Do they feel like they belonged? Do they feel like they fit in with your coaching community, with working with you, with, I don’t know the, the larger community that is, people who exercise, do they belong there? If they don’t, if they’re not checking those A, b, C boxes, that could be why you see them only relying on extrinsic types of motivation.

Hello my friends and welcome back to not another Mindset show. I’m your host, Dr. Casey Jo. My goal with this podcast is to take this. Science of mindset and behavior change and distill it down into actionable takeaways for you. Together we’re gonna unpack research around motivations, self-sabotage, willpower, and so much more, and we’re going to take all of that and translate it into strategies you can immediately apply to your health, fitness, relationships, business, marketing clients, all of the things.

But just to be clear, it’s not all serious and sciency around here. We’re gonna have a ton of fun too, and I’m so excited to share all of this with you. Alright, let’s go ahead and get into the episode. Hello my friends. Welcome back to not another mindset show. Today we are talking about motivation and all of the different types of motivation that exist while highlighting that.

It’s not necessarily that you need more motivation or that your clients need more motivation, it’s just that you or your clients need more of the right type of motivation. So without knowing more about self-determination theory and all of the different types of motivation that exists, we just use one word motivation.

But the reality is there’s a lot of different. Types of motivation and some are going to be far more beneficial when it comes to behavior change and lasting behavior change than others. So we can’t talk about motivation without talking about self-determination theory, which I kind of just hinted at.

And I’ve mentioned self-determination theory a handful of times on the podcast. Mainly when I’m talking about basic psychological needs of autonomy, belongingness, and competence. And I actually walk through. All three of those basic psychological needs in depth in a different episode. It’s the ABCs of Behavior Change, I believe it’s called.

So I’ll make sure that that is linked in the show notes if you wanna dive into those further. But basically, when we talk about these basic psychological needs, people are motivated to get these needs met. They are motivated to feel autonomous, to feel like they belong, and to feel like they’re competent and when those needs are met.

They are more motivated to do whatever task behavior is in front of them. So if they feel autonomous, they feel like they belong, they feel like they’re competent, they’re more likely to do the thing. So in our coaching practices, we really need to be paying attention to those things. And like I said, I have a whole episode on that specifically, but it is important to note here since we’re talking about motivation.

Because if those basic psychological needs are met, it’s something that you are paying attention to in you’re coaching when you’re working with your clients, or honestly even like speaking to your children or your significant others. Um, you want them to do something. Those things need to be met. They, those people in your lives, whether it be clients or otherwise, are more likely to do it if those needs are met.

And so when we’re talking about motivation and the different types of motivation, and we’re trying to help our clients or ourselves find more of the best kind of motivation, which we’ll talk about, then these basic psychological needs are important to keep in mind. So. Outside of the basic psychological needs, we need to understand that there is a spectrum.

Just like with fricking everything. There are gray areas, there’s a middle ground. It’s not all or nothing, or black or white, or good or bad. There is an in-between. We need to consider that when we’re talking about motivation, when we’re thinking about motivation, when we want to have more quote unquote motivated clients.

This is something you need to keep in mind. So with this spectrum of motivation, and this is all coming from self-determination theory, so this is coming from a long standing framework in behavior change within the the research on behavior change and psychology. We have the spectrum, so. I was gonna say, everyone knows, but it’s possible you don’t know this, that there are kind of two main types of motivation when we’re speaking about it from this lens, and that is extrinsic motivation.

And intrinsic motivation. You can kind of think of it as external and internal, but again, that lies on a spectrum. So what falls. In between extrinsic and intrinsic is also important to understand, especially if you want to help your clients move from more extrinsic motivators to more intrinsic motivators, which should be the goal, by the way.

And when we’re talking about the quote unquote best type of motivation, what I’m really referring to is intrinsic motivation. So I’m gonna work us along this spectrum and kind of describe each of the steps along the way from extrinsic to intrinsic. So with extrinsic motivation, it is motivation driven by.

External factors pretty much says it in the word, right? So when we’re talking about extrinsic motivation, this is external rewards, external pressure. If you have a client who is simply checking in and going to the gym and eating healthy just to appease you, just to make you proud. Just to do the things that won’t disappoint you.

That is extrinsic motivation. Or maybe this is someone who has a hard time sticking to something unless they have some sort of external reward, like they’re working towards a competition or they have a wedding or a specific goal that they have that is tied to an an external reward or outcome that’s not just about them.

So. If motivation is mainly coming from this, you can see where it would be relatively short term. This is not something that’s going to sustain a long-term behavior change. It’s not necessarily bad, like if you have a client who wants to compete in a High Rocks competition. I literally, I just learned that High Rocks stands for Hybrid Rockstar.

I literally, I can’t get over that. That seems, it’s just, it seems so silly. High rock sounds like kind of like tough and intense and then it’s like, huh. Hybrid, rockstar, funny. Um, anyway, so if they want to train for that for fun as part of their overall health and fitness journey, sure fine. But if they always need some sort of competition to look forward to or something that they need to train for and compete in, that’s where you need to kinda.

Pay attention. So after extrinsic motivation, we can go to the next step on the spectrum, which is interjected regulation. I really wish researchers would use terms that like make any kind of sense, but instead it just sounds like scientific jargon, but interjected regulation, this is when clients are engaging in activities.

Mainly to avoid guilt or feel better about themselves. So this might be your client who maybe feels obligated to exercise because their husband. Frequently exercises or you hear a lot of like the language of, I feel like I should be doing this. It’s not a want, it’s that they feel like they should. So there’s still some sort of like external, whether it’s societal pressure, pressure from you, pressure from others.

So, but they’re, they’re motivated to do that in order to not feel guilty for not doing it or to feel better about themselves rather than really. Wanting to do it or having any internal drive. So when it comes to coaching, you really wanna help clients recognize their motivations and. Try to work them away from some of these external pressures, be it extrinsic motivation, interjected regulation.

Here’s the thing, I don’t need you to remember these terms, and this is what I tell my students too. ’cause this is something we go in depth in the health mindset coaching certification. So it’s not imperative that you remember these terms, but it is imperative that you understand that there’s kind of like this progression from.

Extrinsic to intrinsic, and I don’t even wanna say progression because it’s not a step-by-step process that you start with extrinsic motivation and then you end at intrinsic motivation. But you could be landing anywhere on the spectrum, and you could also have more than one of them at play. Your clients could have more than one of them at play.

So after interjected regulation, okay, first we had extrinsic. Motivation. Then we had interjected regulation, which is still technically extrinsic. Okay, we move on to another extrinsic type of motivation called identified regulation, so fully extrinsic and then interjected. And now we have identified and identified regulation.

These clients recognize the importance of an activity and its value to their goals. So this is a client who understands that if I regularly, regularly exercise, that’s beneficial for my long-term health and I am motivated to exercise because it’s beneficial for my long-term health. So this is. Not obviously a bad thing, right?

At face value, we know that if someone is doing something because they recognize the importance of those behaviors and the value it has to some of their other goals, maybe they wanna be a good role model for their children. So that’s why they’re eating healthy and taking care of themselves. Those are not.

Bad things ’cause they’re, it’s identified because you’re identifying the activity with a value, a personal value or belief that you have. So as you can kind of tell, we made somewhat of a shift already from ex extra extrinsic to interjected to now this identified form of regulation. And when I say regulation, I’m really meaning like motivation again, interchangeable terms, researchy terms.

So identified regulation is moving us towards. Intrinsic motivation on the spectrum, right? So the next one is integrated regulation. So this is where clients or your yourself, if you’re thinking about yourself and your own motivations, you feel aligned or your clients feel aligned with their goals as part of their identity.

So, which is also so confusing, like riddle me this, why did we name this integrated regulation? Identified regulation is related to your values and the goals that you have, but integrated regulation is about your identity. Wouldn’t it have been smart to call, I call identified regulation, something that has to do with your identity?

It would’ve been, but researchers don’t think this way when they create things. So integrated regulation is maybe a client who sees fitness as part of their. Overall self-image, they identify themselves as an exerciser, as a fit person, as a healthy person. So now you’re motivated to exercise and eat well because it’s part of who you are.

That’s pretty good, right? So we, as you can tell, we’re getting closer to intrinsic motivation based on sort of these more, more internal. Types of motivation. When we talk about, we’re talking about broadly self-determination theory and why it’s called that is because we’re talking about motivations that are self-determined or not self-determined.

So as you can see, when we get into identified regulation. And integrated regulation. The last two that I just described, they are more self-determined compared to interjected, which is again, feeling like you need to do something in, in order to feel better about yourself, avoid guilt or extrinsic, which is just based on external pressures from other people, other things.

So as a quick recap, I’m doing my best to make this as seamless as possible when I don’t have like a diagram to show you or something. ’cause you’re listening. Right. We had extrinsic, interjected, identified, integrated, and finally we have intrinsic motivation. And intrinsic motivation is the motivation that comes from personal satisfaction and enjoyment.

So this might be, you know, there’s, there’s a couple ways we could look at intrinsic. Motivation, there could be in intrinsic motivation to know and to understand. So maybe you have a client who’s driven to learn more and better understand their bodies and they’re really interested in the science of nutrition and exercise that might have been you at one point.

Now you are a coach. So if you have a client who is enjoying, like researching nutrition and fitness techniques and they wanna learn more from you, they have a lot of intrinsic motivation. ’cause they have this motivation, this drive to learn more. Or there’s a intrinsic motivation to accomplish something like clients who find joy in mastering new skills or achieving personal goals.

A client who loves hitting new personal records on their strength training program, and they’re doing so because it gives them personal satisfaction, not because they’re beating someone else, but because it feels good to them. So that kind of gives you the full rundown. On the spectrum of motivation, and I hope I just didn’t confuse the hell out of you.

’cause as I’m saying all of this, I’m like, man, this just feels like a, a mouthful of words, but. Again, the most important thing to remember is that people are gonna fall on all different parts of the spectrum. They’re gonna have motivation that comes from a variety of different things. It is your job as a coach to better understand where their motivation is coming from and if they’re falling more on the extrinsic side of the spectrum, external pressure doing it so they feel better about themselves and they don’t feel guilty.

You need to pay attention to that because those aren’t going to be very great for long-term behavior change, whereas. If you can start to help your clients maybe recognize identified or integrated types of motivation, so you’re helping them recognize the values that they have or the identity that they have, and how that attaches to some of these health and fitness goals that is more self-determined.

More part of them and less external. So it’s, they’re going to be more likely to stick with it. And then the best, best, best kind of motivation. The thing that’s really going to, and you guys can understand this, if you enjoy something and you get personal satisfaction out of it, of course you wanna keep doing it.

So as coaches, it’s not our job to. Give our clients more motivation or to make them be more motivated. It is our job to understand where their motivation is coming from and do our best to guide them to uncovering more of these internal motivations wherever that kind of falls on the spectrum, away from external or extrinsic.

So how do we do this? How do we, how do we nurture motivation and pinpoint where our clients are at? Like obviously ask more questions. Maybe consider enrolling in the health mindset coaching certification. ’cause that’s where we talk about this in depth. But this brings us back to the beginning of the podcast when I was talking about autonomy, belongingness, and competence.

So if you are including those things in your coaching and you’re assessing your clients, I really love using it as an assessment. So if you have a client who is struggling to stick with a plan and stay consistent, it can be. A pretty easy if, if you understand these concepts, and again, join us in HMCC if you really wanna understand them.

Autonomy, belongingness, and competence. You have this client who’s struggling. Do they feel autonomous? Do they feel like, are you looking at this client in their communication with you? Does it seem like they can make their own decisions that they’re sitting in the driver’s seat? Do they feel competent?

Do they actually like know what they’re doing and can get away, get around the gym on their own and track their macros or whatever? Do they feel like they belong? Do they feel like they fit in with your coaching community, with working with you, with, I don’t know. The, the larger community that is, people who exercise, do they belong there?

If they don’t, if they’re not checking those A, b, C boxes, that could be why you see them only relying on extrinsic types of motivation, and you could be leveraging the ABCs to help them find more intrinsic style. More internal, more self-determined style motivations that’s are going to help them stick with it.

Okay. Trying to think if there’s anything else I wanna add here. Um, I think really so much of this comes down to kind of playing the researcher as the coach, but you’re researching your client’s behaviors and their communication with you. And if you feel like you have clients who just can’t stay motivated.

The first thing I would do is really like, take a look at this spectrum, see where they’re falling. Maybe even have a conversation with them. I have done this with clients in the past so many times where I explain all these different types of motivation and I ask them, see autonomy, hello. I ask them to tell me where they think they fall on the spectrum or where their motivations are coming from.

And a lot of times then where the conversation goes is like, I really would like to enjoy this more. I really would like more satisfaction. I really want to identify as a person who exercises. I really want to tie my values into this more. And now they are driving the conversation again, autonomy and you can kind of take it from there.

So all this to say, it’s not about making your clients more motivated. It’s not about them needing more motivation, it’s really about what types of motivation are we dealing with here? You have to remember too. We’re always motivated to do something. So the reality is how do we shift that energy of motivation into something else, and also work on finding ways for it to be more self-determined, more internal, and if we can get to that point of.

Intrinsic motivation. That’s where it really is the best because we’re doing it because we enjoy it and we find satisfaction in it. I think a lot of you listening to this podcast, if you are a health and fitness coach, you likely do find a lot of enjoyment and personal satisfaction in your workouts, in what you eat, and making healthy recipes and stuff like that.

And if you think about it, it’s like if we could just take that and package it up and put it into all of our clients. How much more successful they would be. That is intrinsic motivation and we can’t necessarily expect people to get there right away or get there easily, but we can guide them and you can help them.

So if you’re sitting there thinking like, yeah, Casey, this all sounds fine and good. And I love that there’s a spectrum and different types of motivation and this is a really interesting way to think about it, but I like, I just don’t understand how I would ever help my clients get there. Like that is what the health mindset coaching certification is for.

There’s literally no way I could do all of that. For you on the podcast ’cause it does require practice. It requires understanding more about human motivation and desire and behavior change and how all of that works. You gotta have a good grasp on client psychology if you want to be an effective coach when it comes to, if actually helping your clients achieve long-term results.

I did not mean for this episode to be a sales pitch, but. The thing is I want to help you and I want so much more for you and the coaching industry in general, and that’s why the certification was created. And I can only do so much on the podcast. Um, but I do hope this was helpful, even if it was to just make you think about motivation differently when it comes to working with your clients and also in your own life.

And that’s actually a, a good thing for me to leave you with is don’t just be thinking about your clients. Think about your own. Motivations to do things, whether there’s personal goals, health and fitness goals, business goals, whatever. Where on that spectrum do you lie? Like at what types of motivation are you pulling on?

And if you pay attention, you’ll see the places where you’ve been the most successful are probably the ones that have more internal intrinsic drives to do things. Okay. Like I said, I will actually leave you at that. I hope this was helpful, and I’ll see you next week. And that’s a wrap for today’s episode of Not Another Mindset show.

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I’ll see you next time.