A life lived without enthusiasm is a life half lived.
What gets your child out of bed in the morning? What makes their face light up? What makes them feel alive and connected? These are critical parts of their well-being. Follow your child’s intrinsic motivation and enthusiasm as a trail to their happiest future selves.
To build your child’s intrinsic motivation this week, have a conversation with them! Talk to them about how our brains are like a muscle.
If we go to the gym to get bigger biceps, but never lift weight that makes us uncomfortable, it’s unlikely that we will build any muscle tissue by doing that activity.
It’s when we start to feel some discomfort that we know the activity has done enough stress to our muscles that it will result in strengthening.
We can build our brains very much the same way! Learn more in today’s video tip with Dr. Jen.
To help your child build intrinsic motivation, notice what interests them and help them to engage in those things.
It’s rare that a child will be passionate about something until they’ve worked through the process of mastering that task. Do not worry about identifying things that inspire a big passion in your child.
Instead, keep an eye out for sparks of interest to determine if it’s something that your child might want to work towards mastering. Listen in with Dr. Jen to learn more!
To improve your child’s intrinsic motivation, help them set learning / mastery goals.
These goals place more emphasis on progress along the way and allow children to have lots of small wins on the way to their bigger goals.
This helps to keep them intrinsically engaged instead of placing all the emphasis on the end result. Think IMPROVE vs. PROVE. We don’t get to jump from step one to 100. We must make small improvements along the way to get to our goals. Often the big performance goal is overwhelming on its own. If we can find joy and engagement in each step, we are practicing our intrinsic motivation.
Intrinsic motivation can be built when something in the environment grabs our attention and when we are curious to learn more. Curiosity is a wonderful tool in building your child’s intrinsic interest in learning and exploring their world but is often lost as we get older. Use the simple question “I wonder what will happen next?” to get your children more intrinsically motivated and engaged with the world around them. You can even use this question for yourself, helping to prevent what we think we know from our past in shaping our futures.
Jim Quik, a thought leader in the world of accelerated learning, says the first thing we need to do to speed up our minds and learn new information quickly is to forget everything we thing we already know. Only in this state of open minded curiosity can we boost our intrinsic desire to learn and retain new information.