Explore Your Personal Values And Motivations
Learning Objectives
Identify your personal values and sources of motivation;
Explore how to define and meet your personal needs;
Tell the difference between the types of motivation and understand your own.
“. . . my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people feel comfortable.”
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, author
PERSONAL VALUES, MOTIVES AND NEEDS
The journey of achieving success in college begins with a single step: identifying your personal values. Your personal values are your core beliefs and guiding principles. They shape the roles you play in daily life. They color your interests and passions, and frame your thoughts and words. In essence, your values are a compass that help you make decisions and choices.
What are your values, then? Which are most important to you, and which are least important? How do your values fit into your educational goals? How do your educational goals relate to your future career?
To help you answer these questions, you can use a “self-assessment” survey. These surveys can help you evaluate your personal identity—your thoughts, actions, attitudes, beliefs, values, and behaviors—in relation to the task at hand, like going to college and preparing for a career.
Many different self-assessment surveys are available from college career centers and online sites. Some are designed as personality tests, like the Keirsey Temperament Sorter, or as inventories, like the Myers- Briggs Type Indicator (MTBI®), the most widely used personality inventory in history. You may also come across instruments designed as scales, or measures, games, surveys, and more. These descriptors are often interchangeably used, although most often they refer to questionnaires. The distinctions are not as important as whether or not the instrument meets your self-assessment needs.
Connect Your Values and Interests to Careers
Once you understand your personal and cultural values, you can begin to connect them to your interests. From there, it’s a short step to identifying careers that incorporate or compliment your values and interests. Some ideas to narrow in on career-related interests include:
Take this Career Cluster Interest Survey, https://bit.ly/npcareerclustersurvey, to identify career clusters (groups of jobs that have overlapping themes or interests) you might enjoy exploring. This survey asks you to rate the activities you enjoy, your personal qualities, and school subjects you like;
The Career Bridge Survey, https://bit.ly/npcareerbridgesurvey, takes into account the activities you like to do, your personality traits and subjects that interest you. The automated results rate 16 different career clusters from best to worst fit based on these factors;
Explore internships (learning while getting paid for a limited amount of time on the job) or job shadowing (visiting a business for a day or a week) opportunities to get a sense of what you might enjoy doing;
Ask a trusted relative or elder for advice and reflection. Listen to what they think you’d be good at or enjoy;
Attend job fairs and internship fairs to learn about different jobs and careers;
Explore current job trends.
Stages of Life
Keep in mind that your personal values and interests can and do change as you get older. This is evidenced in research conducted by a number of contemporary social scientists, like Erik Erikson and Daniel Levinson. Their studies show how our values affect our choices and how our choices can characterize the stage of life we’re in
For example, college students, ages 18–26, tend to make choices that are tentative (more short-range) and support a desire for autonomy. Later, during ages 27– 31, young adults may rethink decisions and lean toward more permanent choices. In ages 32–42, adults tend to have a greater sense of commitment and stability, as shown by their choices. In essence, our personal identity and values change over time, but they continue to affect our choices and can illuminate the stage of life we’re in, https://bit.ly/lumenlifestages.
Keeping in mind that there are many phases of life, you can expect changes in your values and choices as you get older. You may experience a significant change in perspective while you are in college! To better understand your relationship with your values, you can continually reassess what is important to you. Make a commitment to examining your thinking, actions, and choices, and keep taking self-assessment tests. This will put you in a stronger position to manage changes in your educational goals, your career, living situation, hobbies, friends, and other aspects of your life. Changes are part of everyone’s life transitions.
Your Motives and Needs
Abraham Maslow’s theory frames personal needs or motives as a hierarchy, meaning that basic or “lower-level” needs have to be satisfied before higher-level needs become important or motivating (1976, 1987). Compared to the stage models of Piaget and Erikson, Maslow’s hierarchy is only loosely “developmental,” in that Maslow was not concerned with tracking universal, irreversible changes across the lifespan. Maslow’s stages are universal, but they are not irreversible; earlier stages sometimes reappear later in life, in which case they must be satisfied again before later stages can redevelop. Like the theories of Piaget and Erikson, Maslow’s is a rather broad “story,” one that has less to say about the effects of a person’s culture, language, or economic level, than about what we all have in common.
In its original version, Maslow’s theory distinguishes two types of needs, called deficit needs and being needs (or sometimes deficiency needs and growth needs). Deficit Needs are prior to Being Needs, not in the sense of happening earlier in life, but in that Deficit Needs must be satisfied before Being Needs can be addressed. As pointed out, Deficit Needs can reappear at any age, depending on circumstances. If that happens, they must be satisfied again before a person’s attention can shift back to “higher” needs. Among students, in fact, Deficit Needs are likely to return chronically to those whose families lack economic or social resources or who live with the stresses associated with poverty (Payne, 2005).
Image by FireflySixtySeven is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Get Your Basic Needs met
Deficit Needs are the basic requirements of physical and emotional well-being. First are physiological needs—food, sleep, clothing, and the like. Without these, nothing else matters, especially nothing very “elevated” or self-fulfilling. A student who is not getting enough to eat is not going to feel much interest in learning! Once physiological needs are met, however, safety and security needs become important. The person seeks out stability and protection, and welcomes a bit of structure and limits if they provide these conditions. A child from an abusive family, for example, may be getting enough to eat, but may worry chronically about personal safety. In school, the student may appreciate a well- organized classroom with rules that ensures personal safety and predictability, whether or not the classroom provides much in the way of real learning.
After physiological and safety needs are met, love and belonging needs emerge. The person turns attention to making friends, being a friend, and cultivating positive personal relationships in general. In the classroom, a student motivated at this level may make approval from peers or teachers into a top priority. They may be provided for, materially, and find the classroom and family life safe enough, but still miss a key ingredient in life— love. If such a student (or anyone else) eventually does find love and belonging, however, then their motivation shifts again, this time to esteem needs. Now the concern is with gaining recognition and respect—and even more importantly, gaining self-respect. A student at this level may be unusually concerned with achievement, for example, though only if the achievement is visible or public enough to earn public recognition.
Become the Best That you can be
Being Needs are desires to become fulfilled as a person, or to be the best person that you can possibly be. They include cognitive needs (a desire for knowledge and understanding), aesthetic needs (an appreciation of beauty and order), and most importantly, self-actualization needs (a desire for fulfillment of one’s potential). Being Needs emerge only after all of a person’s Deficit Needs have been largely met. Unlike Deficit Needs, Being Needs beget more Being Needs; they do not disappear once they are met, but create a desire for even more satisfaction of the same type. A thirst for knowledge, for example, leads to further thirst for knowledge, and aesthetic appreciation leads to more aesthetic appreciation. Partly because Being Needs are lasting and permanent once they appear, Maslow sometimes treated them as less hierarchical than Deficit Needs, and instead grouped cognitive, aesthetic, and self-actualization needs into the single category self-actualization needs.
People who are motivated by self-actualization have a variety of positive qualities, which Maslow went to some lengths to identify and describe (Maslow, 1976). Self-actualizing individuals, he argued, value deep personal relationships with others, but also value solitude; they have a sense of humor, but do not use it against others; they accept themselves as well as others; they are spontaneous, humble, creative, and ethical. In short, the self-actualizing person has just about every good quality imaginable! Not surprisingly, therefore, Maslow felt that true self-actualization is rare. It is especially unusual among young people, who have not yet lived long enough to satisfy earlier, deficit-based needs.
Video
Play this video to learn about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how it has become invaluable for understanding the modern world. https://bit.ly/maslowandneeds
MOTIVATION
Human motivation has long been considered the result of evolutionary processes. In other words, we tend to be motivated by things that help us survive (food, sex, water) and things that are associated with these essentials (money that can be used to buy food, and so on). However, motivation is not quite so simple. We now have a number of theories that attempt to accurately describe why certain states may motivate some people but not others. This idea can be extrapolated at the level of culture and society as well. For example, the state of hunger might cause us to be highly motivated by food. However, hunger itself may be under strict cultural control. In fact, most aspects of our eating habits are linked in some way to culture. As such, motivators are also, in some way, linked to our culture. This unit touches on the universal theories of motivation and examines how certain approaches to culture can better determine what will be a motivating factor versus what will not.
Motivation as Self-Determination
A recent theory of motivation based on the idea of needs is self-determination theory, proposed by the psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (2000), among others. The theory proposes that understanding motivation requires taking into account three basic human needs:
Autonomy—the need to feel free of external constraints on behavior
Competence—the need to feel capable or skilled
Relatedness—the need to feel connected or involved with others
The key idea of self-determination theory is that when people feel that these basic needs are reasonably well met, they tend to perceive their actions and choices to be intrinsically motivated or “self-determined.” In that case they can turn their attention to a variety of activities that they find attractive or important, but that do not relate directly to their basic needs.
If one or more basic needs are not met well, however, people will tend to feel coerced by outside pressures or external incentives. They may become preoccupied, in fact, with satisfying whatever need has not been met and thus exclude or avoid activities that might otherwise be interesting, educational, or important. If these individuals are students, their learning will suffer.
Self-Determination and Intrinsic Motivation
In proposing the importance of needs, then, self-determination theory is asserting the importance of intrinsic motivation. The self-determination version of intrinsic motivation, however, emphasizes a person’s perception of freedom, rather than the presence or absence of “real” constraints on action.
Self-determination means a person feels free, even if the person is also operating within certain external constraints. In principle, a student can experience self-determination even if the student must, for example, live within externally imposed rules of appropriate classroom behavior. To achieve a feeling of self-determination, however, the student’s basic needs must be met—needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.
Self-determination theory recognizes this reality by suggesting that the “intrinsic-ness” of motivation is really a matter of degree, extending from highly extrinsic, through various mixtures of intrinsic and extrinsic, to highly intrinsic (Koestner & Losier, 2004). At the extrinsic end of the scale is learning that is regulated primarily by external rewards and constraints, whereas at the intrinsic end is learning regulated primarily by learners themselves. By assuming that motivation is often a mix of the intrinsic and extrinsic, the job is not to expect purely intrinsic motivation from students all the time, but simply to arrange and encourage motivations that are as intrinsic as possible.
Video
How about a little pep talk from Kid President?, https://bit.ly/kpsppeptalk
Types of Motivation
Pure Extrinsic motivation means a person lacks the intention to take any action, regardless of pressures or incentives. For example, you won’t complete any homework (unless you happen to be internally motivated), even when pressured or incentives are offered;
Very External motivation means actions are regulated only by outside pressures, incentives and controls. For example, you would complete an assignment only if reminded of the incentive of grades or negative consequences of failing;
Somewhat External motivation means specific actions might be regulated internally, but without reflection or connection to the person’s needs. For example, you might complete an assignment independently, but only because of fear of shame or guilt about the consequences of not completing the work;
Somewhat Internal motivated action is recognized by an individual as important or valuable as a way to achieve a more valued goal. For example, you generally complete your school work independently, but only because of its value in gaining admission to college;
Very Internal means the actions adopted by an individual are integral to self-concept and to a person's major personal values. For example, you generally complete your school work independently, because being well-educated is part of your concept of yourself;
Pure Intrinsic Regulation means one’s actions are practiced solely because they are enjoyable and valued for their own sake. For example, if you enjoy every topic, concept, and assignment that every teacher ever assigns, and complete school work solely because of the enjoyment you take from the work.
In certain ways, self-determination theory provides a sensible way to think about your own intrinsic motivation and therefore to think about how to manage your own learning. A particular strength of the theory is that it recognizes degrees of self-determination and bases many ideas on this reality. Most people recognize combinations of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation guiding particular activities in their own lives. To its credit, self-determination theory also relies on a list of basic human needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—that relate comfortably with some of the larger purposes of education.
N.B.: The Student Success Library item was customized for Santa Monica College (SMC) in Santa Monica, CA. You may come across SMC-specific resources, links, or activities that do not apply to you. Search for your own school’s resources or google for similar tools that can help you where you live, study and work.
This work, Explore Your Personal Values and Motivations, is part of the Student Success Library, which is a derivative of Student Success, originally modified by Vanessa Bonilla, Dr. Tyffany Dowd, Jackeline Felix, Dyana Valentine, Olivia Vallejo and Daniella Washington from the original Student Success by Graciela Martinez, Anh Nguyen, and Liz Shaker under CC BY-SA 4.0. Student Success Library is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 by Dyana Valentine. Last edit date: July 2022.