Knowing What Drives Your Child’s Self-Motivation
Understanding what drives a child’s self-motivation is a big part of helping that child pursue a difficult goal. Obviously, it’s exponentially harder to work at something when you don’t have motivation. If you can turn something that feels like a grind to a child into a process built on their innate motivation, it’s like magically creating fun out of pain. That is why self-motivation is so important.
With this in mind, my process to assess what innately drives a child’s self-motivation starts with categorizing their motivation into 1 of 9 areas.
- Autonomy
- Competence
- Social Bonding
- Social Status
- Accomplishment
- Knowledge
- Excitement
- Challenge
- Creativity
However, in order to categorize a child’s primary form of self-motivation into 1 of these 9 types requires a fairly rigorous process. Most parents and coaches don’t have the time and or patience to follow this process.
Therefore, when you want to keep the process of discovering a child’s self-motivation simple, you can start by just focusing on the big 3 motivators from author Daniel Pink as presented in his book Drive. Pink uses these three basic motivators in the context of motivating employees at work. However, applying the same concept to parents or coaches who need to motivate children is fairly easy.
Autonomy
Children who are creative, rebellious, or who have trouble with authority are good candidates for motivational techniques with autonomy as the focus.
An idea for motivating a child with autonomy is to regularly provide the child with options to pick from or giving complete control of a choice. Then also giving the child the freedom to see their choice through to completion without adult intervention.
Mastery
If a child is very competitive, regularly takes on difficult challenges, or enjoys showing off their success, then mastery will likely work as the center of motivational techniques.
An idea for motivating a child with mastery is to help that child continually get better or make progress at achieving something he or she wants. In addition, providing charts, graphs, and checklist to visually track, measure, and manage progress will add additional motivation.
Purpose
Finally, if a child enjoys helping others, working with friends, or checking tasks off a list then motivation techniques that center around purpose are ideal.
An idea for motivating a child with purpose is to help that child come up with one big overarching long term goal. Then break that big goal into short and medium term goals in the context of a realistic step-by-step plan. What’s more, be sure to reference the plan and the end goal on a regular basis, especially in those times when there is a dip in motivation.