Are You in a Mood?
…to do something
Goal: To add understanding of what happens between motion and emotion
Many years ago I ran an experiment with my students. I asked a simple question, “What is keeping you from being more successful?”
Most of the responses fit into two categories:
- Lack of Motivation
- Laziness
When I question them about it and pointed out that the two are almost the same reason they simply shrugged their shoulders.
Since that they I have thought a lot about the idea of motivation. What makes people motivated to do anything? What gets them started in the first place?
I have concluded that for me motion comes before emotion. In other words, I need to do something in order for me to feel motivated to keep moving and feel like doing it. Motion before emotion.
I looked at my feed yesterday and in it was a post by Susan Cain in which she showed an image from a book with some underlines. The underlines are from a new book called Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychology.
The book claims that mood that we feel in a moment is driven by the rate of progress towards a goal. It is not whether we are successful or failing at the moment.
If we are moving faster than expected to finish our goal, we feel good and our mood improves. We want to continue feeling good. If our progress is slower than expected progress, our progress pushes our mood down. We don’t want to feel bad.
For us this can be understood, and connected to my earlier statements, as:
Motion improves Mood. Mood improves Emotion. Emotion feeds back into more Motion. And so on..
It is interesting when one adds a piece of information to a belief. I have talked about the Motion into Emotion connection before. To add a piece between them is powerful to me. The more pieces are inserted the better understood the system is that drives us to complete the goals that we set.
I believe that this loop also contains elements of grit. Grit is defined as passion and persistence. I am yet to include those elements but I feel that they belong in there.
Does passion drive motion? Does emotion drive persistence?
I need more data to get to information level.
Any suggestions?
My four cents….(this is what I earned from Medium.com for March 2021)
I got to go…my future self alarm went off
PRODUCT LIST 2021
My first product of the year is the t-shirt with a circle. It can be purchased at
https://teespring.com/be-adaptive?pid=212&cid=5819
My second product is MyLin app. It can be viewed following the link below:
My Third product is a clean design T-shirt available on Amazon:
