Motivation Can Be Labeled as a Process That Acts as a Catalyst to Help Someone - Essay Example

Motivation and Behavior Motivation can be label as process which act as a catalyst to help someone to be career or success oriented and to achieve their goals with greater ease. Or in other words motivation is a will to do and a will to do best and better than others (Carter et al, 2005). Motivation can be of any kind. Motivation is like a guiding force or more metaphorically speaking a steam in a steam engine. It guides our action which can be anything like losing a weight, completing an assignment, reading a book and many other tasks from our daily routines. It is essential. Motivation is completely a positive word. Like saying, “I was motivated to smoke” is generally a false statement. Motivation is referred to a struggle which outcome is good and productive. Also the word ‘motivation’ leads us to many answers of the question which involve ‘why’s’. It is used very frequently in our daily lives to explain someone’s behavior and actions. For example you can say that Sarah was so motivated to clear her accounting exam that she studied late at night to achieve her respective goals. Motivation is basically a very wide term. Take the above statement as an n example. Sarah studied late at night because: • she wanted to get a job with significant salary, • wanted to prove her parents wrong who accused her for being a useless creature or • to get more marks within her friends. There can be many possibilities behind her hard work or motivation. So we can say that there are many forces which triggers motivating. Those forces can be economical, social, emotional or biological. Or in other words we can say that these are sources of motivation. Above mentioned terms are specified sources of motivation. In broader terms we generally use two terms/sources of motivation. Internal or external. Internal motivation or we can say self-motivation, personally speaking, is mandatory to achieve any goal. No matter how many people ask you to go to gym or force talk you to lose your weight if you lack in the self-motivation department you won’t be able to do anything. Internal motivation push a person to achieve his/her desired goals. More scientifically speaking, internal motivation is positively correlated with a percentage of energy, a person is willing to put in his actions to achieve what he need or desire. For example weight lost involves more internal motivation. Desire to look good or to feel and live a healthy life usually work as a catalyst increasing one’s self-motivation to lose his/her weight. On the other hand external motivation is very powerful. It pulls people with a great force to achieve particular goals. External sources of motivation includes economic, social and other forces (Petri, 1981). For example if Mr. A works in some multi-national company and his boss offer him bonus in the form of raised salary for extra hours of work then it’s an example of external motivation or more precisely speaking, economic motivation. Obviously most probably he’ll grab this opportunity because it is highly motivated. In our daily lives we can see numerous examples of external sources of motivation anywhere. In educational institution in the form of bonus marks or grades, in workplaces in the form of raised salary or significant bonuses or in our social lives. Behavior can be defined as an act. How people act or react in different situations under different circumstances define as their behavior. Being a human being we are always doing something like eating, walking, talking, sleeping and many other tasks. Why people engage themselves in one task than other? For example one can go and play with his peers instead of staying at home and playing Xbox. Our actions are strongly inter related with our motivations, either internal or external. So we can say our behavior and actions are very closely related with motivation. Motivation and behavior are close in many ways. Motivation leads to a particular behavior. For example a student set his goal to study for 3 hours straight at night so his actions and behavior most probably will work accordingly to achieve his respective goal. When we say, “Smith is very hardworking”, we are actually describing his behavior. Now what made him to be a hard worker? Obviously a motivation. So we can say that motivation results in energy and effort which thus directly effects person’s motivation. It makes them to perform their task wholeheartedly or energetically. Motivation is not only a word. In fact it is a complete process. We can’t say that smith was motivated to study late at night and viola he succeeded. Motivation includes: activation, persistency and intensity. It’s a whole process. First it requires activation of any particular goal. Then there is a persistency which is essential followed by the intensity of that particular task and then finally a success. So if we see consistency or persistency in someone’s behavior most chances are it is backed by a hardcore motivation. Or we can say motivation triggers persistency in people’s behavior forcing them to complete a particular goal until they achieve it. Also motivation helps people to behave logically and rationally. It effects people behavior and helps them to pay proper attention to whatever they are doing and helps them to perform their tasks more effectively. For example motivation may help student in a biology class to grasp and understand lecture or class material more effectively. In short way motivation enhance behavior, performances, thinking, effort and energy. Behavior exhibits motivation. For instance how you behave shows how motivated you are. A student working hard in math class shows how motivated he is to gain good scores in a specific subject. Moreover drawing a line between motivation and behavior can be very challenging. These two are correlated and intertwined and any minute change in one will result a change in another. So the solution is to treat these two terms together and focus on the combination of their combine strategies rather than treating motivation and behavior separately and individually. References Carter, L., Ulrich, D., & Goldsmith, M. (2005). Best practices in leadership development and organization change: How the best companies ensure meaningful change and sustainable leadership. San Francisco: Pfeiffer. Petri, H. L. (1981). Motivation. Cengage Learning. Read More