How to steer your life’s trajectory with your internal Motivation
Learn How to steer your life’s trajectory with your internal Motivation. Creating new angles, or art forms, around what drives you can then create a sense of enjoying the pinnacle of living.
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Have you ever stopped to evaluate what your intrinsic motivation / drive really is?
‘Intrinsic motivation: “The motivation to engage in an activity primarily for its own sake, because the individual perceives the activity as interesting, involving, satisfying, or personally challenging; it is marked by a focus on the challenge and the enjoinment of the work itself.”’
We have established that creativity is a crucial component in creating a desirable life, but it needs to come from a place that resonates with you and is in-line with your finer intrinsic values to make things worthwhile.
Telling you to follow your intrinsic drive is a way of telling you to follow your dreams in a more practical sense as it can be broken down into finer details and built upon from here.
The term ‘intrinsic drive’ qualifies what pushes you on a fundamental level, according to your own life, learning, and way of behaving and can be seen as your being’s core.
What you believe, what you want, how you like to do things, what works best for you, and so on represent your basic drives.
For example, street photography appealed to my instincts to connect more with humanity. My upcycling art came from my sadness at seeing so much waste through my job as an electrician, and the joy of turning waste into attractive and useful objects.
It can be a critical life component, to learn to steer your life’s trajectory with your internal drive. Creating new angles, or art forms, around what drives you can then create a sense of enjoying the pinnacle of living.
Also, it can be the difference between success and failure in various endeavours. Staying aware of this, with committed goal-setting, is one way to ensure success and joy in your existence.
Some people go through their entire lives without even stopping to evaluate what their intrinsic drive really is. Look at past and present activities and the things you enjoy, to figure out the subtler points that drive you.
Take the time to look inwardly and figure out the precise aspects of why you find joy in these experiences. Make a list and see if these finer points of different activities are similar, then you can use these as foundations when deciding what’s next. similar, then you can use these as foundations when deciding what’s next.
Follow your heart here; learn to trust your intuition. If an idea arises with feeling backing it, investigate it further, toy with it in your mind, then on paper, and, if you are really feeling it, take steps to see it form again in the physical realm.
Every activity can have tedious elements, perhaps especially when it doesn’t look viable or rewarding to put in energy to move forward. Will you push through anyway?
The answer to this question may lie in whether you are intrinsically driven or not. Or if your passions lie outside work, but you need funds to explore and grow them, then you can look at your job as a catalyst for something greater, putting in the hard and smart work required.
One of my big intrinsic drives is a common one, and that is learning. I find absorbing new, helpful knowledge exciting and rewarding, and, coincidentally, personal growth occurs.
Staying aware of this helps me push through when I take on something challenging, because regardless of the result I still feel as if I’m gaining something. When inevitable moments of self-doubt arise, I push through taking this as a sign, I am learning and heading in the right direction.
When I was struggling in my electrical apprenticeship, not feeling it at all, self-doubt about my life choice was overwhelming. This was a turning point for me. Using the principle explained above, I started to embrace the headache days, because I believed I must be moving forward.
When I changed my mindset like this, there were no longer bad days; they were instead mentally challenging days, which I felt I must be benefiting from. So when I take on something new, I look at the learning potential in it, because I believe a degree of intrinsic value is already there, which could help me pull through.
If something doesn’t work out, that’s also fine. There was probably a reason for it, look for the lessons to be learned and personal development gained from the experience and new contacts and friends made.
Whereas if you do not follow your desire to try something, and then what you are doing now doesn’t work out, or you get stuck in a rut, you are probably going to kick yourself for not daring to take a new direction—and that’s likely to prove depressing.
It was soon after such a point in my apprenticeship, I also started to find creative ways to express my intrinsic natures, one of these outlets was photography. Although the street photography I was doing was popular and took a lot of time and effort after my day job, I still didn’t make any money from it. But it didn’t matter.
I was creating further opportunities to follow my passions. My work was being displayed at established locations. Doors were not just opening in the physical world, but in my mind also.
You never know what may accelerate you faster into a realm intrinsic to you, but if you don’t start experimenting and executing, then the odds of you ending up balls deep in something you love are a hell of a lot lower.
‘You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.’
Examples of common Intrinsic Values:
- Reading books because you enjoy reading and not only for learning.
- Volunteering because you enjoy helping fellow humans, not only so you get brownie points.
- Cooking because you enjoy cooking, not merely to put food on the table.
- Creating things from scratch, not just because you want the final product, but because you enjoy the process.
The flip side is extrinsic, meaning external, so if you are extrinsically motivated by an activity it is because of the external results, that is, monetary gain or recognition.
