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The science behind what motivates us to get up forwork every day

The following post is a guestpost by Walter Chen, founder of a unique new project management tool IDoneThis.More about Walter at the bottom of the post.

So, here is the thing right at the start: I’ve always beenuncomfortable with the traditional ideal of the professional— cool, collected, and capable, checking off tasks left andright, all numbers and results and making it happen,please, with not a hair out of place. An effectiveemployee, no fuss, no muss, a manager’s dream. Youmight as well be describing an ideal vacuum cleaner.

I admit that I’ve never been able to work that way. Thereis one thing that always came first and most importantlyfor me: How am I feeling today? I found that it can easily happen to think of emotions as something that getsin the way of work. When I grew, I often heard that they obstruct reasoning and rationality, but I feel that we ashumans can’t shut off our humanness when we come to work.

Feelings provide important feedback during our workday. It doesn’t make sense to pretend that it’s best or evenpossible to keep our emotions and work separate, treating our capacity for emotion and thought as weakness. Iwanted to look into whether there was anything besides a gut feeling to my suspicions behind keeping the headand the heart separate in business.

What does emotion have to do with our work?It turns out, quite a lot. Emotions play a leading role in how to succeed in business because they influence howmuch you try and this is widely misunderstood by bosses and managers.

Psychologists Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer interviewed over 600 managers and found a shocking result. 95 percent of managers misunderstood what motivates employees. They thought what motivates employeeswas making money, getting raises and bonuses. In fact, after analyzing over 12,000 employee diary entries,they discovered that the number one work motivator was emotion, not financial incentive: it’s the feeling ofmaking progress every day toward a meaningful goal. In Fact, Dan Pink found that actually the exact oposite istrue:

“The larger the monetary reward, the poorer the performance. – money doesn’t motivate us, at all,instead emotions do.”

Posted on Thursday, September 20th, 2012Written by Walter Chen

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In the famous expriment by Dr. Edward Deci clarified again whether emotional feedback or money wouldengagement with work. People were sitting in a room and tried to solve a puzzle while Deci measured howmuch time they put in, before giving up. For Group A, he offered a cash reward for successfully solving thepuzzle, and as you might expect, those people spent almost twice as much time trying to solve the puzzle asthose people in Group B who weren’t offered a prize.

A surprising thing happened the next day, when Deci told Group A that there wasn’t enough money to paythem this time around: Group A lost interest in the puzzle. Group B, on the other hand, having never beenoffered money in exchange for working on the puzzles, worked on the puzzles longer and longer in eachconsecutive session and maintained a higher level of sustained interest than Group A. So if it not money whatelse really motivates us?

The 3 real reasons that motivate us to work hard every dayPink explains further that there are in fact just 3 very simple things that drive nearly each and everyone of us towork hard:

Autonomy: Our desire to direct our own lives. Inshort: “You probably want to do somethinginteresting, let me get out of your way!”Mastery: Our urge to get better at stuff.Purpose: The feeling and intention that we can makea difference in the world.

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If these three things play nicely together, Amabile and Kramer called this the somewhat obvious “inner work lifebalance” and emphasize its importance to how well we work. Inner work life is what’s going on in your head inresponse to workday events that affects your performance.

The components of the inner work life — motivation, emotions, and perceptions of how the above three thingswork together — feed each other. So ultimately our emotional processes ultimately our motivation to work. Theyend up being the main influencer of our performance.

Deci’s experiment showed that payment actually undermined intrinsic motivation because such external rewardsthwart our “three psychological needs — to feel autonomous, to feel competent and to feel related to others.” Ashe told BBC.com, “You need thinkers, problem solvers, people who can be creative and using money tomotivate them will not get you that.”

What’s going on inside our brains that connects our emotions to motivateyou as a thinker and problem solver?Amabile and Kramer tell us this:

“depending on what happens with our emotions, motivation for the work can skyrocket or nosedive (orhardly shift at all).”

So how does our brain deal with emotion and connect it to such practical results like motivation andproductivity? Well, the ironic part is that the parts of the brain that deal with emotions are actuallyconnected to those that deal with cognition. Richard J. Davidson explains how emotional and cognitivefunctions interrelate. To get all “brainy” with this:

The brain connection of cognition and emotion is not segregated. The idea is that your “limbic system” isthe seat of emotion [...] and it is critical for your cognitive processes (e.g., the hippocampus for memory).

Emotions are wired straight into our thinking and cognitive functions such as memory, attention, andreasoning.

Let’s switch this around. We know what happens if we positively affect our emotions. But what about the otherway round? Famous psychologist Alice Isen found that positive moods facilitate creative problem-solving.Negative emotions, on the other hand, lead us to think more narrowly:

“Negative emotions like fear and sadness can lead to brain activity and thought patterns that aredetrimental to creative, productive work: (a) avoidance of risk; (b) difficulty remembering and planning;and (c) rational decision-making.”

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Personally, I found this particularly interesting. I always had a good hunch that positive thinking will improve mydaily performance. The impact of negative emotions was never that clear and gives me a lot to think aboutworking hard on limiting these emotions.

3 Most important things to improve your inner work life and manage yourmotivation:Yes, it’s done! With the knowledge about the impact of a positive inner work life and our emotions’ connection togreat performance, I think we win the battle against the reserved, rational robot.

The key takeaway here for me is to pay more attention to our emotions and thoughts. It’s simple, we use themto be more awesome at what we do. Following on from the studies above, the following three main actions haveproven the best results for keeping our emotions and positive thinking the highest:

Exercise – How to get started and why: We’vediscussed before in detail how exercise makes ushappier. Any work-out will automatically releasemood-enhancing chemicals and endorphin into yourblood. This can immediately lift your mood andlowering stress. Exercise and maintenance of ourphysical health boosts our emotional health. The hardpart here is of course how to get started with anexercise habit. Whatever it is you want to get into, thekey is to start with easier task than you could actuallydo. Yes, that’s right. If you feel comfortable lifting10kg, make it 5. The art is in the start as this postfound.Set yourself up for success – here is how: Amabileand Kramer’s most important finding is that makingprogress at work is the main way to fuel positive innerwork life. Making progress is easier said than donebut breaking it down to ask what will facilitateprogress can be helpful. Identify barriers and removethem, whether it’s too many meetings ormicromanagement. Identify facilitators and implement

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or improve them, such as better communication orincreased autonomy. The feeling of progress triggersthe emotions and brain activity that result in creativityand your best work.Reflect and review through work diaries: Paycareful attention to your inner work life by writingdown thoughts and feelings about your workday in awork diary by yourself or with your team using a toollike iDoneThis. A regular practice of reflection helpsyou recognize patterns, gain insight about your workand work relationships, celebrate and appreciateachievements and gestures, and puzzle out whathelps and hinders progress. Journaling itself willimprove your inner work life, lifting your emotions andaiding cognitive processing and adaptation. Take tenminutes out of your day to reflect, vent, andcelebrate.

Quick last fact: Emotions are the key driver to make your daily decisionsHere is an interesting last fact for you. Making decisions is all about our intellectual capability, right? I thoughtso too, turns out, that’s completely wrong. In an experiment by Antonio Damasio, named Descartes’ Error hediscovered that the key element for making daily decisions is to have strong emotional feelings:

“One of Damasio’s patients, Elliot, suffered ventromedial frontal lobe damage and while retaining hisintelligence, lost the ability to feel emotion. The result was that he lost his ability to make decisions and toplan for the future, and he couldn’t hold on to a job.”

The way our brains are built make it necessary that emotions “cloud” our judgment. Without all that cloudyemotion, we wouldn’t be able to reason, have motivation, and make decisions.

Of course, I am sure that you have tons more insights into how you manage your own work-life balanceand which things help you to stay motivated every day. What have you found to be your main driver toget up for work every day? Do you think some of the new habits mentioned above could be useful? I’dlove your thoughts in the comments.

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