Unlock Your True Potential | Self Determination Theory By Michael B. Clegg

If you want to learn how to stay motivated, you have to learn this psychological concept called self determination theory, which is really focusing in on intrinsic motivation more than extrinsic. Both are important. But intrinsic motivation is what are the things innately that get us excited? Like, I have some very intrinsic goals that really excite me that I can get out of bed early in the morning because I'm excited to accomplish those things. I'm excited to work through some of those things. Now because of that intrinsic motivation, the goal is to drive and engage in activities where you have inherent satisfaction. An SDT Self Determination theory identifies three basic psychological needs and I use an acronym called ARC to remember them. Arc. Those three needs are autonomy, relatedness, and ultimately competence. So let's start with the first, autonomy, which is the need to feel in control of your behaviors and your goals. It really just involves a sense of choice that you have in the activities that you're going to get involved in. So when you think about it, are you as a leader delegating tasks or delegating authority? I know last week when we were talking about the seagull manager, we talked about them being in control and oftentimes delegating tasks rather than authority. So when you're delegating tasks, you're not giving your employees the autonomy that they need. When you're delegating authority authority, you're giving them the autonomy to make the decisions to get to the outcome the way that they want to get to the outcome, not the way that you want them to get to the outcome. Number two, the R stands for relatedness. This is the ability to connect with others and belonging to a community or a group where you feel at home. And honestly, if you're following the leadership squared pathways that I teach, which really speak to culture and connection, you're already doing this anyways. If not, you're missing a big piece of the puzzle. And the number 3, the C stands for competence. You want to feel that you're being effective. You want to feel that you're having an impact on other people. You might go cleg. Why does this matter? Well, we know that employee engagement is not growing. Employee engagement has been flat to declining for some time now. The great thing is we now know what drives employee engagement. Employees. And self determination theory is going to be one of those things that helps that process. So think about it. When you statistics like this, 49% of employees are happy. Only 49% of those employees, and interestingly enough, only 12% of employees that quit. It's actually due to compensation. And I would be willing to bet if I asked you that question, why did most employees quit? You would probably say because of the money. And in fact it's such a small portion of of the employees that quit. So what else is happening? What else is happening is that employees are miserable at work. Now I can read you a few of the extrinsic motivation. The things that I would say generally speaking matter, but that's not what's going to sustain you. There's certain things like behaviors that are being driven by rewards, that's an extrinsic motivator. Or being driven by pressure from a higher up, that's an extrinsic motivator. You can be driven by personal goals and values. Technically those are also included in extrinsic motivators. But it comes back down to your basic psychological needs, which is why I came up with the acronym arc. You want autonomy. You want to be related and connected with others. And you want to know that you're getting better at your job, the competence. So where can you give your employees autonomy? Work processes, decision making, career development opportunities. All the employees that get those things experience a higher level of job satisfaction because they get the opportunity to be creative. They get the opportunity to feel productive. They get the opportunity to feel like they're making an impact. These are all critical things as part of employee engagement. So here are four steps that you can do to help start making steps towards identifying self determination theory for yourself. And the first thing is set personal goals. Now we like to call those personal goals impossible goals. You're going to be excited. The bigger and the more bold the goals are, the, the more natural that excitement is going to be. Number two, embrace autonomy. Now this might sound easy, but for those that are accustomed to being told what to do every single day, being autonomous is actually pretty difficult. So look for opportunities in your life to make independent decisions. Remember, this is all part of the learning process. Everything that you do is a draft. It can all be changed, upgraded, updated or pulled back. Number three, you got to nurture relationships. And that could mean as we talk about identifying new who's people that can help you get to where you want to be. And then number four, seek challenge. This could also be paired with the first one which is setting personable or impossible goals. Really when you think about setting challenges like put yourself out there, the more that you operate in discomfort, the more growth that you're going to get. And I know it's not fun, I know it's not exciting to operate in discomfort, but I promise you, it will absolutely change your life faster than anything else will. Just remember the reason you're doing this. When employees have autonomy, the ability to connect, and they can get great at their jobs, they're going to be satisfied. Those are the people you're going to retain. We look at coaching your employees look for opportunities in those three areas because the benefits way outnumber any time that will be lost spending teaching them or learning about those benefits or what's important to them. As you're looking to retain your team, this is one of those little things that you can help them identify. Where are they motivated? Because a motivated employee is a happy and engaged employee. A happy and engaged employee is an employee that produces at higher levels than those that are not. So I hope you have a great week. Looking forward to next week's where we're going to talk about morning routines and the importance of those. So have a great one. Please share this. As usual, you can go ahead and comment or send me a message about how this impacts you, or if you've got ideas of things that you'd like for me to cover. Talk to you soon. See you next time.