps and having confidence in their abilities can help them feel more ready to make change. However, if a online courseee appears motivated by fear or pain, they may experience procrastination and may not be willing to engage in online coaching. They may resist change if they perceive that they are being asked to do things that they don’t enjoy.

Breaking through this cycle requires discovering the client’s purpose, which involves examining their willingness, ability, and readiness. By doing so, online courses can offer powerful behavior change online coaching, which can help clients make meaningful transformations in every aspect of their lives. Coaches must not overlook this critical aspect of coaching to help clients accomplish their career and life goals.

STEP 2: Sparking Motivation

In order to pursue change in one’s life, it is crucial to develop a strong vision for the future. However, it can be difficult for an online course to motivate an individual to take actionable steps towards achieving their vision. Fortunately, research shows that people are driven to resolve cognitive dissonance. This means that if an individual has two conflicting beliefs, they will prioritize closing the gap between them as soon as possible. Creating a new vision for the future can help to alleviate the discomfort of holding conflicting beliefs.

As a career coach, it is important to help your clients build an ideal future based on their passions and interests. This can include becoming a manager at their workplace, taking a dream vacation with their family, or even learning a new language. Once you have established their ideal future, it is essential to work with them to identify the differences between their current state and their future vision. This will help the online course participant understand the mindset shifts they need to make in order to reach their desired destination.

By creating a sense of discrepancy between their current reality and their ideal future, you can provide the spark of motivation they need to keep moving forward. Addressing what truly matters to your clients and the level of commitment they have towards their goals will become the intrinsic motivation that inspires them to take action.

Deepen Your Drive Towards Career development

Step 3: Progressing for Major Changes

After identifying your motivation and unveiling the difference between your present scenario and future vision, it’s time to take a deep dive into your perception of the future. You don’t always require an epiphany to bring a change in your life. Small consistent progressions can lead to significant changes over time.

To achieve success, you need to work on building your self-efficacy slowly and consistently. To accomplish this, online courses use a scaffolding approach. Online courses reinforce your thinking patterns, which help you envision your future.

Recognizing the difference between change talk and sustain talk is vital. Change talk indicates the desire to change, while sustain talk shows an individual’s argument for the status quo. By detecting changes, you can gauge your progress towards your goals. Change talk is the lifeblood of deepening the drive, and effective courses focus their attention on engaging in conversations that revolve around change talk.

The key to shifting sustain talk to change talk is to discover the source of motivation for the course participant. A successful online course should enable individuals to vocalize their motivation for change. The ultimate goal of such courses is not to argue for change but to help individuals recognize and vocalize their motivation for it.

A successful online course must reference the discovered motivation as the catalyst to help participants overcome struggles and slip-ups towards progression.

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Unlocking Motivation in Online Courses

For those seeking to elevate their online course practice, it is crucial to understand the proper ways to motivate your clients. While it is essential not to be the source of extrinsic motivation for the coursees, it is easy to fall into the trap of pushing them towards change. It is important to comprehend the motivation roots of the coursees for a more successful experience, and fortunately, the 3D Model for Motivation can aid in this process. This model allows you to understand their intrinsic motivation, ultimately inspiring them to take small steps towards success.

At BrainApps, we believe in these online courseing principles and have utilized them to help organizations worldwide discover their employees’ intrinsic motivation. So if you are passionate about online courseing and looking for a career in it, apply now to become a BrainApps online course instructor today!

This article was adapted from the original found on the ICF blog.

The original art featured in this article was created by a talented artist, Theo Payne.

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