When a person has a drive to engage in certain kinds of productive behaviors, we say that they have good self motivation. When a person struggles to successfully undertake productive behaviors, repeatedly fails to meet goals and expectations or is unable to come up with reasons or desires to do the things they should, despite having all of the skills and abilities they would need to succeed, we say that they suffer from low motivation.
According to psychologists, problems with motivation are often due to a lack of self-efficacy, which is our ability to judge ourselves as being capable of succeeding and attaining a goal. In other words, when presented with a task, a person with a high degree of self-efficacy is able to construct a concrete goal, believe that they are capable of attaining the goal and plan a clear set of actions that will allow them to succeed.
On the other hand, a person with low self-efficacy may assume they will fail at the task and therefore not plan and carry out the steps that would be necessary to complete it successfully. Often, people with low self-efficacy feel unmotivated or apathetic or don’t try as hard as they can because they don’t truly believe they can succeed. Avoidance and apathy can end up becoming coping strategies that protect a person from perceived failures.
Although low motivation and low self-efficacy are distressing and sometimes crippling problems, they can be treated. The most common method of treatment is a coaching process in which a life coach or therapist helps a person set a goal, plan the steps to attain it and then carry out the steps. This therapeutic technique is especially effective in terms of increasing employee motivation, because it helps guide an employee through the correct process of completing a job-related task.
Not only does personal coaching concretely teach a person with motivational problems how to succeed, but it also results in positive reinforcement. According to psychologists, when we repeat an activity many times and are rewarded each time, we start to naturally get motivated to do this activity more often. This is because we begin to anticipate a positive reward each time and are therefore driven to engage in the behavior in the first place.
