Approach vs. Avoidance Motivation - Video Transcript

Hi everyone, I'm Kristen, the anxiety therapist, and today I want to talk about motivation. This is a topic that I was actually teaching about earlier this week with my theories of personality class. And as I was going through the content with the students, it really dawned on me that this is a topic that applies to a lot of the clients I work with and especially those who tend to be more perfectionistic or have a fear of failure.

So the two types of motivation I want to cover today, our approach motivation and avoidance motivation. With approach motivation, it means that we are motivated by some sort of reward. So we are going to seek out that reward and try to move toward it in order to have that, that positive experience.

So an example would be if I'm trying to train my dog and I'm doing that with treats I tell him to sit or to lay down or to give me his paw and he's going to be motivated to comply with those commands so that he can get that treat as a reward. This also shows up in our personal and professional lives. So if we have approach motivation, it means that we are um success seekers, right? We're going to be proactive and do things that are going to move us closer toward success.

An example might be going above and beyond at work so that you are more likely to get the promotion you've been wanting now on the flip side. The other type of motivation is avoidance motivation and this is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of approaching a reward, we are avoiding a negative consequence and a lot of times that consequence is the perception of failure.

And so when we have avoidance motivation, it's really driven by fear, right? It's driven by fear that we are going to experience some sort of negative outcome or fail in some way. And the problem with this is that it's not um really beneficial for us from a self esteem standpoint or for having that intrinsic motivation.

So if we are approach motivated then we're sort of recognizing our skills, we're being proactive, we have greater sense of control over the outcome because we are intentionally doing things to seek out success, whereas if we have avoidance motivation, we don't feel like we're in control of the outcome because it's fear based and that means that if something is fear based, it's typically outside of our control and it's outside of ourselves, so it's something external, an external consequence that we are attempting to avoid.

So that we don't experience distressing emotions that come along with it, but the problem is that it tends to degrade our self-esteem. It doesn't acknowledge our abilities, skills, or talents in a positive way. Instead, it's more focused on what we're lacking, and that takes a toll on self-esteem. It doesn't allow us to live authentically or in alignment with what we value and want to accomplish in life.

So just take a minute to kind of sit back and reflect on what motivates you and it might be different from situation to situation. But ultimately we want to have more approach motivation versus avoidance motivation because then we are um, we're just moving forward in a more positive way as opposed to avoiding something negative.

So I hope this was helpful and gave you a little bit of verification. Feel free to leave a comment or ask a question. Be sure to follow me on social media at cathartic space counseling or subscribe to my youtube channel at the anxiety therapist or visit my website cathartic space counseling dot com. I hope you all have a great week and I'll see you next time.