Whenever we prepare conferences on the human brain, the thought of reaching so many professionals and a skeptic or two who’d rather fight ideas that offer alternatives, seems daunting at first. Has that overwhelmed feeling happened to you?
Interestingly, when we break the work down into doable tasks that allow participants to draw on more mental extravagance for benefits, motivation kicks into the brain’s amygdala and we begin to create solutions, and enjoy the experience. If you’ve had similar experience – your road to enthusiasm, and drive also finds reasons in interesting research.
Researchers found that when we break complex problems into simple steps – we add motivation for better solutions. Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwartz found that a group of college students became more willing to follow instructions for exercising when instructions were easy, and tasks broken down.
What difficult challenge stumps you lately? Can you break it down into bit-sized pieces as a way to make it more palatable? Here are 21 tips to motivate yourself when the road ahead looks daunting.
Worth a try for better motivated results today?
on Feb 18th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
This gives strong support to a strategy of small wins and action steps as a way to achieve a larger goal. Nice to know that some of the things I’ve been doing with coaching clients for years has some good science behind it.
on Feb 18th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Makes sense to me too Wally – as it is in daily stepping stones that one often finds the finest progress:-) at the end of the week:-). Gives hope to the smaller steps we take too:-)
on Feb 24th, 2009 at 8:53 am
[...] Ellen Weber, of the MITA Institute describes the process this way in a post on her Brain Based Leaders and Learners blog. “Researchers found that when we break complex problems into simple steps – we add motivation [...]
on Feb 24th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
[...] cross the interplay between motivation and results is to leap across huge caverns that create high performance minds – and like every successful [...]
on Feb 28th, 2009 at 12:05 am
[...] Ellen Weber, of the MITA Institute describes the process this way in a post on her Brain Based Leaders and Learners blog. “Researchers found that when we break complex problems into simple steps – we add motivation [...]