3 Motivation Styles determined by Personality

let's talk a little bit about motivation okay so motivational styles okay so the first thing to understand is that we think about motivation as a monolith right so people say i lack motivation i don't have motivation i wish i was motivated so if we really tunnel down into that language what it means is that motivation is one quality that has like a quantifiable number right it just moves in one direction or it's even binary i have i have motivation or i don't have motivation and so people say like oh i lack motivation um and so in my experience like that's not really how it works that motivation is a lot like body type so for example we know in western medicine that there are different kinds of metabolism right there are people who have slow metabolisms and they're people who have fast metabolisms so people who have fast metabo metabolisms can kind of eat whatever they want to and their body is just going to burn it up and then people with slow metabolisms they can even eat healthy and they're still going to be sort of heavyset so we can call we call those people like big boned is what people used to say um and so the first thing to kind of understand is that like people are different okay and so but in western medicine we don't really think about that in the way that western science conceptualizes things it conceptualizes things as standalone monolithic concepts so for example like gravity is gravity no matter where you go the caloric recommendations from the u.s government are like 2 000 calories or the world health organization or 2 000 calories a day no matter who you are or where you are right um actually i mean there are different caloric recommendations for children and things like that but generally speaking when we think about western recommendations or western solutions they're a one-size-fits-all solution and you kind of see this on the internet because you'll get a bunch of people who are like motivational speakers and what they do is try to motivate everyone right because they sort of say that you're lacking motivation so you just need this motivation and then you'll be fine and it's kind of like making a 2000 calorie recommendation for people with slow metabolisms and people with fast metabolisms which is kind of silly because these people are fundamentally different the way their metabolisms work is different and so the dietary recommendations need to be tailored to the metabolic fingerprint of the person right so this person has a relatively different kind of class of metabolism they have a different metabolic style and therefore they need different kinds of recommendations for an ideal diet but that's not how western medicine works western medicine is sort of a one-size-fits-all kind of approach right if i diagnose you with depression i treat depression so when i was training to become a psychiatrist they gave us a class about a depression not about people so if you go to the diagnostic and it sounds weird but we treat an illness we don't treat a person i say okay if i diagnose you with depression then i go to the depression protocol and i give you this medication and i do this and i do this and so basically the way that western medicine works is that we average a bunch of stuff and that's what we make is our recommendation so if i were to say like okay you know how did they come up with the 2000 calorie diet what they did is they asked a bunch of healthy people how many calories do you eat a day and there was a range some people ate 1500 some people ate 2 500 and then they averaged all those numbers and they say we recommend that you eat 2 000 calories a day that's how we come up with our answers we average populations to make a uniform recommendation but if you stop and really think about it within that population two thousand calories isn't going to work for the person who normally is eating 2500 calories and isn't going to work for the person who's eating 1500 and so that's kind of bizarre it's almost like if i were to say okay like if we relied on the fda to tell us what kind of clothing to wear what the fda would do is survey the us population and would say what size clothing do you wear and some people would wear larges some people wear small some people were would wear extra larges they'd average them all together and they'd say everyone should wear between a medium and a large that's our recommendation and so if you kind of think about it that's just that's just dumb like you're gonna miss the boat on a lot of people but like most people would be kind of okay with that right if you give everyone a piece of clothing between a medium and large it's going to kind of work for a fair number of people it's going to be like kind of baggy but they're not going to be walking around like naked and for the people it's going to be a little bit tight and uncomfortable but they'll manage and so that's what our recommendations are like so 2000 calories a day sort of works for most people um but it's not really ideal for many people at all and so we think about motivation sort of is the same way and we kind of say like okay so this is what works on average for a bunch of people which is what motivational speakers do right they'll say like i've done this thing and about 50 of people who show up to my motivational seminars get help from it and the whole reason that motivational seminars are still a thing is because they're ineffective because like just think about this for a second right if they were actually effective then you'd do like 10 seminars and then you'd have motivated everyone and then you'd be done and no one would need your help there's a really simple like thing in medicine whereas like you know when you have an effective treatment for medicine in medicine like the problem sort of goes away and you don't need the treatment anymore a good example of this is like the smallpox vaccine like we don't really worry too much about smallpox thanks god thank god because we sort of like took care of it right we sort of took care of like nutritional problems like you know we sort of took care of things like sinus infections which used to be lethal like a thousand years ago and so when you actually have an effective solution the problem sort of goes away and so then the question becomes like why are these motivational seminars so successful if they don't really fix the problem and that's because they do a good job for a slice of the population and that's where we get to the concept of motivational styles so in the west what we tend to think about is that like there's a particular kind of motivation that we shoot for and i think what gets us into a lot of trouble is it's not that kind of motivation doesn't work for everyone and that's because we each have a cognitive fingerprint or a particular cognitive style and what i've found is that once you understand what your cognitive style is once once you understand what your motivational style is then you can actually motivate yourself in sort of like a very specific way and if we go back to the diet analogy like people are figuring out on their own that even though the fda says you should you know bread rice or noodles makes no difference you should eat x number of carbs per day that some people are gluten gluten insensitive and so like even though the fda says oh it makes no difference for some people they're like it absolutely makes a difference that the fda will say a certain amount of fat and a certain amount of protein whereas some people will be like dairy really messes me up or cheese really messes me up that there's individual variants within a population that a global recommendation doesn't capture and so i think that's true of motivation as well that where we make global recommendations of this is how you get motivated and you should just do this just do it man get good noob right just do it and that only works for a particular kind of motivational style and so what we're gonna do is turn to something called ayurveda so ayurveda is a traditional system of medicine from india from about 5 000 years ago and the really cool thing about ayurveda is people in ayurveda sort of said they started with the idea that people are like fundamentally different they're like oh look this person has a fast metabolism and this person has a slow metabolism this person feels really really like um you know bad when they eat a bunch of salad like they really don't like to eat salad and this person really likes salad oh there's like different dietary preferences there are different metabolic styles there are different cognitive styles and so they came up with these three things called doshas and doshas are essentially classifications that are not real they're just ways that we kind of lump people together and what they realized is that the dorsals like sort of relate to the elements and what they mean by that is not so much that like you can you know so there's like a wind type a fire type and an earth type and so it's not so much that you know you can like biopsy someone and you're gonna see wind in one person but what they noticed is that some mines are kind of like the wind they're highly dynamic so i'm avata type which means i'm a wind type mind which means that my mind is all over the place so i'm kind of prone to adhd and anxiety like my mind kind of thinks about this and then i get excited about that and then i get bored of this and i kind of bounce around all over the place and then there's there's the second type which is sort of the fire type mind which is a bit the mind and the bit the mind is sort of like fire it's like slow and steady kind of burns i mean not really slow but it kind of burns consistently in one direction so if you're trying to figure out you know which way the wind is blowing the wind will blow this way today and it'll blow that way tomorrow which is the whole reason you have a weather vane right that little thing that spins around because the wind changes direction whereas if i you know if i go to like a field and i like light a fire in the corner of the field like the fire is gonna spread in a pretty consistent and steady manner and this is the kind of motivation that we tend to prefer or prioritize in the west we tend to think about motivation as fit the style motivation like you wake up every day you hammer out your work you go to bed you wake up the next day you're ambitious you're driven you're kind of fiery like you you guys like you know people envy and we value sort of this western style or the fire type motivation of i want to wake up every day and have a fire in my belly like i want to work hard and i want to be ambitious and uh you know that's the kind of thing that we kind of try to value and then the third motivational style is the kapha style or the earth style so people with with a kapha motivational pattern or sort of like slow steady resilient if you think about the earth right like earth is sort of like stable it's steady it's strong but it's not very flashy it doesn't move too much and so there's a kapha style of motivation which is kind of like slow and steady wins the race like um and so these are kind of the three different motivational styles okay so i think part of the reason that i want to explain this to you guys is that if you try to adopt a motivational strategy that does not meet your cognitive style you're gonna run into trouble because it's not what you're built for so just to use a gaming analogy it's like you know if i watch a youtube video of like you know mitch has been streaming wow recently so if i watch mitch and i'm like oh man like mages are op dude like mages are sick bro and and then like i try to be a mage but my character is like a fighter i'm gonna suck right so there are different classes and just because a particular class gets a bunch of hype doesn't mean it's the class that you're playing and so the most important thing is that you need to gear and build your strategy based on the class and the stats that you have as opposed to like the stats that get advertised in the class that gets advertised right and so we're gonna kind of go through the three different styles i'm gonna tell you a little bit about them and i'm gonna tell you a little bit about how to find your ideal form of motivation okay all right so what i'm going to call them is there's a vata motivation which is a dynamic motivation a bit the motivation which is a driven motivation and a resilient motivation which is a kapha motivation okay and the first thing that i want to point out is that isn't driven in motivation the same thing like isn't that redundant like that's my whole point is that we define motivation in the bit the style and that's what holds people back is because we assume that all motivation has to be like this drive oriented like steady burn kind of ambition sort of motivation and if you really want to be successful you don't need to adopt that style if that's not what works for you okay so let's start with the dynamic form of motivation or the vata or wind kind of motivation okay i'm going to use those three terms kind of interchangeably so vatas tend to be like very dynamic so they tend to like their mind is sort of like the wind they move in this direction they kind of move in that direction they move in a different direction and so their motivation is something that is easy come easy go and so the first thing that i want you guys to notice is that for people a lot of people complain about this they say that my motivation i get super excited about something and then i lack follow through and they say that this is a problem to be fixed and then they beat their heads against a wall trying to stop having their attention wander so much and then start to like really focus on follow through and they want to be more bit the like right they want to be like more driven and and what i would say to these people is actually you shouldn't do that because that's not who you are and when i tried to do that i started to suck at life and actually what vata motivators need to do is just acknowledge that you're going to get excited about stuff and then you're going to get bored of stuff and so the solution for people who have avata motivational style is to rotate what you're working on and so what i do like my days like i'm part clinician i stream three days a week i see patients like a couple days a week i you know have meetings for healthy gamer i do research i do some consulting here and there um and so like if my my schedule is like all over the place like today you know i saw a patient in the morning i wrote this lecture now i'm streaming i have a research meeting after this i'm going to play some cyberpunk after that i've got a random patient like this evening and so my mind i can work 10 hours a day every single day as long as i'm giving my mind different kinds of things to work on and this was a huge discovery for me because what i used to do is like i used to look at my colleagues who were successful and what i would see is people who were like super hyper focused on one thing like i have a colleague who's a awesome person so she's like an md phd and does a lot of schizophrenia brain research and she knows the brains of people with schizophrenia in and out and she like does research and works clinically in schizophrenia that's like what she does like day in and day out and if i would look at her i'd say wow look at how hyper successful she is she's like assistant professor at the harvard medical school and she has this like she goes to international conferences and presents her research wow she's so amazing i wish i could devote myself to something the way that she does and then i realized like that's just not who i am right so her her style is very kapha oriented we'll kind of get to that so for vata styles recognize that your mind is dynamic that your motivation is easy come easy go that follow through is going to be hard for you which is totally fine because what isn't hard for you is getting re-excited about something right so what you want to do is your your excitement is going to bump up and then it's going to fade but what you can count on yourself for is you're going to get excited about it again so what you need to do is have a rotation of what you work on so instead of going from like okay today i'm going to learn guitar and tomorrow i'm going to learn drums and then the third day i'm going to learn piano pick like one instrument pick like one life skill and then like try to write and then work on your resume and then do this and then the key thing about vatas is that instead of going from one to two to three to four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen fourteen what you'll actually find is once you hit number three or four you can go back to number one and you'll be just excited about it just as excited so you at the end of the day what you're gonna do is not dig one well a hundred feet deep you're gonna dig one well one foot deep and then you're gonna start a second well and a third well and a fourth well and then you just need to rotate back to number one and then over the course of like a month you'll have you'll have dug four 50-foot wells which is like pretty good and kind of good enough okay so solution to vata motivation is don't try to force yourself to follow through let your mind wander and come back to it from a daily perspective what you want to do is take frequent breaks and do multiple things a day okay so like for vatas your your day shouldn't be like okay i'm gonna start work every day at like you know 10 a.m and i'm gonna work until six no i mean your day can be kind of all over the place like for structure and frequent breaks you know you can start you want to try to be consistent but it's okay to have some variability in your start time structure frequent breaks because your mind is going to do way better when it's kind of like fresh and so the other way to think about vata motivation is that y'all are sprinters not marathon runners so you want to have your day lined up in like multiple sprints or even like a sprint for a week where like this week i'm gonna sit down and i'm gonna learn how to program python and then next week i'm gonna sit down and i'm gonna like learn how to play the piano so you want to organize your day in in in sprints okay or organize your kind of motivational style in sprints next thing is pitfalls for vata people so the pitfalls that vata people run into tend to be like anxiety-oriented or worry-oriented so since our mind is kind of all over the place we tend to um you know anticipate all kinds of different sorts of problems and then all of those problems will kind of destroy our motivation because we're like this could go wrong and that could go wrong and that could go wrong and that could go wrong and so the best thing to kind of do there's some meditation techniques and things like that we that we've taught so nadi should be is like a really good technique for um vata motivators kapalabhati is also really good you kind of want to slow yourself down a little bit just recognize that you may worry about things and recognize that your mind has the capacity to see more problems than actually exist so have a little bit of faith in yourself and kind of circle back to it and over time your let your excitement overcome your anxiety because remember when you get started you're not anxious you're just excited about it and so as your excitement dwindles the anxiety will start to decrease and you'll lose motivation because of your anxiety and that's actually totally fine so just move to the next thing and then over time the excitement will rebuild and the anxiety will just kind of go away because the thing that you've got working for you if you're avata mind is that the anxiety is going to be a sprint in your mind too that the anxiety will flare and as long as you don't feed it it'll actually die away on its own because your mind is going to get bored of it and it's going to be like oh like let's go do something else now so you can play that to your that's a strength that you can kind of rely on okay so so def the second type is the pitta or the driven motivational style or the the fire motivation so this is what i would call kind of a more traditional motivation so when we think about people who are highly motivated we think about pittas okay so bit the motivation is like the steady burn it's like it's not slow but it's kind of steady constant kind of driven towards a particular thing and if you're a pit the motivator generally speaking you may not actually have that much trouble with motivation because our society is designed for fitness to succeed so our societal structure is like if you look at you know pay raises for example there's like a statistic that suggests that people who earn the highest salaries like move every two years so you're not like avatar and switching jobs every six months and you're not like a kapha and switching jobs every five years if you like kind of go to a job you work really hard you start to kind of get bored of it you sort of burn out a little bit and then you move to the next thing that's sort of the bit the style so if you're a pit the motivator a couple of things to kind of be mindful of is that you want a sort of stable work day so you want to work start at maybe like you know somewhere between eight and ten in the morning and then run until five or six um you neces you don't necessarily want to take a bunch of breaks because like once you get going you kind of get going right um and then like you know if the fire goes out it can be hard to kind of reignite it second thing about bit this is you have to be careful about burnout so bitters often times have ambition that exceeds their stamina okay so what this means is and you go you guys may run into this which is that um you know you feel like you really want to work but then you kind of feel burnt out at the end and then like you don't actually end up progressing because you kind of like burnt up too quickly and so what i want you guys to think a little bit about is like you know the brightest candle burns out the fastest so if you're a pit that you may need to restrain that kind of fire a little bit you guys have to be careful about sort of feelings of ambition or feelings of righteousness or other kinds of like emotions like anger or irritability that drive you to work really hard and kind of leave you in sort of a burnt out sort of state so pithas also need to watch out for interpersonal conflict so my diagnostic question for pithas is are you intolerant of the idiocy of others and if the answer to that question is yes then chances are you're a pitta so as you motivate yourself you guys may end up working with other people and you may find that their motivational style is different from yours and you can get really really frustrated with them and that can lead to interpersonal conflict which really shatters your productivity because then you're fighting with this person instead of doing your work so the pitfall to really watch out for if you're a beta is interpersonal conflict that brings us to our third um motivational style which is kaphas so kaphas are earth types or the resilient motivators i kind of think about them their motivation is like a marathon okay so what that means is that it's slow to start and really doesn't like start rolling until like you know late in the day so i want you guys to think about kapha's as people with low acceleration and high top speed whereas vatas have high acceleration and low top speed betas are kind of in the middle so the biggest thing about kaphas is that they tend to beat themselves up for not being faster they look at the fitness and they say like oh my god look at how successful and driven this person is they look at the vatas and they're like oh my god look at how quickly this person learns things so uh gaffas just they start slow but they hit their top speed and when they hit their top speed they do awesome work so the main thing about guppas is you got to give yourself time to get started so some of these people may have a lot of trouble starting work like early in the morning and they may sort of like have their most productive hours late at night or like in the in the middle of the afternoon whereas like a zavata once 3 pm rolls around i like i'm done like my stamina is shot and so for kapha kapha's the biggest thing that they need to learn is kind of patience right and recognize that like you're someone who will take maybe a few weeks or a few months to like figure out how you know your job works some people are quick studies kaphas are slow studies which doesn't mean that they're dumb because the interesting thing about kapha memory is that they learn slowly but they also forget slowly whereas vatas learn very quickly and then they forget very quickly so with kapha's you're sort of like a late game build okay so it's going to take you some time to get started so be patient with yourself once you get kraken you're a force to be reckoned with so you can think about kaf as sort of late bloomers i think a lot of people on you know a lot of people in our community are like oh i miss the boat i'm so old now um there are so many people who are younger and more successful than i am you got to understand that you just may be a late bloomer and be patient with yourself which brings us to the cognitive pitfall of guffas which is that they tend to be very very self-critical and prone to depression and as a result they are likely to give up kind of at the worst possible moment just when they're about to really start kicking ass right so i want you guys to think about a kapha like a late game carry whereas like if you're 25 minutes into the game and you haven't really done a whole lot you've just been kind of farming and you've died a couple of times but you're sort of a late game carry and and guffas have a tendency to be really self-critical and so they'll work at something for like you know a week two weeks three weeks four weeks and they won't see a whole lot of result and then the self-critical thinking starts to step in and says oh look at how dumb you are you've been doing this for a month and you haven't gotten anywhere you might as well stop and then when they stop they really shoot themselves in the foot because if they actually just like recognize that it's going to take me a while and if you recognize that you're patient with yourself if you let yourself be patient with yourself if you don't let yourself be quite so critical about how slow you are you'll realize that like when you figure things out you'll have figured them out completely and then you'll really start to fly so just give yourself a little bit of time give yourself a little bit of patience and recognize that your acceleration is going to be slow but once you get into a groove you'll really do amazing work so i've worked with a couple of like guffas who um you know they they sort of feel very anxious in their workplace because they'll get some new employee who like seems super bright and super capable and everyone's like oh look how smart this person is and then like they'll get a new person you know they've been there for three years and then the new person shows up nakafa feels like this person is doing way better than i am and they've only been here two weeks and i've been here three three years and then if they give themselves a little bit of patience what they begin to see is that like everyone starts to realize oh the shiny new toy is just shiny and actually can't get the work done and they kind of come back to the coffin they're like hey can you help us out with this again hey you know it seems like i'm really having trouble this person's really not cutting it and so kapha's kind of you know you just got to really give yourself patience um and so that's sort of a quick rundown of different motivational styles just to recap we have vata motivators which are sprinters or dynamic right motivation is easy come easy go the solution is to rotate things that you work on and let your mind be a little bit free but rotate them between the same set of things so when you get bored of number one go to number two when you get bored of number two go to number three you get bored of number three number four and then back to one the things to watch out about are anxiety so a lot of times your anxiety will tell you oh my god all this stuff will go wrong just drop it and the cool thing to remember there is that like your anxiety will go away too because your mind is fata and dynamic and you'll get bored of your anxiety second type is bit the motivators that are sort of driven motivators so this is the classic motivation that's kind of kind of steady constant a lot of ambition which you have to watch out for is interpersonal conflict because you're going to have low tolerance and low patience for other people there's going to be a lot of anger irritability righteousness that could kind of push you in the wrong direction and then you're going to get so caught up in your interpersonal conflict that you're not going to be productive in your work anymore the third motivational type is the kaphas or earth motivators or resilient motivators these are our marathon runners so they start slow um they take a while to get to top speed but once they hit top speed they're really a force to be reckoned with so you got to give yourself time and have patience to for yourself and recognize that kaphas have a tendency to be very self-critical and so a lot of kaphas give up right at the moment of success and so just give yourself more time give yourself time to kind of get started and you'll be far more successful so i hope that was kind of um helpful and what i want to really what i want you guys to take away is that if you have trouble with motivation maybe the reason you struggle so much is because you're trying to motivate you're trying to play a class that you're not that you aren't right so you're a mage running around with a two-handed sword and you're like my dps sucks yeah it's going to like start casting fireballs bro and don't do what other people are doing recognize what your strengths are and play to your motivational strengths and then you'll be surprised at what you're able to accomplish you

Channel: HealthyGamerGG

Views: 241,528

Rating: 4.9778924 out of 5

Keywords: drk, dr kanojia, twitch, motivation, motivation explained, how to be motivated, how motivation works, motivation psychology

Id: tRWX21lW_bU

Length: 29min 4sec (1744 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/La-ni]

definitely vata