143: Chicago Professor Ayelet Fishbach | Four Science-Backed Ways to Increase Motivation

2024-06-10

Ayelet Fishbach is a Professor of Behavioral Science and Marketing at the University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, and the author of GET IT DONE: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation. She is the past president of the Society for the Science of Motivation and the International Social Cognition Network. Her groundbreaking research on human motivation has won numerous awards and is regularly featured in the media, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, and NPR.

Ayelet earned a bachelor's degree with distinction in psychology, a master's degree summa cum laude in psychology, and a PhD magna cum laude in psychology, all from Tel Aviv University.

In this episode we discuss the following:

To increase motivation, find pleasure along the way. And setting a goal to do something is generally more motivating than setting a goal to stop doing something.
To increase motivation, we can monitor progress by looking back and looking ahead. When we start out, we can look back and take encouragement from the small progress we’ve made. When we’ve almost completed our goal, we can look forward, and take encouragement from how little we have left.
When our goals are in harmony with each other we’re more motivated than when we have conflicting goals. For example, rather than thinking about work-life goals as conflicting, we can think more abstractly about how the goals complement each other.
Including other people in our goals can be more motivating, whether that’s explicitly involving them in our goals, or just acknowledging that others have an interest in us achieving our goals whether they realize it or not.

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