The theme of the workshop held on Friday 20th October was motivation – more on this below.
We began the workshop with our usual reflective exercise on how we’d gone with tasks that had been specified at the previous workshop. We now have a “log of progress” for everyone, and despite the fact that not everyone feels happy with their progress, everyone has moved forward on tasks related to their thesis or research. It seems to me that those whose issues were largely related to task management and setting priorities, feel they are achieving better results than those for whom the issues are more complex.
We moved onto a discussion of motivation, since motivation is related to an ability to think our way around problems rather than be defeated by them. We discussed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and also theories of motivation and goal orientation. The concept of “Implementation Intentions” was also briefly introduced.
According to Maslow, our hierarchy of needs moves through physiological, safety and security, social, self esteem and self actualisation. The highest level, that of self actualisation, is our need to express our potential and is the level at which we need to operate in challenging projects that require creativity, such as a PhD. Unfortunately, if our lower level needs remain unmet, we are not free to operate effectively at higher levels. We discussed what this hierarchy may mean in the environment experienced by research students. Apart from the obvious issue of financial stress (particularly if the Scholarship has run out), other issues that may commonly prevent PhD students from achieving their potential, are feelings of isolation (social needs), poor self esteem (seemingly always under challenge when feedback on work is given) and even concerns about safety if there is bullying or intimidation in the work environment. We discussed all of these, but in particular, the challenges of maintaining self-esteem in an academic environment where critical peer review is the name of the game. A paper by Prof. David Pannell entitled “Prose, psychopaths and persistence: personal perspectives on publishing” (http://cyllene.uwa.edu.au/~dpannell/prose.htm) was a useful point of discussion.
Motivation and goal orientation looks at 3 extremes of goal orientation, and of course we all have a mix of each of these extremes.
- Mastery goal orientation. People who are strongly this way inclined gain a lot of satisfaction from attaining competence. They are likely to show persistence in the face of difficulties, because they find overcoming difficulties intrinsically rewarding.
- Performance goal orientation. People who are strongly this way inclined require extrinsic rewards (eg praise, gain in status, recognition) to stay motivated.
- Social goal orientation. People who are strongly this way inclined require meaningful social interaction on tasks they undertake, in order to maintain their psychological well-being.
We all reflected on our own balance of orientations, and discussed how and if we could manipulate our research environment to better suit our personal style.
Finally, one of the participants at the workshop drew our attention to some literature on “Implementation Intentions”. This concept is tied to the formation of goals, but talks about how our external environment and techniques such as visualisation can be used to trigger automatic action towards our goals. More on this at the next workshop.
We concluded the workshop as always, with plans for the coming 10 days. Our next workshop will be held at 2-4pm on Wednesday 1st November in Guild Seminar Room 1. All welcome.