Concepts for Coaches #5: Motivation

It's common to want to get more out of your athletes. When they aren't focused or don't seem to be giving great effort, it's a natural inclination to question their motivation. We might wonder if their heart is in it to practice, or if they believe that they don't need to prepare and can simply show up and be great.

Whatever the reasoning that lands you squarely with the idea that motivation is the issue you need to solve, there's one big motivation myth we need to uncover before we can move ahead.

And then I'll show you to motivate your athletes to get them engaged in the way you need.

Why losing motivation is bullsh*t

Myth: People can be "unmotivated".

Reality: People are not unmotivated, but differentially motivated.

What do I mean by that exactly?

There's a popular belief that people can be absent or "lose" motivation, based on the archaic idea that people have some internal essences that drive their behavior. What the science of motivation and human behavior tells us is that this view is patently false.

People don't lose motivation - they're just motivated to do something else more than they're motivated to persist in whatever you're hoping for.

Let's take this by way of example.

Suppose you've asked your athletes to complete a 2-mile run as a warm-up (not sure why you'd be doing this, but leave that aside for now). Around 1 mile in, one of your athletes slows down. A tenth of a mile later, they've slowed to a walk. Around 1.25 miles, they just sit down and rest.

What's happened here?

Putting aside the possibility of poor conditioning, the athlete's motivation shifted from completing the two-mile run to preserving energy. The athlete didn't "lose" motivation to run, they became more motivated to do something else.

The same dynamic plays out in people experiencing anxiety, stress, or depression. The person who doesn't get out of bed hasn't "lost" motivation. They're just more motivated to stay in bed.

Understanding motivation in this way can help shift your framing of how you bring motivation back. Rather than pouring into an empty cup, you can think about increasing motivation by pulling a series of levers. Just remember that, whatever lever you pull, it's going to have to fit several needs to really ratchet up the engagement.

Motivation Levers

Here's a really simple model to understand what might impact a person's motivation, as a function of the importance of achieving their goal and the difficulty of the task. This graph comes from research called "motivation intensity theory," and in the case of helping people manage motivation, can help us understand the baseline from which people are starting.

As you can see, people are motivated up to a point - specifically, the point in which their goal seems worth it to them. Beyond that, the cost of expending energy outweighs the benefit of saving it. This is actually advantageous from a performance perspective. The more energy your athletes have left, the better they can perform on subsequent tasks.

But suppose you want to. get more out of your athlete right now. What can you do?

Enter: self-determination theory.

Put simply, self-determination theory posits that people are motivated by three driving forces: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

Autonomy is a sense of control of their tasks.

Competence is a sense of progress toward a goal.

Relatedness is the sense of mattering to others, and something bigger than ourselves.

These are the three levels at your disposal to help ramp up an athlete's motivation in the area that you're looking for.

If you want your athletes to engage more in practice, one simple lever to pull is to give over some power. Ask your athletes what practice task they'd like to engage them, or have them design a whole day of practice. Give them some control over how they execute in the flow of the game. Allow them to make decisions and experiment. The coaching tendency to over-engineer performance saps athletes' motivation in a way we don't often recognize by restricting their sense of autonomy.

The next lever at your disposal is competence. How can you help your athletes experience success early and often in this task? We are wired to feed off of small wins. Much like compounding interest, small wins compound into energy and motivation over time. By helping people feel a sense of mastery over their environment and tasks, we can use this lever to our advantage.

Finally, make sure your athletes feel connected. Most athletes care deeply about their teammates and their team. Yet, practice can feel isolating - like you're out there "with your team" but truly by yourself. Create a sense of connectedness by highlighting how a particular task is connected to the team's mission, and how your athlete's individual success improves the odds of the team succeeding. The more connceted they are to one another and the team, the more this lever works for you.

Finally, make sure you're accurately calibrating the importance of the task and goal you're asking your athletes to work toward. Whether we tell people that all of our goals matter and that we should live each day like our last, the reality is that not all goals matter the same. When you're trying to tap into motivation, treating everything like it matters the same puts the honess on your individual athletes to moderate their investment for themselves, and thus you'll find individual variability in commitment and effort. They have no choice but to try and guard their own energy, since you haven't given them a guide of how much energy they should expend.

It's counterintuitive to think about telling your athlete that a particular task isn't as important as another, yet what you're doing is helping your athletes manage their energy more efficiently. This doesn't mean framing some things as unimportant. It simply means helping them better understand the effort you expect on a given task, relative to it's importance (see motivation intensity theory above). Since infinite energy is impossible, best to help calibrate expectations.

Ultimately, maintaining motivation is an ongoing challenge, but a manageable one. The more we can help our athletes feel a sense of success, ownership, and connectedness, the more motivated they'll be to deliver for themselves and the team.

If you’re interested in learning more about performance psychology and how you can leverage it to improve your own work, consider joining my first cohort at Maven.