Motivation Theory and Examples

Whether you don't have enough motivation to do something in your life or you don't have a real purpose to guide your motivation, the concept of “motivation” from an evolutionary and psychological point of view may be the key to helping you in your life.

In this article, we'll explain motivation from a “motivation theory” perspective and offer some practical tips to follow, which will help you guide your motivation to serve a consciously chosen goal you want to achieve.

To be motivated, you first have to set a goal that you want to achieve, use your strong will and skills to achieve this goal and take actions that make it part of your experience, as your personality is the product of all the bad and good experiences that have passed in your life.

How strong are you in achieving your goals or dreams if you can channel that power and focus it on desired outcomes? Could you start doing it simply by changing your thoughts? It's not about finding new ways to move forward randomly and unplanned. It's about your ability to understand the interconnectedness between your feelings and your motivations and why that interconnection might go away.

What is Motivation Theory?

The term "motivation" as it relates to human behavior is thought to have been first used by William Wordsworth in his 1918 book Dynamic Psychology.

The American philosophers J. B. Watson and J. J. B. Morgan published a paper in the April 1917 American Journal of Psychology entitled Emotional Reactions and Psychological Experiences.

However, Wordsworth says, “A machine has a mechanism that if it's turned on, it works a certain way, but it has to be oriented to move, and the engine needs the power to run.”

Watson and Morgan are talking about the relationship between our critical emotional state and our motivation. They have focused their thesis on three basic emotions: fear, anger, and love. Motivation is formed through these feelings toward our desire to obtain something that we do not have and generates sufficient willingness within us to take action to obtain what we want.

Motivation theory examines the emotions behind a particular human behavior that pursues a goal. It is more fundamental than other theories because it lies at the heart of everything we do.

The Role of Time in Motivation Theory

To be sure, you've heard of the term “delayed gratification” before, and it's often used as a critical indicator of intelligence and a marker of success in life. In short, this term implies the understanding that future gains can be essential if we do not seek immediate reward.

Regarding our motivation, time is a central component of how everything we want happens. Time is a challenge because you start in one place and want to end up somewhere else. The real reason why you are motivated to make a decision is that your future is different from your present, and the motivation may be related to the desire to control because you want to be sure of what your future will be to make sure that your financial and emotional situation is secure.

Let's say you're excited about earning a college degree and receiving a pension because you want to create better jobs and financial security when you grow up, as you take action now to reap the supposedly good results in the future.

The limited nature of time also leads us to exploit it, as the realization that one's life is limited leads one to go through many experiences and events before it is too late.

Find out what motivates you

In many older discussions among philosophers about "motivation," they believed it was a new term that could be used flexibly.

If you consider it difficult to find motivation at work or in your personal life, you may find it easy to sum it all up by knowing why. We stick to the idea that our tasks should be done perfectly, but this stubborn mechanism can lead to motivations for choosing specific paths that are useless.

Psychology seeks to address childhood trauma, as our subconscious mind is programmed with emotional energy, and in the early years of childhood, we are more vulnerable to trauma because our consciousness is not yet complete, so it is straightforward to survive the trauma, which controls our behavior until adulthood.

Wondering why we want - or don't want - something is the vital first step in finding motivation, and you may need more motivation for something. The tendency toward procrastination and self-sabotage is that you don't want it.

Theory of Motivation and the Midlife Crisis

Fear is the emotional driver that leads us to act in a certain way, such as the fear of not having what we wish for in the future, and this is what lies in most midlife crises to realize that you were living your life motivated by someone else, whether intentionally or unintentionally. It is one of the biggest fears, but you can avoid this by focusing on your motives consciously.

Most people know that working in a job enables them to achieve a series of societal goals such as a mortgage, pension, savings account, etc., which is unsatisfactory, as they do so because they want to invest interest in the future. Still, of course, they do not want to spend most of their lives in the service of their last few years, but when the real motives behind those actions are revealed, all the schemes turn into chaos.

How to understand your motivation and regain control?

One of the most important things you must accept and believe in is that you have never failed in anything, as you work 24/7 and carry out all tasks to the fullest. So, there is no such thing as failure, but incorrect beliefs are unfortunately present. You must start thinking of yourself as an innovator of your reality, and you certainly can't control external forces in yourself. Indeed, you can control your response to those forces.

A simple way to understand and do this is to practice gratitude. By simply looking for all the things you're grateful for in your life, you begin by training your subconscious mind to start seeing more to be grateful for, and this starts feeding into your retinal activation system (RAC) and cuts a lot. It's hard to understand your subconscious.

You will be grateful for everything around you shortly, and when you are, you will have regained your strength as a maker of your reality. However, when you accept this basic truth, you have to accept the whole aspects of this truth, as everything that led to this result and all the experiences you went through in your life are your responsibilities. Of course, you may be exposed to many obstacles beyond your control, but how you face them is entirely up to you. You must realize that you can form yourself but do not blame or judge yourself. Once you are armed with this fact, you can make new decisions for new results.

Impact of the environment on motivation

From a geographical point of view, it is quite clear that where the seasonal variations are most severe, people should have generated an impulse to support themselves during the less severe periods to overcome the more severe ones. The motive here is just a simple fear of survival.

When it comes to societal factors, it's critical first to understand why we're social in the first place, much of it stemming from the need to care for babies. At the same time, newborn animals can stand and walk unaided within hours after birth, and babies need years of dependence to develop complex motor skills.

So, we are born with an innate understanding of our weaknesses and our need for help from others, and this motivates us to form a group of people who support each other, whether through family, friends, or mentors. We know we need help, as this fear of not receiving the care and guidance required to survive drives us to form bonds with others.

Many things are subject to the “evils” of capitalism and money being the path of all other evils, which implies that these are the kinds that should not be the motivation for ourselves.

There is no doubt that people feel pressured to keep up with the social and physical level of their neighbors or friends - but in fact, this is driven by fear, fear of missing out or being judged, and not having a group of supportive people. This feeling stems from the same place where we need containment and integration.

Money is nothing more than a representation of a set of values valued by most people, where we can attach any meaning to the money we want and look for more money to satisfy our true desires rather than someone else's desires. It does not change the result or even the motivation on the face of it, but what changes are the intention, and here lies the critical motivation.

Create a new incentive

How can we regain control of what motivates us to maintain motivation in the areas that serve us the most?

We've talked about time and how it's fundamentally linked to our motivation. We don't have what we want to achieve in the present, so we're driven to achieve it at a time in the future, but what if you act as if you have what you want now?

We're talking about behaving in the style of the character you want to create, different from what you want to achieve. If you can understand and feel the emotional state you will be in on an ordinary day in your dream life, you can start feeling that way now. Living in those situations invokes that reality you dream of and makes it an inevitable part of your future.

Emotions are the primary driver of energy, so by sticking to the repetition of the emotions we want - that is, simply imagining our future and then allowing ourselves to feel the emotions associated with it -we communicate with the future we want, an expansive connection, rather than a contraction.

And indeed, it's all about intention. If you sit and think about being very rich and living your life in luxury, but you do it from the perspective that you do not have this life now, you ward off your feeling of inferiority. By doing so, you will attract more luck to yourself. If you have the same image about the life you want, but this time you think about how wonderful this feeling is, you can expand and strengthen your thoughts and motivations, where your intention makes a difference, ultimately keeping your motivation.

In conclusion

Motivation theory is complex and simple at the same time, and it is something that everyone naturally understands. Still, to bring it fully under the control of our minds, we have to do a lot of complex thinking.

If you find that your motivation for something requires more conscious effort to maintain, or if you're wondering if you want something, try the following steps:

1. Fully understand your motivations:
   • Are you acting out of fear, anger, or love?
   • Are you driven to achieve someone else's goal?
   • Recognize and confess the truth without making any judgments.
   • Ensure your goals encourage you to grow rather than representing the unattainable and making excuses for not trying.
   • Spend time imagining your future as if it were a typical day for you, see the impact of emotions in your body, and recognize them as you begin to appear in your daily life now.
2. Understand the reasons for your motivations and identify your intentions from a broad perspective:
3. Practice retaining the emotional reluctance associated with your desired future, and keep an eye on the changes happening to you in the present.