The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

(this is raw unedited text transcribed directly from the audio)

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Female:           Maybe I’m not made to dance.

Male:               You like dancing? Then you were made to dance.

Female:           I want to dance more than anything. It’s just I know I suck. My mom and dad paid so much for my lessons.

Male:               There is the problem. You need to dance for yourself. Not for anybody else.

Dr. Kenner:      One of the questions that many of us don’t ask ourselves is, “How do I motivate myself?” How do I motivate myself and we’ll use the example of sports, because I have a sports psychologist with me. How do I motivate myself, whether it’s in sports or life in general? Am I a good coach to myself? With me today is Dr. Judy Van Raalte. She’s a psychology professor at Springfield College in Massachusetts and she has worked with youth sports athletes and elite and professional athletes in the United States and around the world. She has written four books and presented at conferences in 11 countries. She is a certified consultant and she is listed on the United States Olympic Committee sports psychology registry. Welcome Judy!

Dr. Raalte:       It’s a pleasure to be here.

Dr. Kenner:      Tell us a little bit about sports psychology, in terms of motivation?

Dr. Raalte:       A lot of people are motivated to do things. So most of the time, motivation isn’t a big problem. But every now and then, things just get hard. And getting motivated to exercise, that can be a really tough one. And to do the right thing can just slow us down. Sports psychologists work with teams and athletes to help them get back on track.

Dr. Kenner:      People don’t like to feel vulnerable. They don’t like to open up to people and to tell them what the problem is and they try to keep this macho front – women and men – so you don’t get a feeling of, you never get to the problem of what their motivational problem is.

Dr. Raalte:       It’s true that we sort of have a society where you tough it out. If it’s hard, you do it anyway. And we’re also busy. So sometimes we don’t have time to think about how to get ourselves motivated. But there are a number of great things we can do to motivate ourselves and one of them is just to think about what really motivates us. If you’re a person who wants to exercise more and you find that going to the gym, you just don’t have time in your day, you might be a person who parks your car in one location and walks or jogs to Starbucks, has that cup of coffee and then jogs back and that’s your exercise. Some people walk to work and I guess it depends what you need to wear to work and if there’s a shower available, but that could be a possibility. And there are other kinds of rewards. Growing up, I had a world-famous soccer player Christine Lilly who lived in my town. I wasn’t a soccer player, but my sister played success with her and Christine Lilly’s grandmother gave her $5 for ever goal she scored as a kid. That’s external motivation and she should have more motivation than just five bucks from Grandma, but Christine Lilly grew up to be one of the best soccer players in the world. Internationally known. Most soccer games of any woman soccer player. And Christine tells us that when she scored a World Cup goal, even though she’s made lots of money playing soccer, she still called Grandma and asked for her $5.

Dr. Kenner:      That’s so great.

Dr. Raalte:       I guess I would say a wide variety of types of motivation. Internal motivation – it’s good for you. You’ll feel good when it’s done. You can accomplish things. That’s great. And some external things can work too.

Dr. Kenner:      But the external things always get translated internally. And I know that my parents gave me, I wanted to go with the chorus to Italy and they told me that if I got straight As, they would give me the $100 needed to go to Italy. And that was a very good motivation. I ended up getting the straight As. There was a downside. I was getting the As but not passionate about the topic, the subjects, so in that case, it didn’t work completely, but I fixed that going forward. I was able to motivate myself and to coach myself to say that going forward, if I’m going to give myself something, or when I had my kids, if I’m going to give them a $5 reward – I’ll use that as an example – it will be a celebration. It won’t be out of duty or guilt or they have to. It will be just a celebration of their accomplishment, a way to celebrate it. That worked well. What you say to yourself really matters.

Dr. Raalte:       There is some pretty good research showing if you reward people for what they already like to do, then they start to think they’re only doing it for the reward. So you insight is excellent. After all, what do you think Tiger Woods does on his day off? We know Michael Jordan, back in the day when he was playing basketball, that he might play golf on his day off, but we can guess that Tiger Woods isn’t playing golf on his day off. He’s doing something else. Make millions doing something and it stops being as much fun. So that’s true for schoolwork too. Make $100 and go to Italy for $100. You’re dating yourself a little there! Studying in school when you don’t get $100 may be less important to you. So getting a reward for a job well done may be an excellent way to help with motivation. But also, to help people internalize that motivation so they can keep up the hard work and get through school.

Dr. Kenner:      That’s why I always liked the term celebration. Let’s go out and celebrate. You got a good report card and it’s not, “I’ll give you this for each A.” You got a fabulous report card. How would you like to celebrate? I’d like to go out to eat.

Dr. Raalte:       That’s the kind of, a way to both reward and allow internalization of what’s going on. Excellent strategy.

Dr. Kenner:      Right. How do people deal with failures? I know we’re talking about rewarding success, but dealing with failures.

Dr. Raalte:       Failure is something we see a lot of in sport. In some sports, only one person wins. So if we think of tennis championships, there is one winner and everyone else is a loser in that event. And that’s true in a lot of racing events as well. For people who take a loss as a personal failure and demonstrating that they’re not good at anything and that they’ll never be the best, it can be pretty disconcerting and they’re the ones that tend to drop out of sport, but also give up on school and give up on jobs. People who take a failure as a setback or a learning experience or a disappointment but turn to something that they can work at and enjoy, they’re the ones who have much better experiences in that sport or activity, but also much happier lives. Understanding that we all lose sometimes and what caused us to lose and what can we do next time or differently, that’s a great way to approach a difficult outcome.

Dr. Kenner:      What I’m hearing is, in psychology we call them core premises. Core ideas about yourself and others and the world. If you are saying, “I’m a failure. Others are laughing at me. The world is not open to my achieving values and I can’t achieve anything in the future because I lost this game,” those are very bad core ideas. Whereas if you say, “I’m a good person and I just need to strategize a little differently and some people will make fun of you, what are you going to do? Other people are going to be good coaches and those are the people I want. And my future is open to me.” That’s a much better path to being involved in not only sports but anything in life. Thank you so much Judy. This is Dr. Judy Van Raalte, sports psychologist, and what is your website so people can contact you if they’d like to?

Dr. Raalte:       If they want to get in touch, they can reach me at info@vbvideo.com.