Intrinsic Motivation and Flow

Five Tips For Improving Intrinsic Motivation In Your Personal and Professional Life

by Jason Haller

Why do you do any of the things you do? At some level, there has to be some kind of motivation, otherwise, you wouldn’t do it. Some of those motivations are extrinsic, meaning you are looking to get some type of external reward like money, praise, or acceptance in return for your efforts.

Other motivations are intrinsic, meaning you don’t need an external incentive. You enjoy doing the activity itself regardless of external reward and in some cases in spite of the consequences. Flow, for example, is so autotelic that certain extreme sports athletes will risk their lives, for no money and no social media attention, just to reach that state of consciousness.

Life isn’t so binary, however, and we are usually dealing with a mixture of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators. In this blog we are going to explore intrinsic motivation and why it’s important to harness for peak performance, a life filled with meaning, happiness, and flow.

Let’s take a moment and reflect on how it feels to be unmotivated. Are you energized? Are you creative? Are you engaged? Are you happy? I’m certainly not. Some personality types can bulldoze right past this lack of motivation and “grind” their way through life by sheer willpower, but is that the optimal way of doing things, or is that merely a workaround to a more fundamental problem? Spending a little time and energy upfront to establish what you’re interested in and how you’d like to affect the world around you will help define what you’re passionate about and how to spend your time purposefully. This will help lay the foundation to set meaningful goals that you are intrinsically motivated to achieve. Once that foundation is set and the goals are clear and filled with purpose, it’s a lot easier to find the energy, innovation, and focus to achieve them.

As a society, we are heavily influenced to respond to external motivators like salary, status, prestige, envy, and adoration. But as we lean heavily on one style of motivation, we tend to lose touch with the other. In most cases, intrinsic motivation is the more effective path to achieving flow, so maintaining some proximity to things we are intrinsically motivated to do is a necessity for peak performance.

A person who is almost entirely motivated by external factors and incentives will have a lot of trouble with the question “what do you enjoy doing?” because they focus mainly on what they get out of doing something, rather than doing things they enjoy. They may achieve success outwardly, but potentially feel hollow and unfulfilled internally. On the other end of the spectrum is someone who does only the things they find enjoyable and meaningful and potentially ends up on the outskirts of society for lack of means or connection (social fluency) to the rest of us. The point is, to function in society and to feel and perform our best, we probably need a healthy balance of both types of motivation.

Dan Pink shares some studies that clearly show when it comes to mechanical skill-based work, like factory work or manual labor, incentives, and reward-based motivation drives better performance. But when it came to creative or cognitive-based work, incentives actually worsened performance. Extrinsic factors were useful at creating compliance, while intrinsic factors were far superior at creating engagement. He lists several flow triggers such as autonomy, mastery, and purpose as the keys to motivation. He suggests integrating them into our modern thought-based work environments to achieve better productivity as well as a healthier relationship with work-life balance. Obviously, people still need to get paid for their work, but we can see the benefit of being aware of how best to wield these variables.

Some high profile companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Toyota, Tesla, and many others have leveraged these triggers extremely effectively and the results have been highly innovative and profitable, to say the least.

The Flow Research Collective actually spells out their formula for intrinsic motivation similarly to Dan Pink, listing curiosity, passion, purpose, mastery, and autonomy as the main drivers. Essentially we need to feel purpose towards some meaningful goal, we need room for improvement (and a growth mindset to believe in that improvement), and we need the free time to pursue this goal. Curiosity plays a role by helping us find what we are interested in initially, while passions can arise from the intersection of multiple points of curiosity. Purpose, however, is developed by applying passion towards a societal or global scale issue. Essentially, how is your passion able to make the world or a community better off. Not only does that last step increase motivation dramatically, but it also increases your business opportunities as well.

The Japanese term Ikigai means “reason for being.” Ikigai in its most basic form is the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for. When all those factors are aligned you’re likely living an actively engaged life that is full of intrinsic motivation and flow. You look forward to getting up in the morning out of excitement for what you can accomplish that day. Finding the drive and energy to perform hard tasks is almost effortless, and when you do eventually run into a bump in the road, your ability to handle adversity is much stronger. To me, this is an integral part of addressing the burnout and mental health crisis that has been happening since well before the pandemic. Feelings of purpose and productivity can have a huge impact on emotional health and self-esteem. Lack of motivation, lack of purpose, and lack of freedom (autonomy), however, have a more dampening effect on us mentally.

Are all jobs capable of being this meaningful to the people who work in them? Perhaps not, but there are strategies to help address most situations. For starters, have you ever thought through what it is your company or job brings to the world? Maybe there’s something you can find there that makes you take more pride in your work. Maybe you realize you’re interested in learning more about an aspect of the company or how its product interacts with the world. And maybe it sparks an innovative idea in you worth pursuing. It can be a good reminder to go through this process once in a while as it’s far too easy to get trapped in a cycle of going through the motions, too busy to take notice of the greater context, and eventually lose touch with why we care or enjoy certain things in our life.

If this all sounds a little strange and fanciful, I don’t blame you. This is hardly how the current business world operates. If we want to incentivize, we immediately think of money, or maybe perks. This has obviously worked for decades so I’m not going to say it’s wrong. But we do have some tools at our disposal that we aren’t taking full advantage of, and that’s worth pointing out. There is also some supporting evidence for intrinsic motivation being as important, if not more so than money (once a baseline threshold has been met anyway). A study from MIT Sloan found that lateral career opportunities were 2.5 times more powerful as a predictor of a company’s relative retention rate compared with compensation, and lateral career opportunities were 12 times more predictive of employee retention than promotions. Lateral career shifts, in many cases, happen because that person is more interested intrinsically in the other role. Lateral moves based on more curiosity/interest will set that employee up with a better foundation for intrinsic motivation, leading to better productivity, more innovation, and thus better business outcomes for the company and more opportunities for the employee in the future. This is just one way to leverage some of these motivation triggers.

At the end of the day, intrinsic motivation drives flow by helping us be present and focus on the moment we’re in because we want to be in that moment. Think about a parent spending time with their child; the moment is enjoyable just for the sake of the activity and who it’s with, and there is no outcome desired. This draws the parent’s focus effortlessly. If we can harness that type of effortless engagement at work, we may find we get a lot more done in less time, and we get that work done with higher quality and more creatively. The overall effect should be less stress, more positive feelings of accomplishment and energy left over to do it again the next day, as well as the energy, attention, and desire to live the rest of your life to the fullest.

Five Tips for Individuals and Organizations

Look for points of interest. It’s hard to develop passion and purpose if you don’t know what you’re interested in first. Spending 20 minutes a day reading or learning about topics you’re curious about can be a great way to explore various points of interest as well as boost your pattern recognition and creativity.
Seek more autonomy. Autonomy can be very effective at boosting intrinsic motivation and performance at as little as five to ten percent of your workweek. That’s one afternoon per week to work on passion projects or trying to solve a problem that isn’t part of your core projects. Just the act of exploring things you care about in the work world at your own pace has the effect of increasing intrinsic motivation and improving your performance and outlook.
Look for ways you can gain mastery. Nothing is as unmotivating as being stagnant with nowhere to go. Looking for ways to improve your skills or efficiency automatically sets you up for new challenges and boosts motivation. If the challenge is scary but exciting, that’s probably a good place to start. Failure and feedback are just stepping stones for someone on a path to gaining mastery, so there’s no need to fear them.
Extrinsic motivators are great at providing compliance in a given role and intermittent rewards are interpreted as positive reinforcement/feedback.
Intrinsic motivators are a conduit for experiencing meaningful engagement in any task you participate in. The more autonomy, mastery, and purpose you provide individuals, the greater satisfaction they receive.

If you are interested in learning more about how Five to Flow can improve the five core elements of your organization, contact us today. For more information on flow concepts and how they improve business health, visit the Collective Voices blog for more articles.