Personal Motivation: Using Your Emotions to Pursue Goals

Almost everyone starts out keen. What sets apart the people who make it to the end is rarely more enthusiasm. It is a different relationship with effort: knowing why they are doing it, being clear about the next step and not reading every stumble as a verdict.

In Daniel Goleman’s emotional intelligence model (1995), motivation is the ability to channel your own emotions to sustain effort toward a goal, even when the road gets harder. It also covers how quickly someone recovers after a failure: people with this component well developed don’t avoid frustration, but they don’t let it become the end point either.

Goleman took the idea from a much broader research tradition. This article sums up what that research knows about what keeps motivation going over time.

How to recognize it

• Persistence in the face of difficulty: a first obstacle isn’t read as a sign to quit.
• Focus on the goal itself, not only on the outside recognition that reaching it might bring.
• Relatively quick recovery after a failure: the disappointment gets processed without settling in for good.

The why matters: self-determination theory

The most influential theory about the quality of motivation comes from Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, who summarized it in a widely cited 2000 paper. Their starting point is that measuring how much motivation someone has is not enough: what matters is where it comes from.

• Intrinsic motivation comes from interest in or enjoyment of the activity itself.
• Extrinsic motivation responds to something outside the task, such as a reward, an obligation or other people’s approval. Not all of it is the same: the kind that rests on goals you have made your own works very much like intrinsic motivation.

According to Deci and Ryan, the most stable motivation appears when three basic psychological needs are met:

1. Autonomy: feeling that what you do is your own choice, even within constraints.
2. Competence: noticing that you are capable and getting better.
3. Relatedness: feeling connected to other people.

An everyday example: two people sign up for Spanish classes. One does it because work requires it and treats every class as a chore; the other wants to travel and read in Spanish, and has also found a group that makes them laugh. Same schedule, same teacher, and the second person is far more likely to still be going in June. The types of motivation are covered in our articles on intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.

The what matters: concrete, challenging goals

More than three decades of studies by Edwin Locke and Gary Latham, summarized in 2002, show a very consistent result: specific, difficult goals lead to better performance than vague “do your best” goals.

According to their review, goals work because they direct attention, mobilize effort, increase persistence and push people to look for strategies. And they work better under certain conditions:

• The person is committed to the goal.
• They get feedback on how they are progressing.
• The task is not so complex that an outcome goal blocks learning. On new tasks, a learning goal (“try three different approaches”) can work better than a performance goal.

The how matters: “if… then” plans

Having a goal does not guarantee getting started. In 1999, psychologist Peter Gollwitzer studied a simple tool for closing that gap: implementation intentions, plans of the form “if X happens, then I will do Y.” For example: “if it’s seven o’clock and I get home, I put on my running shoes before I sit down.”

The plan hands the start-up over to a cue in the situation, so it no longer depends on deciding in the moment. A meta-analysis by Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran (2006), covering 94 independent tests, found a medium-to-large effect of these plans on reaching goals.

Progress feeds motivation

Harvard researcher Teresa Amabile and psychologist Steven Kramer analyzed nearly 12,000 diary entries from 238 professionals in 26 teams across seven companies. Each day, participants rated their mood and motivation and described one notable event of the day.

In their book The Progress Principle (2011) they concluded that, of everything that could make a workday better, what weighed most was making progress in meaningful work, even a small step. The days with progress were the days with the best mood and the most motivation, and setbacks weighed heavily in the opposite direction. Noticing progress, then, is not a detail: it is part of what sustains effort.

A single failure is not a verdict

The part of Goleman’s component that has to do with recovery fits with what psychology studies as resilience and as a growth mindset: the difference between reading a stumble as something specific (“it didn’t work out this time”) or as something general about yourself (“I’m no good at this”). Missing out on a promotion once says something about that round, not about the value of continuing to try.

Does 40% of well-being really depend on what you do?

Popular writing about motivation often cites a figure from psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky: about 50% of well-being would be explained by a genetic set point, 10% by life circumstances and 40% by intentional activity, what each person chooses to do actively and repeatedly. The proposal comes from a 2005 paper with Kennon Sheldon and David Schkade, and it was popularized by her 2008 book.

That breakdown does not hold up as a figure. In 2020, Nicholas Brown and Julia Rohrer reviewed the data it rested on and concluded that the 40% could not be derived from them, among other reasons because the effects of genes and circumstances do not add up independently. Lyubomirsky herself later revisited the model with Sheldon (2021). The underlying idea, that what you do repeatedly influences well-being, is still being studied; the exact number is not. In our article on social skills we look at one of the activities with the strongest support: looking after close relationships.

If you want to see where your motivation sits within the rest of your profile, you can take our emotional intelligence test.

Disclaimer: this article is for general information only and does not replace the assessment, diagnosis or intervention of a mental health professional.

Sources

• Deci, E. L., and Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227-268. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327965PLI1104_01
• Locke, E. A., and Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705-717. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.57.9.705
• Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493-503. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493
• Gollwitzer, P. M., and Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69-119. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1
• Amabile, T., and Kramer, S. (2011). The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. Harvard Business Review Press.
• Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. Penguin Press.
• Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M., and Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of General Psychology, 9(2), 111-131.
• Brown, N. J. L., and Rohrer, J. M. (2020). Easy as (happiness) pie? A critical evaluation of a popular model of the determinants of well-being. Journal of Happiness Studies, 21, 1285-1301.
• Sheldon, K. M., and Lyubomirsky, S. (2021). Revisiting the sustainable happiness model and pie chart: Can happiness be successfully pursued? The Journal of Positive Psychology, 16(2), 145-154.
• Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books.