How do you motivate yourself? What works in motivating others? Do you turn to the stick, the carrot, or a combination of both? These age-old questions are at the root of humans trying to turn what they need to do into what they want to do and manage complex slates of desire and obligation.

Ayelet Fishbach is a professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She is an expert in the fields of motivation and decision-making and the author of Get it Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation. Ayelet’s human motivation research has been recognized via many international awards, including the Society of Experimental Social Psychology’s Best Dissertation Award and Career Trajectory Award, and the Fulbright Educational Foundation Award.

Ayelet and Greg talk about motivation on all levels and from all angles. They discuss the similarities and differences between employers motivating employees, teachers motivating students, and parents motivating children. Ayelet sheds insight on what common mistakes doom the best of intentions and how to set up tasks to properly harness your natural motivational triggers and improve your self-control.

Episode Quotes:

The difference between willpower and self-control

08:33: Willpower is the power you use to motivate yourself, get yourself to do something. But they're different in the sense that we often think about willpower in the literature, as well as in lay language; self-control is overcoming yourself as doing something you don't want to do, but you can somehow get yourself to do. Self-control is required when you have a goal conflict. When there is a goal that you want to pursue, but there is something else that stands in the way that you want to do.

What are the barriers in learning from negative feedback?

19:21: There are two specific barriers to learning from negative feedback. One is that it hurts. And the other one is that it's often hard, just cognitively, to learn from negative feedback.

What’s wrong with avoidance goals?

13:14: The problem with avoidance goals is that they make us rebels. They point to mind the things you should not do and are just not fun to pursue. To find another hobby is better than to stop obsessing on your current hobby.

One of the problems with goals

43:37: We set goals that are ambitious. We set goals that we don't know if we can reach this specific target. We don't know if we can do this much by that time. And we did that on purpose—the challenging target is better than the target we know we can achieve. But the problem is that once we fail on that target, we might give up.

On setting goals

06:21: How to best set a goal? I would say it's the same for setting a goal for others and yourself, and there are a few principles. We want the goal to be enticing, something we aspire to achieve. That seems more like a goal and less like a chore.

Show Links:

Guest Profile:

Faculty Profile at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Contributor’s Profile on Psychology Today
Ayelet Fishbach Website
Ayelet Fishbach on LinkedIn
Ayelet Fishbach on Twitter
Ayelet Fishbach on Facebook

Her Work:

Ayelet Fishbach on Google Scholar
Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation
The Motivation-Cognition Interface: From the Lab to the Real World: A Festschrift in Honor of Arie W. Kruglanski

219. Motivation Dos and Don’ts feat. Ayelet Fishbach

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc