How to motivate yourself - Freud and beyond

How to motivate your-SELF

Many different thinkers have been trying to deal with motivation throughout the centuries. What they end up doing is all converging on the self. At first this seems self-evident, but as you will see, the below suggestions from some of the great minds, include multiple selves and multiple angles to develop them. There’s the ego, wishes, a need for validation, a consciousness that watches, and a habitual self. People who are trying to improve themselves will find that they are good certain parts of their motivation and bad at others. For Sigmund Freud, he felt that the wish had to at some point alter the reality in some way with action in order to get out of neurosis and provide some sense of satisfaction where the will has some control over the environment. Until there are actions that create some small progress, the mind just spins in fantasy and becomes depressed because the reality is moving farther and farther away from the dream.

Freud – Sublimation: https://rumble.com/v1gv2fr-sublimation-sigmund-freud.html

Freud – The Pleasure Principle: https://rumble.com/v1gurqv-the-pleasure-principle-sigmund-freud.html

Jordan Peterson – Advice for people with depression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c9Uu5eILZ8

Intrinsic motivation

So the self needs to see some results to stay motivated, but for many, this may not be enough to get started. There can be voices in the mind that say “it’s not going to work out! Nothing works for me! It will fail like everything else that fails.” Wishes we have can become a burden because of a sense of entitlement that can creep in. Everything has to be perfect, or else we criticize ourselves to death. This is a sign that the self has not been developed enough yet. When people have a strong sense of self they can validate themselves and tolerate ambiguity and imperfect results. Many personality disorders have a sense of slavery connected to motivations and they don’t know how to develop a sense of wonder and curiosity. All endeavors become a chore to try and get a response from parents or authority figures like in the workplace. Doing anything with a loud command inside of the mind increases anxiety. Externally motivated people are only left with ego defense mechanisms that trained psychologists can attempt to heal. Intrinsic motivation experts Edward Deci and Richard Ryan found that even money tended to reduce that playful sense of motivation. Anyone who has ever gotten a promotion must have felt some pleasure at increasing their pay only to be daunted at the amount of work in front of them. When people choose jobs, few actually look at whether they have enough skills to do the job, and therefore have the chance to enjoy them. In most cases people only have some of the skills and the rest they will have to learn on the job.

Self-determination Theory – Deci and Ryan: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781462538966/

Play psychology

The Neo-Freudian Donald Winnicott continued Freud’s work and emphasized the mirroring aspect of the mother towards her child, and even the mirroring of the psychotherapist to the patient. If everything is about parents and authority figures, and getting attention from them, then how does one develop an autonomous self? For Winnicott the parent has to be patient enough so that the child learns to make their own contributions in their own time. The mother at first is not overly critical and perfectionist, but validates and accepts the paintings of the child, and their creative endeavours for example. This sends messages to the child that their contributions are of value and it makes real a sense of self to the child. They exist and they impact the world in a positive way. For an adult this may be difficult to develop. If they forgot that sense of self and are so conditioned with command and obey voices, and needs for validation from authority figures, it may be hard to feel play inside of one’s mind and body. Di Gammage in Playful Awakening quotes Bowen White on play psychology. Bowen found that humans and animals have a ‘play face’ that is recognizable in all cultures. One way to feel that sense of play is to make a play face and try to feel how different that is from the usual feeling of drudgery. Play has that element of learning orientation where people are more accepting of imperfections and capable of learning from mistakes. Play doesn’t require insane perfectionism and accepts that skills can be developed. A play face may seem silly but if you can feel those healing intentions in the mind then one can remember to incline the mind in that way, without needing a silly play face. The mental movements are felt and remembered and can become a healthy habit.

When people feel that they have trouble getting started on any project, one of the reasons is that they have forgotten what it feels like to play. Play reduces the entitlement and perfectionism that is found in many forms of procrastination. It’s the opposite of Yoda’s “do or do not, there is no try.” Depressed people listening to him would just “do not.” How about “playfully try and you are more likely to do.” It’s a form of inertia once you get started it’s easier to keep going. Another important entrance into play is to simply prepare for it, as Scott Eberle proposes. “To prepare for play is to begin to play; to ready for play is already to be at play. In all play, there is an instant or an interval that separates what has not been from what will soon be play.” When you are playing, some of the thoughts you might find in your mind include “let’s see if I can…let me try this…how can this be done right?” This is satisfying one’s own curiosity for knowledge and the results of these actions provide feedback for further learning and increased skill. Play though has to extend to difficult areas of life where we are not usually willing to play. We have to develop challenging projects like learning people skills, or starting a business. We may be out of our depth, but that’s where we have to be honest about our skill deficits. In the end the most efficient way to get started is to play and get on with it.

Playing and reality – D.W. Winnicott: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781138462212/

The Elements of Play – Scott G. Eberle: https://www.museumofplay.org/app/uploads/2022/01/6-2-article-elements-of-play.pdf

The Handbook Study of Play – by James E. Johnson, Scott G. Eberle, Thomas S. Henricks, David Kuschner: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781475807967/

Play and Reflection in Donald Winnicott’s Writings – André Green: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781855753877/

Yoda philosophy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ4yd2W50No

Wayne Gretzky talks about the lack of play and creativity in hockey 2:35 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kW5K08wdvI

Flow

On the heels of these insights is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who focused on how this play might turn into Flow states where there is a lot of continuity of concentration and feedback on our skills that pleasantly reduces that feeling of drag that we get when time feels slow. This is all based on how well we can handle challenges and starts already in childhood. As challenges are given to the children, parents and teachers are to modulate challenges so that they are not too hard or too easy, to prevent stress and boredom. Everyone knows what it’s like when they play a game where it’s too hard. The motivation created by play diminishes, and then there is a desire to give up. When a child grows up they move on from needing validation from parents, since they now truly believe in their developed sense of self. Then the search continues for projects where they can now parent themselves and prove themselves to themselves. It’s now their responsibility to modulate challenges and skills. With a healthy self, needing attention from others can be offset by wonder, curiosity and private goals that are playful, but can also be serious. Yet some goals are so intimidating, they require amazing skills that will test the most motivated person. A lot of what interferes with the sense of Flow is not being able to develop the required skills for big challenges, yet a few people still manage to attain world class skill.

Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: https://rumble.com/v1gvked-how-to-gain-flow-in-7-steps.html

Deliberate Practice

One of the main researchers on these high performers is Anders Ericsson. He found general rules on how people can develop high performance. For him that’s where the generality ends. There are no general skills. Skills are specific and require deliberate practice. The 10,000 hours of practice suggestion, that Malcolm Gladwell learned from his research of Ericsson and others, doesn’t hurt, but 10,000 hours of mediocre practice only leads to conditioned mediocrity. For Ericsson, one must move out of one’s comfort zone to practice skills at a higher level, and only then add the extraordinary levels of repetition, so that a high level of skill is conditioned in the subject. Some important elements of deliberate practice include following:

Knowing what sub-skills make up a total skill.
Having motivation to maintain consistent practice.
Practicing tasks that are within the reach of the subject.
Practicing sub-skills with a high-level of quality and attainment.
High levels of repetition.
Gathering feedback that provides important knowledge for further development of a skill.

Now one of the weaknesses of Ericsson’s and Csikszentmihalyi’s research is the fact that we have imperfect environments. When we apply these techniques to workplaces, for example, there are obstacles including office politics, barriers to knowledge, and inadequate schooling. Ericsson found that without deliberate practice, what is learned in school is forgotten. Most new professionals find that when they start their careers so much knowledge is in people at the workplace. Textbooks leave out so much. That knowledge is political and it’s not easy to find mentors who may share information to future competitors. A person may not be able to access all the sub-skills that make up a total skill. That leaves them to figure it out on their own or to curry favour from others and play political games. Until a supervisor has a desperate need to fill a role, there’s not much incentive for people to “give away the farm” so to speak. With mobbing and bullying being a real concern for many workplaces I’ll just refer you to René Girard’s work below to learn more about that subject.

Peak – Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780152062682/

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (2nd Edition) – K. Anders Ericsson, Robert Hoffman, Aaron Kozbelt, A. Mark Williams: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781107137554/

Outliers – Malcolm Gladwell: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780141043029/

Mastery – Robert Greene: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780143124177/

Violence and the sacred – René Girard: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780801822186/

Adding Value

For those who are stuck in areas where they see no movement or prospects, Kim and Mauborgne of the Blue Ocean Strategy would like you to give yourself a gut check. Questions of redundancy can be asked. If your profession has too many people, your high skills and effort may not add value. Employees can be a replaceable commodity. The largest impact a person can make is to add their high skill to areas that are neglected in the economy. Toxic workplaces, like Kim and Mauborgne’s Red Oceans miss opportunities for synergy between businesses that can trade their technological advancements with each other instead of competing for the same technology and methods that already exist. Employees who feel that they don’t have the resources to start their own innovative businesses can target new startups in other areas to apply for work. I would also add from my own opinion that we live in a global economy and people may have to think of different cultures that require your skills more than the place where you were born. When the economy is in a boom everything looks great, but in hard times, flexibility may be the only strategy left.

Stuck in a rut? Blue Ocean Strategy: https://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/blog/stuck-rut-shift-career-stalling-success/

Blue Ocean Strategy – W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781625274496/

Red Ocean Traps – W. Chan Kim, Renée A. Mauborgne: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9781633692664/

The Being of Beings

Lastly there are people who can make an impact, but feel it’s all meaningless and too much fuss for so little. One of the problems of modern society is the feeling of Falleness where we enjoy comfortable distractions that kill time and make us forget about our impending mortality. The philosopher Martin Heidegger had three alternative methods of motivation different from play. One was Authenticity where Heidegger would have a person bring the sense of awareness of their mortality to consciousness and how death could happen at any time. He emphasized how our personal death is our “own most.” This kind of motivation is another way that we can make our decisions feel like we own them. Following other people, Heidegger calls the they, can make us lose track of that authentic feeling. But because our personal death is our own, and separate from the they, and separate from any notion of a collective demise, then what we do with the time we have is intrinsically motivated if we choose to see it that way. Similar to that idiom of “seizing the day,” a subject can think in the present moment and act with a sense that we are leaving a legacy behind, and like the play method, it relieves that sense of perfectionism. For example, if we want to write that book, we might as well do it now because even if it’s not a bestseller for the they, you are doing it for your own most self. Authentic behaviour creates a relief because when you put your goals behind you, the anxiety of an unfinished project, and the negative self-talk you create, as you head towards death, disappears.

Heidegger’s later work provided a second method that focused on our ability to be aware of mental representations of objects of interest, and how addicted we can be in following them. Whether thinking about the future, or thinking about the past, we can lose the present moment motivation. By meditating we can watch how our feeling of self and an object of desire can arise at the same time, taking us from presence. He called this representing. The sense of an addictive “me” arises with an object of desire in the imagination. There is also an amount of stress arising at the same time motivating us to “act now” on those desires. Heidegger suggested that we can relax it and maintain that same presence of authenticity and use our time differently. It becomes a weaning process where we can weaken the addiction to thinking and all the actions that are connected with it. Abiding in the awareness gives us a clean slate to direct our thinking instead. Here we can actually create meaning in all we do.

Heidegger created another form of meaning where not all consumption has to be direct exploitation of people and the environment. We can have pleasure in not using our thoughts to consume all areas of the environment, but to instead enjoy beauty from a distance. When you have so much presence the sense of wonder that anything exists at all can enter the psyche. A lot of the stress in thinking creates this dualism of subject and object and an emotional distance of feeling alone and separate. Jumping from thought to thought doesn’t change this and can dull the mind to what is beautiful in of itself. This is because of the inherent boredom of the practice of representing and exploitation. All we end up caring about is what is useful to us. In his book Sojourns Heidegger called this third method of motivation, Shining. It is a form of pleasure that requires less exploitation, and to avoid any political correctness, this is not any shaming on exploitation because we all need to do some in order to survive, but there is a motivation inside all of us that would like to preserve some things for posterity so we can enjoy their Shining instead.

When the mind is quiet and the lonely sense of separation leaves, with those negative thoughts, and the oneness connects with the location, the heart can feel a thankfulness. A thankfulness that doesn’t require a subject that is talking in your mind saying “Thank You!” Concepts can keep controlling and covering over the natural feelings and that’s what we have to fight against. How this oneness works is when you incline the quiet mind to notice how the universe created you along with everything else in the environment. The experience you are having starts to feel like a gift. The exact opposite of entitlement and boredom. Entitlement comes from the stressful clinging and boredom that the addictive mind gets trapped in for most people who don’t cultivate meditation. It’s a difficult practice and it can’t be cultivated at all times, but we can sneak it in where we have the time. We can even do this with technology or anything that helps us in some way. Eg. Perceiving how a house protects us and feeling that sense of vulnerability and danger to all the things we build, brings a healthy concern that can be buried with stress in our rushed modern lives. That endearing feeling is empathy. The motivation when in this state is to be responsible and take care of what you have with a sense of love.

For example, Sojourns highlights Heidegger’s trip to Greece, where his goal was to feel the presence of the ancient world. His goal would be tested by modernity crowding the ancient ruins, including modern mentalities interfering with the pleasure of Shining. Heidegger studied the meaning of being, which included moods and intentions of people, but he also looked into the meaning of objects. Heidegger, who was an expert on Greece, was able to bring up narratives related to cultural locations and have the meaning of those locations be disclosed and help the ruins to Shine for him. This blank slate of presence allows one to reduce distractions and bring up appropriate narratives for what one is presencing. Like with basic environmental practices, we can preserve parks, and World Heritage Sites and let be the beings and watch them Shine with meaning and purpose. Of course, one also doesn’t have to go on lavish vacations and tours to find Shining. We can see it in all people, objects and animals when we can see meaning and purpose in them. The great thing is that if you are being threatened, as we all are at one time or another, the nihilism that Heidegger wanted to avoid is helped with that endearment and love. When we love things we can use our anger in a healthy way to defend what we love.