#23: The way you're trying to motivate yourself is all wrong
All that beating yourself up about how lazy you are, and about how you're not achieving the things you need to achieve as fast as you need to achieve them - it's just tough love, right? It's what keeps you going and striving to succeed. Well, actually ... lol no, imperfectionists. Your well-meaning self-criticism and self-shaming are serving no purpose whatsoever. Don't argue. It's science.
Your imperfect friend is back to show you why beating yourself up not only feels bad - it's also holding you back. You can make yourself more productive and efficient by showing yourself some love. Get that kettle on and have a listen for some science-backed ways to feel good and get stuff done.
For the Goal Contract mentioned in this episode, click here.
Episode transcript:
You are making such a mess of motivating yourself to get stuff done. Here’s what to do instead.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hey, imperfectionists - let me ask you something. How do you motivate yourself to get your most important work done? By ‘most important’, I don’t just mean daily admin like replying to emails and attending meetings. I mean the work that you care deeply about getting done, and doing well, and the success of which is closely tied to your sense of self-worth. Examples might be your thesis, or a book or article you’re working on, or a presentation you’re due to give to an audience of people whose approval you care about.
I’m being somewhat disingenuous by asking you how you motivate yourself to do this sort of work, because actually I already know how you go about it - at least if you’re anything like my coaching clients.
We often use the term ‘carrot and stick’ in relation to motivation. Getting someone to do something involves a combination of reward and punishment: reward when they do what they’re supposed to be doing, and punishment when they don’t do what they should. However, in my coaching sessions with clients, I’ve been struck time and time again by how their approach to motivating themselves to do the things they really care about is all stick and no carrot. They tell themselves that they’re lazy, that they’re not doing enough, that they’ll never make it, that their colleagues or friends or fellow students are doing much more - and better - than they are themselves. They tend towards the least charitable interpretations of their own behaviour; for example, by defining ‘progress’ very narrowly, to include words they’ve actually written in their thesis or article but not time spent thinking about their research or talking it over informally with friends. And what’s more, they’re also really resistant to the idea of not doing these things - of giving the stick a rest for a while, and trying the carrot instead. When I ask them what they do to celebrate their successes, they laugh, as if the very idea is childish and ridiculous. When I try to frame their efforts in a more positive light, for example by pointing out that the Facebook exchange they had where they debated their thoughts about their research with their friends should be counted as progress on their thesis rather than written off as time frittered pointlessly away, and that therefore they’re actually working harder and achieving more than they give themselves credit for, they push back against this idea. And when we discuss why they are so opposed to giving themselves a break, we discover something really interesting together. It turns out that they’re afraid to view themselves in a more positive light because they think that if they do, they’ll take their foot off the accelerator, kick back, and stop even trying. The very idea of being kinder to themselves - or even just a bit less mean to themselves - makes them anxious. It feels like relinquishing control.
Perhaps this view of how progress happens strikes a chord with you. It certainly strikes a chord with me - I have a long and pretty deranged history of being absolutely horrendous to myself, as in, so horrible that if you overheard someone else saying the things to me that I routinely said to myself, you’d confidently conclude that I was in an abusive relationship with a sadistic sociopath.
There’s a couple of things I want to say about all this. The first is that, if you really believe that the best way to motivate yourself is by being mean to yourself, and that it’s somehow dangerous to be kind to yourself, then I’m afraid you’re rowing against the tide of some very well established and long-accepted conclusions in psychology. The ‘carrot and stick’ approach to motivating ourselves to get on with our work resembles the operant conditioning model of behaviour modification, which is associated with the psychologist B. F. Skinner. The idea is that behaviour that is followed by something nice will be repeated, while behaviour followed by something nasty is less likely to be repeated. If you’ve ever tried to train a pet (or a child, for that matter), you’ll be familiar with this approach even if you’ve never read Skinner. Even so, Skinner’s approach was a bit more nuanced than this. There is more than one way of reinforcing a behaviour so that it will be repeated in the future. One way - positive reinforcement - involves following the behaviour with something nice, like treating yourself to a glass of wine after you’ve hit a deadline, or (if you’re unfortunate enough to be a lab rat) receiving a tasty pellet of food after you’ve pressed a lever in the box you’ve been confined to. This is the sort of scenario that generally springs to mind when we think of rewarding our good behaviour. But another way of reinforcing a behaviour - negative reinforcement - involves following the behaviour by eliminating some nasty state of affairs. For example, in one experiment, Skinner taught his lab rats to press a lever by putting them in a box with an electrified floor, and turning off the electric current when they pressed the lever. If you’ve ever been tempted to think that it’s unnecessary to reward yourself for meeting a deadline or achieving some other goal because meeting the deadline or achieving the goal - and therefore being able to stop feeling stressed about it - is its own reward, then you’re basically on board with negative reinforcement. And if, like a lot of my clients, you’re reluctant to be kind to yourself because you’re worried that doing so will encourage you to stop trying, and then you’ll never achieve your goals - then it looks like you’re trying a bit of negative reinforcement. You’re waiting until after you’ve achieved your goals before you stop beating yourself up, because if you don’t then you’re basically giving yourself the reward before you hit your goals, and in that case what’s the point in trying for the goals? But there are a few problems with what you’re doing.
The first relates to your pesky tendency to move your goalposts. Goalpost-moving was the subject of episode #16 of this podcast. You start out with some goal in mind - but the problem is, that goal is poorly-defined. Instead of ‘I will write 500 words by 5pm today’, you tell yourself ‘I will do a decent amount of work by 5pm today’. And then when 5pm rolls around, you find some reason to deny that you’ve hit your goal - so, instead of congratulating yourself on any progress that you have made, you carry on beating yourself up about being a lazy good-for-nothing. You might like to think that by being hard on yourself, you’re encouraging yourself to try even harder - but in fact, by failing to recognise any positive steps that you’ve taken, you’re failing to reinforce the behaviour you want to encourage. You’re failing to make it more likely that you’ll work towards your goal in the future. Your negativity towards yourself is completely pointless. You’re doing the equivalent of leaving on the electric current even after the poor rat presses the lever. Just as the rat, in this case, has no motivation to press the lever next time it’s put in the box, you’re giving yourself no motivation to work hard towards your goals tomorrow.
The first is that, by continuing to beat yourself up, you’re actually doing two things at once, and neither of them effectively. To see this, let’s take a step back. As well as noticing that reinforcing (or rewarding) a behaviour makes it more likely to be repeated in the future, Skinner also noticed that punishing a behaviour makes it less likely to be repeated. But punishing a behaviour is not a very good way to stop it - or to extinguish it, in Skinner’s terminology. My cats know this: they get yelled at when they dig up my houseplants, but my yelling hasn’t extinguished their houseplant-digging habit - they’ve learnt to wait until I’m out of the room and then they dig to their hearts’ content. Punishing a behaviour also doesn’t address why that behaviour is happening in the first place. If we’re behaving in a certain (undesirable) way for a reason, then stopping that behaviour needs to involve understanding why it’s happening and finding a way to address that reason without engaging in the behaviour - in other words, rather than simply punishing the undesirable behaviour, we need to offer a more positive way of behaving. In your case, this might mean that if you procrastinate over your writing because writing makes you anxious, you’re not going to solve your problem with procrastination simply by punishing yourself. You need to address the underlying anxiety in a way that doesn’t involve procrastinating.
Anyway, what I mean when I say that when you beat yourself up, you’re actually doing two things at once, is this. You’re attempting some negative reinforcement, in that you’re telling yourself that you’ll stop beating yourself up when you achieve your goal. But you’re also punishing yourself for not making satisfactory progress. You reach the end of the day, you’ve made some progress but (to your mind) not enough, and so you punish yourself for your underperformance. What that looks like in practice is this: you beat yourself up while you’re working, and also after you’ve finished working. You’re the scientist expecting the rat to learn to press the lever to turn off the electric current, even though the electric current doesn’t stop when the rat presses the lever. That poor, scared, stressed rat. And poor, stressed, anxious you.
There’s a final problem with this approach that I want to mention. While you’re going all-out on your ineffective cocktail of negative reinforcement and punishment, you’re completely neglecting positive reinforcement. By recognising your own progress and rewarding yourself, you could be helping yourself be more productive and achieve your important goals faster and more efficiently. But you’ve ruled out doing that, because it involves being nice to yourself, and being nice to yourself is bad. You don’t deserve niceness: you’re too lazy and you haven’t worked hard enough (or so you think). The thing is, although you’re afraid that being nice to yourself is simply going to encourage you to relax and stop trying, in fact it’s going to have exactly the opposite effect. By recognising and rewarding your own achievements, you reinforce the behaviour that leads to success. And this is a great illustration of the fact that ‘Be nice to yourself’ is not simply a feel-good, touchy-feely, sunlit-uplands, but ultimately meaningless maxim. It’s science. If you can’t bring yourself to be nice to yourself simply because you deserve to be treated nicely (which you do, of course), then do it because you want to apply a scientifically sound method of behavioural modification in order to achieve the things you care about achieving.
So, what does ‘be nice to yourself’ look like, in practice? One thing that it might involve is rewarding yourself for hitting the targets you’ve set yourself: a glass of wine or a bubble bath or a takeaway at the end of the day. As an aside, let me remind you that the targets you set yourself need to be clearly defined, not the sort of fuzzy, vague ones that you can wriggle out of acknowledging later. If you need help with this, go and download the goal contract from the Resources page of my website - I’ll put a link to it in the notes for this episode. Another thing that being nice to yourself might involve is making the process of working towards your goals less fraught and more pleasant. Working on something that you care deeply about can be anxiety-inducing: what if you fail, or what if you’re going about it in the wrong way, or what if you disappoint the people who are interested in your success? If that’s you, then you need some love and nurturing as you work towards your goal. How you do that is going to depend on what sorts of things nurture and comfort you. I sometimes sit in bed with a cup of tea when I’m feeling particularly anxious about working on my book. Sometimes - now, don’t laugh - I literally give myself a hug (though generally not when I’m in public). The writer and speaker Mel Robbins gives herself a high-five - she’s even written a book about it. Show yourself some love. If someone you love was working on something that they feel anxious about, how would you nurture and comfort them during the process? Not by telling them how lazy they are, I expect. Whatever you’d do for them, do it for yourself. It’s not going to result in you turning into a lazy, decadent mess, I promise.
You can do this. You got this. Give yourself a break, and trust the fucking process, imperfectionists.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
Enjoy the show?
Please leave a review in Apple Podcasts.
Don’t miss an episode - subscribe using the links below!