I became interested in motivation when I worked with undergraduate students at a small, Christian, liberal-arts college. We had many conditionally admitted students (students whose high school grades or standardized test scores did not meet regular admissions standards). Some of these students did well in their classes once they got to college. Others struggled and often dropped out. Because part of my job involved student retention – and because I cared about the students – I wanted to understand what made the difference. That sent me down the rabbit hole of motivation.
The motivation rabbit hole is deep and wide, and I will not invite you to join me in it. As an illustration, I did a quick database search of peer-reviewed articles published in academic journals in 2023 that addressed motivation. There are more than 8,000 (I also checked the box for “full-text available” – as one does). Narrowing the search to “academic motivation” still returned 333 articles. And 18 articles published in academic journals during the past 6 months deal specifically with motivation and graduate students – including one that looks really interesting about doctoral student attrition. I added that to Zotero for future reading, and I’ll let you know if I learn anything good.
We all have a kind of intuition about what motivation is, but it can be challenging to put that intuition into words. I like the discussion in White (1959), which focuses on motivation as a need to feel competent and to interact effectively with the environment. He was talking about a specific kind of motivation, which he called “effectance motivation” (p. 329). Modern psychology sometimes calls this intrinsic motivation. Of course, many of our motivations are not intrinsic, but the ideas of competence and effectiveness go well with how I, anyway, would like to feel in my everyday life. I think they describe how most people would like to feel in graduate school.
Reasons Why We Struggle with Motivation
So, we have this need to feel competent and effective. Sometimes, however, we don’t. There are times when we may, in truth, be competent and effective, but not feel like it. That disconnect between reality and our feelings about reality is a separate issue for another day. The situation I want to address in this blog is one in which we don’t feel competent and effective because we truly are not operating in a competent and effective way, or at least not in as competent and effective a way as we would like to. There are lots of reasons why this might be. I’ll discuss five briefly here, along with some strategies for what to do if you find yourself in one of the descriptions below. I won’t go into the strategies in detail, because I plan to devote a separate post to each one.
Motivation Problem 1: We Don’t Have Goals
Sometimes, people struggle to move forward because they aren’t sure where they are going. This problem tends to be more common among undergraduate than graduate students. Presumably, you’re in a graduate program because you want to earn a degree. The work you are doing each day is moving you towards that degree. On the other hand, it is certainly possible that you’re not sure exactly why you are in graduate school. Maybe you didn’t know what else to do, or it seemed like the best option available for whatever reason. Additionally, depending on your program and how long you’ve been at it, the goal of finishing grad school may seem too far away or unattainable to have much motivational power.
Strategy: Reflection
Read The Well-Ordered Blog post on Reflection and Goal Setting.
If you don’t have goals you are happy with, one solution is to do some structured reflection. Think about what went well last semester, what you’d like to change, and some concrete things you can do to move toward those changes. That kind of reflection can help you develop basic goals, although they still may be kind of vague. Which brings us to . . .
Motivation Problem 2: Our Goals Are Not Well-Thought Out
Maybe you have goals you’d like to reach (earning a degree is a great one). But you are still finding it difficult to achieve your goals. Maybe, as I said in the last paragraph, the degree seems out of reach or completion is so far in the future that it doesn’t provide much incentive for daily activities. The problem could be that your goals are too big, amorphous, or temporally distant. Maybe your goals aren’t even relevant to what you really want to do. I had a friend who started a Ph.D. program because she thought she needed the degree to get the job she wanted. As it turned out, she was hired for the job without the degree. So then, she needed to find a new reason why completing her doctorate was important to her.
Strategy: SMART Goals
I’m almost a little embarrassed to include SMART goals here. So much has been written about this tool that it’s a bit of a motivational cliché. But you know why things are cliché? Because they express a truth. The SMART strategy is a helpful heuristic for making your goals actionable, which will make them motivational.
If you aren’t familiar with SMART goals, hooray! You, at least, will not be bored for the next few sentences. SMART is an acronym that stands for characteristics of effective goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. As I said, much ink (of the digital variety) has been spilled on this concept, so I will not add to the pool. Here is a link to a helpful article, and, honestly, if you just Google “SMART goals,” you’ll find some good stuff.
By using SMART or some other goal-honing strategy, you can make your goals sharper – more real to you, in a way. This can help with motivation.
Read The Well-Ordered Blog post on Honing Your Goals.
Motivation Problem 3: We Allow “Fires” to Get in the Way of What We Really Want
Sometimes we have well-defined goals, but we can’t seem to find the time we need to work toward them. We find ourselves distracted by other tasks and pursuits. This may be because we are letting the wants of the moment get in the way of what we really want.
I used to tell my kids that we always do what we want. That sounds counterintuitive. As adults, we know that we spend much of the day in activities we’d rather not be doing. For example, I am pretty hungry right now, and I would like to stop typing so I can eat lunch. So, why don’t I do that? Because I have a goal of building a coaching business for graduate students, and this blog is a part of that building process. I could let lunch get in the way. I often do. But right now, the motivation provided by my goal is keeping my fingers tapping away at the keyboard.
It is easy to forget our longer-term goals in favor of immediate wants – or needs. These wants can be our own desires for food, sleep, entertainment, or whatever. They can also be demands from other people – our family members, our coworkers, our boss.
As a graduate student, you have many competing demands on your time. You can’t always be working on your dissertation, obviously. But you also can’t always be pushing it off in favor of other things, whether that’s binging Netflix, responding to an urgent work email, or feeling your toddler. How can you balance the demands of the moment with your need to read that article or run that test?
Strategy: Time Management
Time management is another huge topic. To cover it with even moderate adequacy would make this blog into a book. I will share two tips, though. First, you can’t do everything. Priorities are essential, and the Eisenhower Matrix is helpful in this regard. Second, you need an industrial-strength time-and-task management system. This means you need to have a method for recording what you need to do and a method for recording when each task will happen. Much more to come on this topic in future weeks.
Motivation Problem 4: We Aren’t Sure How to Move Toward Our Goals
This is a common problem in graduate school; perhaps it is the number one reason graduate students struggle with motivation. Whether you are working on a thesis, a dissertation, a capstone project, or just a paper for a class, the work in graduate programs tends to have long deadlines and often, not a lot of clear scaffolding for what should happen when. Remember that helpful syllabus back in college, that told you exactly what to read, when to turn in your thesis statement, and when your annotated bibliography was due? In grad school, you may find that those blissful days of external structure are but a fading dot in your rearview mirror. Your work now is much more independent, and you must create your own structure.
Strategy: Create Self-Imposed Structure
When I was working on my capstone project for my doctorate, I made myself a syllabus. It had tasks and due dates that helped me stay on track (and not freak out that I was off track). When I would awaken in a cold sweat at 2 a.m. wondering what important step I was forgetting, I could look at the syllabus (which I printed out and pinned to a cork board for easy perusal) and go on to worry about something else.
You can use a variety of tools and techniques to create structure, including backwards planning, Gantt charts, checklists, and flowcharts. I’ll discuss some of these in future posts!
Motivation Problem 5: We’re Trying to Be Self-Sufficient
We are created for community. This is as true of graduate school as of any other part of life. You may have the world’s most intense internal locus of control, but you still need others to support you and hold you accountable. My graduate program was online and took place during COVID. Also, I was in Japan – on the other side of the world from most of my classmates. That’s a pretty solid recipe for isolation. But I had three friends in the program with whom I met regularly on Zoom. We laughed, kvetched, and shared what we were learning. I couldn’t have done it without them.
Strategy: Determine the Support You Need, and Seek it Out
This strategy takes two steps. Step one is to reflect on yourself — your strengths, weaknesses, and needs. Do you need help with figuring out how to efficiently search databases? Do you need someone to talk to about the amazing ideas you are exploring? Do you need someone to give you a bit of a scolding when you are drifting from the path of academic discipline? Do you need help navigating your course plan? Determine what support and accountability you need. Step two is to find those people who can provide the needed support. They may be at your institution, in your family, or somewhere else. Reach out, make that connection, and build your support network. There is no such thing as individual success.
Reference
White, R.W. (1959). Motivation reconsidered: The concept of competence. Psychological Review 66, 297-333. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0040934
Photo Credit
Photo by Jordan Seott on Unsplash
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