Chapter 8 - Guiding Principles for Motivating Self and Others

Summary

Many books that aspire to go beyond descriptions of motivational processes to address the question of how to motivate self and others adopt a tactical approach that is overly mechanical and often limited to a narrow range of change pathways and targets of intervention. To avoid these pitfalls, this chapter focuses on broad principles for enhancing optimal human functioning rather than offering simplistic “prescriptions” for motivating self and others. In doing so, we also explain why the uniqueness of individual motivational patterns – psychologically, developmentally, and contextually – makes it impossible to offer formulaic advice for motivating self and others. To engage the reader’s interest, we use a novel Q&A format after the initial presentation of overarching principles to illustrate how a “principled” approach to motivating self and others can be used to diagnosis motivational problems, identify multiple targets of intervention, and envision a variety of pathways to more optimal functioning.