Prediction vs Motivation (Transcription)
[audio:https://www.thementalhealthgym.com/wp-content/uploads/podcasts/Prediction_vs_Motivation.mp3|titles=Prediction vs Motivation|artists=Dr. Ron Kaiser]Hi everybody this is Dr Ron Kaiser with the first podcast of 2014 from The Mental Health Gym. I’d like to start out by wishing all of you a very Happy New Year I hope that 2014 will be very productive, positive, proactive, and pleasant and all the other possible P’s that can mean only good things for you.
This a podcast actually starts out with a letter P because it’s called Prediction verses Motivation and in drawing upon it I am going back in my personal history back may be 40 or 50 years to a presentation that I heard when I was a young psychologist and the title of the presentation was “prediction verses guidance” and one of the points that the speaker make in this very motivational presentation was the fact that there is a difference between prediction that has to be done if somebody is arranging who is going to be admitted to college class or who is gonna be chosen for job and guidance which is the rule that each of us who are in the psychology field play in helping people overcome the predictions. One thing that was discussed and has stayed with me is the fact that if prediction is kind of negative then, you have to look at motivation because if the motivation is high enough it doesn’t guarantee success but it means that all bets are off.
That there is the possibility for success once you have motivation and are willing to act upon it and as we think back, try and think about your own life’s in the development and new choices and choices of friends and spouses, boyfriends and girlfriends and choices of activities and so on. Did you make those choices based on prediction and in doing so did you give up motivation or did prediction and motivation kind of come together or when there was a doubt did you pursue it with the motivation. I was a school counselor where early in my career and I know that hope fully not myself but I know that some of colleagues discouraged some people from going to college for taking a selective program in college because there score isn’t high enough of predict success.
Sometimes this has been done with teachers recommending people not going in the direction in their interest, some people in my profession will base their decision making based on prediction rather than what the person’s motivation is. Hopefully not many of us do that and sometimes family member play a role in having a person make choices that tend to not be satisfying because the choice they make predict success where as something else might risk failure. But that risk does not take into account motivation and that’s really what I wanna emphasize at this point. Now we all have the ability to make choices in many aspect of our lives, some of us feel pretty locked in with respect to certain choices that we’ve made but we will look at other kinds of things, job opportunities that come up, opportunities to a assert ourselves in interactions with other people, opportunities to pursue hobbies or interests that may take more skill that we think we possess or more money or more motivation but motivation is something that can be changed and I think what we have to be able to do is to not give up, something that we may desire just because of prediction and not consider our motivation.
Motivation doesn’t guarantee success I want to be real clear on that. It doesn’t guarantee success and it doesn’t overcome certain external barriers. I could make a whole lot more money if I were a professional athlete at an elite level. Chances of playing professional football at my age and at my height, and weight, not very great, so while I may be motivated, the money may be good, the fame may be good and so on you know I have to consider; are those external barriers insurmountable. But that doesn’t necessarily exclude me from certain choices that I make with respect to my profession, certain choices with respect to who I’m going to reach out to, certain choices with respect to how I am going to pursue hobbies or other activities. We have to be able to look inside or ourselves, to be able to say you know am I motivated love to pursue this or am I saying that I’m too whatever word we may wanna a say too incapable, too weak, too emotional. Are we creating internal barriers that keep us for pursuing our motivations and thus utilizing prediction as the reason for us not pursuing our choices? As I mention at the beginning some people have to do prediction in order to make certain kind of choices.
If you are in charge of a store or if you are in charge of a large company or if you’re a personnel person of the company or if you are in the college admissions world you don’t wanna make a lot of choices that aren’t going to pan out, so you have to be able to predict and if you select a successful student or you select a successful sales person, you know it doesn’t matter a whole lot that you might have gotten somebody else who actually could have done better. So long as your choice works out, so you make your prediction base on certain kinds of safe choices. When we’re working for ourselves and pursuing our own interests and goals, we don’t have to be as safe as a person who is reliant on that type of prediction. So we have to look at you know what is an acceptable risk, how much is our motivation playing and how important is goal for us in order to pursue it.
Keep in mind motivation doesn’t guarantee success but it’s a necessary component for pursuing choices that you really want to pursue as opposed having the made for you based on prediction of success and non-success. Hope this gives you some food for thought as you start the new year and hopefully you’re thinking about pursuing certain kind of goals for this year, hope it makes you may be take a little more risk taking based upon your motivation rather that strictly sticking to prediction as your choice. Any way this has been Dr. Ron Kaiser with January’s Podcast, look forward to hearing from you with any comments and I’ll look forward to speaking to you again in February, So for now I’m signing off on behalf of The Mental Health Gym.