As discussed throughout the book, Black women experience racial trauma and discrimination and may internalize these messages and become highly self-critical. These experiences can lead to feelings of low self-worth, anxiety, and depression. In this chapter, we share the strategies of self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and self-love and acceptance to support Black women in emotional healing. We also discuss the use of the arts and religion and spirituality as resources for Black women’s healing and thriving.

This chapter might be euphemistically called a summary of the book “in pictures,” as it includes all of the key graphics used throughout the book to represent the core ideas of MST (including summaries of goal content themes, different kinds of emotion patterns, and personal agency belief patterns), TSP (including representations of the TSP Theory of Motivation and Optimal Functioning and the TSP Theory of Life Meaning), and principles for motivating self and others. This chapter was designed to provide readers with a quick summary of the book’s contents and an easy way to recall key ideas related to the challenge of motivating self and others.

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.

This chapter helps fill a significant gap in the human sciences and professional practice, as theories of life meaning are both few in number and somewhat narrow in scope despite the scientifically and personally compelling nature of the topic. For those focused explicitly on motivating self and others, it opens new horizons for understanding how to elevate human experience under both favorable and adverse circumstances, consistent with the goal of creating a comprehensive theory of motivation and optimal functioning. It does so by explaining not only the nature and antecedents of feelings of life meaning but also that such feelings are facilitated and enhanced by TSP motivational patterns. Life meaning can thus provide humans with the motivational strength needed to overcome major life challenges and obstacles by telling us that “life is worth living” and “these goals are worth pursuing.”

This chapter provides a nontechnical introduction to the components of human motivation (goals, emotions, and personal agency beliefs) that capitalizes on the intuitive understandings that readers already have about motivation from their own everyday experience. This is done through thought questions that encompass motivation of both self and others. The concept of “motivation at its (human) best” – what we call Thriving with Social Purpose – is also introduced as an advance organizer for the chapters to follow.