August 12, 2026 • 36 mins
Every manager and every parent has met the same wall. Someone who won't engage, won't budge, won't do the thing, no matter how hard you push or how much you offer.
Dr Justin Coulson has spent two decades inside the research explaining why pushing and bribing rarely work, and what actually does.
Justin is a psychologist, bestselling author, host of the TV show Parental Guidance, and father of six daughters, and his work sits inside self-determination theory, one of the most evidence-based bodies of research in psychology.
In this episode, I sit down with Justin to unpack the three basic psychological needs that shift someone from doing something because they have to, to doing it because they're genuinely on board. We also get into his early morning breathwork practice, why he believes boys are the solution rather than the problem, and a story involving his wife, a health retreat and a news website that will make you want to throw your phone into a river.
If you've ever managed someone who just won't engage, or parented a kid who won't do anything without a fight, this conversation will change how you think about motivation altogether.
Justin and I discuss:
- The four levels of motivation, from extrinsic to intrinsic, and why chasing intrinsic motivation in a team or a family is setting the bar too high
- The three basic psychological needs, relatedness, competence and autonomy, and why autonomy is often the linchpin
- Why "autonomy" doesn't mean freedom, and what it actually means in practice
- The three simple questions Justin uses with his own kids and with employees to work out where someone sits on the motivation continuum
- How he uses breathwork and carbon dioxide tolerance as a daily practice in building resilience
- What's really going on with boys today, and why Justin believes a healthy model of masculinity is the answer
Key quotes
"When people understand the value in the activity, when people buy the why, they will choose to do it autonomously, which means that you don't have motivation problems."
"Most motivation problems aren't motivation problems at all. They're rationale problems."
Connect with Justin Coulson on Instagram, LinkedIn and his website. Check out his latest book Boys, and listen to his podcast Happy Families.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
When people understand the value in the activity. When people
buy the why, they will choose to do it autonomously,
which means that you don't have motivation problems.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
That was Justin Coulson, psychologist, best selling author, host of
the TV show Parental Guidance, and father of six daughters.
And Justin is also someone who has spent a couple
of decades deep inside the most evidence based theory of
human motivation on the planet. So most of us are
(00:30):
either dangling carrots or cracking whips, whether that be as parents,
as managers, and sometimes even on ourselves. We think that
motivation is something that we need to manufacture, inject, or
threaten people into. But Justin spent twenty years starting why
that approach is backwards. His new book is called Boys.
(00:53):
But the ideas in this conversation go way beyond parenting.
We get into the research behind what actually makes people
want to show up, and specifically the three leavers that
shift someone from I have to to I'm in. We
also talk about breath work, carbon dioxide tolerance as a
(01:15):
metaphor for resilience, and a story about Justin's wife, and
a news website that will definitely make you want to
throw your phone.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Into a river.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
If you've ever had someone on your team who just
won't engage, or a kid who won't do anything without
a fight, I think you will find this episode very,
very helpful.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals,
and strategies for optimizing your date. I'm your host, doctor
Amantha imper.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
So justin. You've got six kids, six daughter daughters, Yeah, daughters.
You've got a thriving business, a podcast, You've got a
TV show, You've got a marriage. You've just written a
new book called Boys. Is this like your seventh or
eighth book?
Speaker 1 (02:14):
It's somewhere around ten to twelve books. I can do
the maths if you want, but it's loosely in that range.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Okay. I want to know how do you fit it
all in? I want to know what, like, what are
your systems, ritual's, habits that make this possible.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
I laugh every time I hear this question, because honestly,
I feel like I need you in my back pocket
so I can be more productive. This isn't a humble brag.
I'm not trying to play it down or anything like that.
I just feel like I am so staggeringly unproductive and
ridiculously lazy. And if I would really just pull my
finger out and do the work, I would get this
stuff done so much faster and so much more effectively.
(02:51):
I don't know if I've got a really good answer
for you, but I can break down what I do
and maybe you'll hear stuff that is useful. I don't know.
So basically, I'm a fitness fanatic. I get on my
bike at about four thirty and I go for usually
about seventy k's. I'll jump on the bike. My goal
is to do seventy k's by seven am.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Yeah, So I'll do that three mornings a week. There's
also three mornings a week that I go to the gym.
In amongst that, my mornings also include thirty minutes of
what I would call spiritual or devotional kind of reading.
I have a faith background, but you don't have to
have a faith background to read. I do thirty minutes
of regular reading where I read something that I would
just call sort of self helpy kind of thing, and
(03:28):
I do a little bit of breath work as well.
So I usually do twenty to twenty five minutes of that,
and then I'm in the office somewhere between sort of
nine and nine thirty, assuming that I'm not traveling and
I an aeroplanet, that kind of thing. This is when
I'm at home, and then when I'm in the office,
it's kind of phone calls, podcast recording, talking with clients,
preparing talks through until around about four four thirty in
(03:51):
the afternoon.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Tell me about the twenty minutes of breath work, like,
what are some of the practical things that you're doing
there that maybe I can learn from.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
It's really silly. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. I'm
a really keen surfer, so I've got two sports. I
surf and I cycle. My wife doesn't like me surfing.
She's worried that I'm going to get dumped by a
big wave one day and get held under and drown.
So my breath work is basically free diving exercises, so
I can hold my breath for a long time. If
I build up my capacity, I'll do a two minute
(04:21):
breath hold, then have a minute off, then a two
minute fifteen breath hold, then have a minute off, then
a two minute thirty breath hold, then have a minute off,
and I go up to like three minutes or three
minutes fifteen, and then that'll be the day. And the
goal is, of course that you get better and better
at it and move up to four minutes or five
minutes or six minutes. So I do that kind of thing,
and then the reverse of that is getting used to
carbon dioxide build up in your body. And there's a
(04:42):
really great resilience metaphor here as well, which I love
to talk about in my presentations. So with the carbon
dioxide work, you do your two minute breath hold, but
then you only have a ten second break, and then
you do another two minute breath hold and then a
ten second break and then a two minute and so
what you're doing is your cells don't have enough time
to get rid of all the carbon dioxide, which when
(05:04):
you take a deep breath and then you feel like
you're going to pass out, so you have to get
more oxygen in. You're not actually running out of oxygen.
You've still got ninety eight percent oxygen saturation in your cells.
What's happening is that your cells, through your circulatory system,
are picking up carbon dioxide as they whiz around the body,
and the CO two build up in your cells is
what makes you feel uncomfortable. It makes you feel like
(05:25):
you need to breathe. You don't need more air, You
actually just want to expel the CO two and that's
the discomfort. So I do the breathing exercises because it
helps me to get used to discomfort. I feel like
if we can learn to tolerate frustration, learn to tolerate
distress better in our lives, it seems to transfer into
other areas. I find that when I'm doing my breathing
(05:47):
exercises consistently, I'm more patient on the road. I find
that when I'm dealing with CO two build up in
my blood more effectively, I'm more patient with my six children.
I just find that it makes me a better person
when I'm holding my breath and sitting still.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
I love that. I went through a stage earlier this
year where I was doing quite regular breath work. It
was guided through an app in this little device that
connected via Bluetooth, and I fell out of the rhythm.
But listening to you, it's making me go, I need
to get back onto that.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Do you know what? Just on that, Amantha. There's a
health retreat on the Gold Coast called Eden Eden Health
Resort it's a favorite place of my wife's to go.
She likes to get there at least annually, but she
often will try to sneak in an extra few days
somewhere else in the year. And we did an exercise
last time. She was there with a guy who's all
about breath work. She was hooked up to a machine,
I don't know what it was called, and it was
measuring her breathing, the wave in and out. She's working
(06:44):
just on five breaths a minute, so every twelve seconds
time for a new breath, breathe in, breathe out, really regulated,
really easy. While she was doing that, this guy handed
my wife Kylie. He passed his phone to her and said,
I want you to just keep on breathing, but I've
got the news website open. I'd like you to just
(07:06):
scroll through the headlines please. She scrolled through the headlines
for a minute or two, and then he took the
phone back, and then he showed the breathing wave pattern
on the computer. And what had happened is Kylie had
gone from these beautiful twelve second in out waves of
breath to breathing about twenty times a minute, short shallow
(07:26):
breaths The funny thing is she's not interested in the news.
She doesn't ever read the news, and most of the
headlines she said with about things like Prince Harry and
I don't know, just things that were completely irrelevant to
her life. She doesn't care about any of it, and
yet it affected her that much. So we've taken that
as a really, really great signal that there's value in
(07:47):
us really really focusing hard on being present, being mindful
of getting our breath work right.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
I am smiling at that because I was at Eden
in early January and I went through the exact same
exercise and it blew my mind. And the device is
called the m wave and I'll link to that in
the show notes, but highly recommend. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Now.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
I feel like we could talk about breath for another hour,
but instead let's shift gears to Boys, which is the
name of your new book. And I remember when I
sat down to start reading it, and the first few pages,
I was just in shock, like terrified and stressed reading
(08:37):
about these horrible stories and anecdotes that you talk about
in terms of what is happening with boys. And I
want to know what is going on with boys right
now and how is that then playing out into these
boys becoming men and entering the workplace.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
When I first wrote the book, I had a couple
of chapters of like, there was so much because there's
so much news around boys behaving badly. My early readers
just said, I want to cry. I can't keep reading it.
It's too much. So I've shrunk it right down. It
still has that same effect, It's just that there's a
lot less of it now. Essentially, what we're dealing with
is a fundamental trust problem. What of my move by that?
So trust means that you believe the other person is
(09:17):
going to act in your best interest. And unfortunately, because
of the narrative that's been building for at least the
last several decades, but the last decade particularly has been horrendous,
we now have a mainstream societal narrative that men and
boys are a problem. And I was talking with a
colleague one day. She was in her early forties, divorced,
(09:42):
and we knew each other well enough and closely enough
personally enough that it was not inappropriate for me to say, hey, well,
are you dating? Like you're looking around you on the apps?
What's going on? And her response to me was really fascinating, Amantha.
She said, I don't know if I can find a
man who's going to be in my life and show
up as a bonus. And I paused, and instantly I thought,
(10:05):
imagine putting out on your on your Tinder profile, show
me a bonus. I don't know if that's going to
work so well. But at a deeper level, I'm halfway
through writing this book. I just lost my nephew to suicide.
He was twenty years old and he took his life.
And that had already caused me to do a really
big rethink on what I was writing. It was in
that conversation I thought, well, we're really fundamentally dealing with
(10:25):
a trust issue. She doesn't want a man child. She
wants somebody who's going to be a contributor. And she
was basically saying, he's going to want to cook, he's
going to want to clean, and he's going to want
somebody to organize him. I want a partner. I don't
want somebody who's going to be a drag on my life.
So if I go back to your original question, we
keep on saying in society now that boys are a problem,
and I think that's a really unhelpful narrative. We need
(10:47):
to actually start to say that boys are a solution.
I believe that they are the solution. They're not a solution.
They are the solution. But what they need is a
really healthy model of what masculinity is. So a healthy
man is one who helps the people around him feel
safer and stronger, full stop, end of story. If you,
as a man, use your power, use your strength, use
your capacity to denegrate, to demean, to dominate, then you're
(11:10):
not a man. You're a muppet. Right, That's not what
manhood is about.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
You talk a lot about motivation in the Boys Book,
and I want to talk about what are these three
leavers that we can start to pull or manipulate in
boys and also in adults in the workplace.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Yeah, so it's not just for boys, this is universal.
My PhD was in positive psychology, and once I finished
my studies, I moved very very clearly in a specific
direction towards a theory that some of your listeners might
be familiar with called self determination theory. And I've basically
spent the last twenty years deeply embedded in that specific
area of research. If I've got it right, the lead
(11:57):
researcher of the theory, is now the most to living
psychology professor on the planet, and the theory is the
most evidence based, the deepest richest vein of psychological work
that's been happening on the planet for the last couple
of decades. So there's plenty of research, loads of practical
evidence and theory underpending what I'm about to share. You've
talked about three levers. Can I go back a step
(12:19):
and talk about motivation generally? First, really quickly, so everyone's
familiar with the idea of extrinsic motivation, that is carrots
and sticks. I do stuff because if you dangle a
big enough carriage in front of me, I'm going to
go for it, Or if you brandish a big enough stick,
I'm going to pull back. I'm not going to do
the thing that I'm going to get punished for. It
wasn't until the nineteen seventies that researchers began to recognize
(12:39):
that there was another form of motivation. It's called intrinsic motivation.
And everyone gets the idea that I, hang on, I'm
doing it because I want to, and regardless of how
big the stick is, if I really want to do it,
I'm going to find a way to do it. I'll
do it without a bribe, I'll do it for free.
I'm just into it, right. That's that intrinsic motivation. That's
me and surfing, or me and holding my breath. I
just think it's wonderful. There are other forms of motivation
that have been discovered in this theory along the way, though,
(13:00):
and I think that they're really really important. Why because
intrinsic motivation, in my opinion, frankly, is too high a bar.
Like as an employer, I'll talk about parenting again in
a sect, but as an employer, if I really truly
believe that I want to have a purely intrinsically motivated workforce,
then I'm going to have a really hard time finding
(13:21):
people selecting people to work in my organization who just
love it so much that I want to stop. And
if I'm running accountancy firm, I know that there are
some people who can't get enough time in their spreadsheets,
but they're pretty rare. You're going to have a hard
time finding that many people. But if I'm running a
consultancy group or an architecture firm, like people do work
(13:41):
for reasons other than that they love it. If that's
our goal to get them there, you just never get it.
Doesn't matter how many ping pong tables and sleep pods
and shares you offer. That's not going to move them
to intrinsic motivation. So there are three other things that
we need to talk about here before we talk about
the three leads. After extrinsic motivation, a slightly deeper form
(14:01):
of motivation is called interjected motivation. So where I'm extrinsically motivated,
I'm doing it to avoid punishments or to gain a reward.
Interjected motivation means that I'm doing it because I should,
I have to, I must, I'm supposed to. Interjected motivation
is showing up at work on Monday, the day the
(14:22):
diet began, and somebody's brought a cake because their birthday,
and you're standing there in the corner singing happy birthday
along with the rest of the staff, and then you're like,
I really shouldn't have a piece of cake. I said
that I wouldn't have a cake. I told everybody that
the diet started today. There's a bit of ego involvement there.
I'm not going to do it and so you don't
do it. No one's making you avoid the cake. You're
making yourself. You've actually internalized the police, right. So that's
(14:45):
introjected motivation, and interjected motivation kind of sucks because it's
just a drag. It's like the person who says I
have to go to the gym. What happens is that
they quit because we don't like doing things we have
to do. The next form of motivation is called ad
to fight motivation, and this is actually where I think
that we should be setting the bar. Whether it's getting
our kids to clean their room, or getting our employees
(15:07):
to fill in their health and safety reports, or whatever
boring thing they don't really like doing, and you're always
on their case about getting it done. Identified regulation works
like this. Here are the keywords. I identify the value
in doing it. So if I can see that this
(15:27):
is valuable, I don't have to like doing it. I
don't have to want to do it. But if I
can see that it makes sense, what happens is and
here's the other key word. It means that I will
endorse the behavior. And once we get to endorsement of
the behavior, you as a manager or you as a parent,
or you as a husband or wife. You no longer
have to crack the whip because the person goes, yeah,
I get it, I get it. It makes sense. I
(15:50):
value it, I'll do it, And to me, that's the
workhource of the motivation continuum. Get people to recognize the value. Now,
it would be nice if they were intrinsically motivated, and
some people will be, but most people won't. The one
that comes after that is called integrated. Integrated regulation is
where it becomes part of who you are. Right, So,
I ride my bike because just who I am, I'm
(16:12):
a person who really I don't just value fitness. I
see fitness as an integral part of who I am
and who I will be for the rest of my life. Okay,
I don't actually do it because I love it. I
serve because I love it. I write books. I write books, Amantha,
because I value the activity I'm identified. Writing a book
(16:32):
sometimes is like having a four year long illness. You
wake up every day and go, oh, not again, when
am I going to feel better? And then finally you
get it. There true and so, but there are some
people who write books because, oh my goodness, this is
what I live for. I can't wait to craft this
new sentence. I can't wait to flesh out that idea.
I can't wait to see where the plot goes. Not me,
(16:54):
not me. I do it because I see the value
in it. I know that it's going to make a
difference in other people's lives. And so if we want
people to be motivated, the question isn't how motivated they are,
The question is how are they motivated? Because you can
motivate people or get them motivated anywhere along that continuum
based on the environment.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Coming up next, Justin explains where he thinks chasing intrinsic
motivation is setting yourself up to fail, and we also
get into one surprisingly simple move to make your motivation
problems disappear.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
If you're looking for more tips to improve the way
you work, can Live.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
I write a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've
discovered that have helped me personally. You can sign up
for that at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot com.
And can I ask Justin, with those different levels of motivation,
how can say a manager listening identify where is my
(17:56):
team at and is that just going to change every
hour every day? Then how do we know where people
are at.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Yeah, I think that there's value in having the conversation.
Like I do a team training on this with my family.
I sit them down and say where are we at
with this particular issue. Like if I'm having ongoing conflict
with a child, I will make a guess that they're
probably either extrinsically motivated or regulated for something or there
at an interjective level. Let me give you a really
simple example. My family, as I mentioned before, we've got
(18:23):
a faith background. We go to church on Sundays. We
are in the distinct minority of Australians who do that.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I know.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
But I'm currently raising my fifth sixteen year old daughter,
so I've been through this a number of times now.
Like I'm used to dealing with the whole teenage girl thing,
and usually somewhere between fourteen and sixteen, each of my
kids has gone, why are you making me go to church? Dad?
And my response every single time has been, kid, oh,
(18:48):
I'm not making you go to church, And they'll say, yes,
you are. You're going to get me in trouble if
I don't go. My response will be because they're familiar
with this motivation continuum, I'll say to them, Wow, it
sounds like you feel like I'm going to punish you.
That means it sounds like you're only going to church
for external reasons. You're extrinsically motivated, And I say pure,
(19:08):
because that's what teenagers do. Then I sort of have
this mic drop moment with them where I say, guess what,
I'm not going to make you go to church, and
I'm certainly not going to punish you for not going,
and I'm absolutely not going to reward you for going.
So if you're coming to church, it's not for extrinsic reasons.
And their response every time Amantha is well, i'm supposed
(19:29):
to go you think I should be there, And I say, well,
that sounds like an interjected conversation. That sounds like interject
like this is my family. All right, I'm so sorry,
but this is this is the conversation that we have
about everything screens and making your bed and cleaning the kitchen,
the whole lot, walking the dog, feeding the dog. And
so I say that sounds like you're interjected in terms
(19:50):
of your regulation style for church, and I'll go puah,
Maybe like they recognize that this is there making themselves
do it. My response to that is when you look
around the congregation on a Sunday and you see people
who are interjected, and you do see them, what do
you notice? How are they singing the songs, the hymns?
What are they doing?
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Like?
Speaker 1 (20:10):
What's there listening? Like when somebody's giving a talk or
a sermon and the kids will be like, they don't sing,
They're staring at their phone. I'm like, yeah, like they
hate being there because when you're interjected, you're doing it
because you should. And so my response to them is
as follows, I really think that this matters, and here's why.
So I provide a rationale for why I believe that
we should be going to church, that there's benefit in
(20:33):
being there. I'll talk about the social benefits. I'll talk
about the spiritual benefits. I'll talk about the meaning of
life benefits. I'll talk about the discipline benefits and so on.
And that little speech will normally go for twenty or
thirty seconds, because anything longer than that and the kids
start to doze off. Then I'll say, so here's the thing.
We're going to be in the car in about twenty
to thirty minutes. I'd love for you to be in
the car with me, but I'm not going to force
you in the car, and you don't have to be there.
(20:53):
If you can see the value in what I've just said,
if you can buy the why, if you can accept
the rationale as valid, that means that you will have
reached identified regulation. And if you can be identified when
you're sitting in the car, then we'll have a good
time at church, and you'll actually end up feeling reasonably
glad that you were there most of the time. Every
(21:14):
now and again it's a bit of a doug let's
face it, but most of the time you'll feel okay
about it. And in every case, my kids have been
sitting in the car twenty minutes later when we've gotten them,
and I haven't hastled that, I haven't said we've got
to go get in the car or anything like that.
They just do it. Back to your question about the workplace,
it's exactly the same. When you've got an employee who
is struggling with a policy, or with a procedure, or
with their sales, or with a staff member or whatever
(21:36):
it might be. You name, it doesn't matter what the
challenge is. If you sit down and work out what's
going on. You usually find that they're doing something because
they have to, or they're only doing it because they're
going to get paid, or whatever it is, and then
our opportunity is to help them to understand the value
of it, to explain the rationale so that they can say, Okay,
well I can get behind that, I can endorse that
(21:59):
I'm in, because once they say I'm in, once they
buy the why, then you don't have motivation problems, which
brings us to the three leavers that you asked about
about a half an hour ago when I started this answer,
I'm so sorry for long answer. I don't know if
it was third, probably been if I wasn't that long ago.
And the three leavers that we've got to pull, the
three leavers that helped to identify where we're going to
(22:20):
be situated on that motivation continuum what we call basic
psychological needs. So one of them is relatedness. Do I
feel a sense of mutual belonging in this environment? We
move towards environments where we like the people that we're with,
and we avoid environments where we don't like the people
that were with, Like on another's day, if I've got
to go and spend time with my mother in law,
and I don't have a great relationship with her. Here's
(22:41):
what's going to happen. I'm going to say to Kylie, Hey, honey,
we've had a great morning. You've had breakfast in bed,
the kids have made a mess in the kitchen, you've
opened up some gifts. It's been fantastic, and I know
that it's time to go to your mum's house now.
But if we leave, the hou's going to be a
big beness and then we're going to get back and
there's going to be stuff everywhere and we're going to
have a rush afternoon. It's going to be horrible for
I've got an idea, Why aren't you and the kids
(23:02):
go to your mum's and have a beautiful Mother's Day
with your mum. I'll stay home, I'll clean up the kitchen,
i'll tie to the house, I'll make the beds, and
I'll get everything ready for dinner, so that when you
come back from that beautiful Mother's Day activity that you're
having with your mum, everything's perfect for you for your
Mother's Day evening. So what I'm trying to do there
is I'm trying to avoid the place that I don't
want to be right, but I'm doing it in this
really pro social, helpful way. But essentially this is an
(23:24):
avoidance strategy, and you might often find that you've got
an employee or a child who doesn't want to do
the thing because they hate the people, where when they're
going to be with people they like, they just end
up wanting to be there, like they identify the value
of being there simply because they get to be with
great people. The second basic psychological need is called competence.
Competence means I can do this thing. I'm capable, I
have the capacity for it, or if not, at least
(23:46):
I'm making progress in that direction. And again you'll usually
find that a team member is refusing to do a
job or not doing a job well because they don't
know how. They don't understand the structure, the process, the framework,
the system, the routine, the algorithm, the way that it
needs to be done. So the key word for building
competence is structure. And that's why we do trainings and
inductions and all that sort of stuff, because you teach
people the structure of how we do it. Your whole
(24:08):
podcast How I Work is about providing structure for optimization,
maximization and efficiency and effectiveness in the workplace. As you
provide structures, people go, hm, I can do this more
competently now, and as they become more competent, they feel
better about being there. Their motivation or regulation style actually change.
It moves into those deeper waters because we love being
places where we're good at stuff and we avoid places
(24:30):
where we allowsier stuff. And the third basic psychological need
is autonomy. Autonomy does not mean freedom. Every time I
say autonomy, people are other. Their eyes are like, oh,
here we go. People want to do whatever they want.
It's got to be rules, and I agree that that does.
Autonomy actually means, if we go back to those words
that I use before, that we understand the rationale that
we buy the why, and therefore we are choiceful of
(24:52):
volitional in our action. So the example that I always
use is driving on the left hand side of the road,
where in Australia that's what we do. We drive on
the left hand side of the road. It ever gets
in the car in Australia, punches the steering wheel, swears
at Anthony Alban easy or the state premiere where whatever
state you're in, and says why are you're making me
do this. I just want to drive on the right
hand side. No one does that. And you might argue
(25:13):
that it's because you're going to get fined if you
drive on the right hand side of the road. But
you could get in the car in the middle of
the night with no traffic, no vehicles anywhere, and I
guarantee you would still drive on the lefts you're doing
it volitionally, you're doing it choicefully, you're doing it autonomously.
That is, you understand that it just makes sense that
you drive on the left, and so that's what you do.
(25:34):
When people understand the reasons for the policies, when people
understand the value in the activity, when people buy the why,
they will choose to do it autonomously, which means that
you don't have motivation problems. So those are the three
leavers to pull. Whether it's kids, or whether it's employees,
or even if it's your wife or husband, they're the
three leavers to pull.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
And can I ask out of those three levers? So
we've got related less or connectedness, we've got competence sometimes
also called mastery, and we've got autonomy. Which of those
three do you find tend to be the biggest problem,
certainly like in workplaces for adults.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
I think that autonomy is the lynchpin. I don't know
if I would say it's the biggest problem. Every workplace
is going to have its own challenges and unique variables,
attributes and characteristics, but I generally find that autonomy sits
at the heart of it. And what I mean by that, well,
let's say there's a relationship challenge somewhere. What will usually
(26:35):
happen is that a person in management will step in
and say, well, you guys need to sort this out.
They'll step in in a command control way, although they'll
step in with a whole lot of correction and direction.
You get really wonderful managers who will sit down sometimes
and say, I've noticed justin that you and Amanther have
had this ongoing, simmering tension for a little while. I
(26:55):
don't know where it started. I don't know where it
came from, but i'd i'd love to understand what's happening
and see if I can support you. And you get
that kind of a manager and you go, oh, yeah,
this this feels good. But that often doesn't happen. And
it's the same with competence. Quite often, if you're struggling
with competence, the workplace gets turned into a game show.
We're not getting our sales, well, let's give away a
(27:16):
holiday to Hawaii for the number one performer. And it
just band aids over the real reasons that we're not
getting sales. Maybe there's something going on in the economy,
something happening in the market. We get that kind of
performance challenge, and we need to look at the structure.
We need to look at the training, the processes that
we've been working through to see whether or not we
can help our staff. So I would say that autonomy,
(27:39):
understanding what's going on for them, making sure that they
understand our reasons, our rationals, and making sure that they're
stepping in choicefully to the tasks that they're doing is
at the core of it. When I do my doctorate,
I did a lot of work leaning into Amy Resnevsky's
tripartite model of workplace orientation, that is, to see it
as a job, a career, or a call. And I
(28:01):
don't have any data for this, but my sense would
be that people who see their work as a job,
they tend to do it in a controlled way. They're
not really that worried about competence. They're probably not even
loving the people that they're with. It's just a means
to an end. Whereas people who see their work as
a vocation or a calling, my sense is that they
probably work with people that they love. They probably just
(28:24):
get so embedded in the process of developing and progressing
and creating that sense of mastery. And just my sense
would be that they would score really, really high in
terms of their motivational style or their regulation style because
they see it as a calling. And when we can
make our workplaces feel a little more supportive of autonomy,
(28:46):
relationships automatically improve, and people feel more competent because they
have more of a sense of choice. They're orienting themselves
towards things that they're already attracted to because they do
them well.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
I want to know, justin if we're reflecting on ourselves
and how motivated am i? How am I going in
these three dimensions, and perhaps also reflecting on our kids
if we have kids, or our employees if we're a manager,
what are some of the questions that we can ask
(29:19):
ourselves to go How am I going with autonomy and
competence and relatedness.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
When I was writing the book, I threw a handful
of questions together in that vein. My sense is that
these conversations, either with self or with another person, should
just orient around how am I feeling about my relationships.
Let's pick school, for example, with a child, or university
with a young adult, and of course you can apply
this in whatever your context is. I might say to
(29:47):
my child, I've noticed that you haven't wanted to go
to school a lot lately. We've been having a lot
of tension in the mornings. You don't want to get dressed.
And it's not just because it's cold and it's winter
or anything like that. It's like there seems to be
a level of resistance around school that I haven't seen before. Now,
if I do that with my child, I'm already stepping
into a really relationally supportive environment with them. They're feeling
(30:09):
like I'm exploring their world, and so that makes them
feel safe, they can trust me, and they might start
to open up and say, yeah, there's this issue going on.
There's this person, there's this teacher. If it's a workplace,
there's this colleague, there's this client, there's this boss. And
then you say Okay, well, that's really tricky. The question
that I always ask next is is there anything else?
Because quite often you'll have a staff member or you'll
(30:30):
have a child who will just tell you what they
think you need to hear or what they think you
want to hear. And by just poking and probing that
a little bit deeper, it really makes a difference. By
expanding a little bit further and saying does it have
anything to do with how you're doing? Do you feel
like you're progressing? Do you feel like you're stuck in
a rut? That kind of a question just taps into
(30:51):
competence a little bit, taps into how's it all going
in terms of the quality of your output, and that
can be really revealing. But the third question is if
you didn't have to do it, would you be doing it?
And when you get a big fat no, that to
me is a signal that this is not work that's
lighting me up. It's not something that I'm choosing to do.
It's something that I feel compelled to do. And whileever
(31:11):
there's compulsion, we are down that shallow end of the
motivation continuum. We want to have people looking at the
tasks that they're doing. We want them to be in
a position where they're saying, I can see the value
in what I'm doing, and I'm on board with it,
like this is purposeful, it matters, it's meaningful. I'm in now, justin.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
I don't know where time is gone, because I feel
like I've got a billion more questions for you. But
let's just finish by talking about books, because Boys is
your latest one out now, who should be reading that book?
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Oh, this is easy if you are raising a young
man eight and above, So a boy or a young
man eight and above, this is for you. If the
kid's younger than that, it will be useful, but it's
probably not right up your alley. The difficulty we've got today, man,
there is we're sort of full circle. Now back to
what you said. You read the first couple of pages
and covered your face with your hands and said, oh,
my goodness, what's going on with boys today? There are
(32:08):
a lot of boys in primary school who are doing
it sane, horrendous things. I would say most of them
don't really know what they're doing in saying, or they
don't understand the magnitude or the severity of it, but
they are doing it. So once the kids are in
about grade three, grade four. That's when I'm saying, as
a parent, you probably want it. If you're an artie
or an uncle or a grandparent or somebody who isn't
raising boys yourself, but you've got a sister or a
(32:30):
brother or a friend who is grab a copy. I'm
going to sound like I've got such a big head
when I say this, forgive the conceit. I've written eleven books.
I've never written one that has been this hard to write,
and I've never written one that has had this level
of response. We're recording this podcast. I'm not sure what
day it's going to drive, but we're recording the podcast
the day the book has launched, and it's in the
(32:51):
Amazon bestsellers list as I think it was number fifteen
or number seventeen or something like that this morning, because
people are seeing the value in the book.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
Book.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
It's for anyone who's raising boys or cares about them.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
I've got a twelve year old daughter justin. I mean,
I have read a lot of your books, which I love,
But if I hadn't, where would I start If I
am raising a girl or girls instead of a boy.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
A couple of years ago before I wrote this one,
I wrote a book called Miss Connection, Why your teenage
daughter hates you, expects the world, and needs to talk.
And so if you're raising a teenage girl, i'd point
you there. Otherwise we talked about that motivation continuum and
those basic psychological needs. Boys is built on that framework.
But if you have younger kids, or if you are
(33:35):
raising girls and they're younger and you don't want to
go in to Miss Connection, I wrote another book called
The Parenting Revolution, which is also built on that framework.
It goes in a number of different directions because it's
not oriented towards boys. But that would also be where
I point you.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I mean, you've written so much, but you've also read
a lot. I would love to know what parenting book
has had the biggest influence on how you parent outside
of everything that you've put into the world.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
There are two, and they're both by the same author.
This is a guy who built his career as an
author working in that same framework, which is why they've
been so influential. One of them is not just about parenting,
it's also about the workplace in the school. It's called
Punished by Rewards. It was written in nineteen ninety three.
It's really polarizing. It's very very strongly worded, and I
(34:22):
think that sometimes it maybe gets out over at skis
a little bit, and yet it's just so helpful. It's
called Punished by Rewards. The other book is called Unconditional Parenting,
same author, a guy called Alfie Cone. He looks into
how we get it so wrong and how easy it
is to actually get it right. I think both of
them are exquisite parenting books.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Justin I always love having you on how I work.
Thank you once again for spending this time with me.
And happy publication Day. I didn't know today was the day,
so happy pub day as well.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
That's really kind. Thank you. I love chatting with you
and ononeful listener, a wonderful interviewer, and Jehoe so much
that some of the things that we've talked about today
can be useful in people's lives. Thanks Smetha.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
So hopefully now you're realizing that most motivation problems aren't
motivation problems at all. They're rational problems. People aren't disengaged
because they're lazy. They're disengaged because no one has helped
them see the point. And this has got you thinking
about how you lead or how you parent. Justin's new
(35:29):
book Boys is out now, and if you're raising girls,
I recommend starting with a couple of his other books,
The Parenting Revolution or Misconnection and if Motivation Science. In
this episode got you thinking, I reckon you'll really enjoy
my conversation with Dan Pink where we get into more
(35:51):
of that. That episode is an oldy, but it's a goodie,
and I link to that in the show notes. Finally,
make sure you hit followed so you never miss an
episode of How I Work.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
If you like today's show, make sure you hit follow
on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop.
How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
the Warringery people, part of the Kulan nation.
When people understand the value in the activity. When people
buy the why, they will choose to do it autonomously,
which means that you don't have motivation problems.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
That was Justin Coulson, psychologist, best selling author, host of
the TV show Parental Guidance, and father of six daughters.
And Justin is also someone who has spent a couple
of decades deep inside the most evidence based theory of
human motivation on the planet. So most of us are
(00:30):
either dangling carrots or cracking whips, whether that be as parents,
as managers, and sometimes even on ourselves. We think that
motivation is something that we need to manufacture, inject, or
threaten people into. But Justin spent twenty years starting why
that approach is backwards. His new book is called Boys.
(00:53):
But the ideas in this conversation go way beyond parenting.
We get into the research behind what actually makes people
want to show up, and specifically the three leavers that
shift someone from I have to to I'm in. We
also talk about breath work, carbon dioxide tolerance as a
(01:15):
metaphor for resilience, and a story about Justin's wife, and
a news website that will definitely make you want to
throw your phone.
Speaker 1 (01:22):
Into a river.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
If you've ever had someone on your team who just
won't engage, or a kid who won't do anything without
a fight, I think you will find this episode very,
very helpful.
Speaker 3 (01:43):
Welcome to How I Work, a show about habits, rituals,
and strategies for optimizing your date. I'm your host, doctor
Amantha imper.
Speaker 2 (01:56):
So justin. You've got six kids, six daughter daughters, Yeah, daughters.
You've got a thriving business, a podcast, You've got a
TV show, You've got a marriage. You've just written a
new book called Boys. Is this like your seventh or
eighth book?
Speaker 1 (02:14):
It's somewhere around ten to twelve books. I can do
the maths if you want, but it's loosely in that range.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Okay. I want to know how do you fit it
all in? I want to know what, like, what are
your systems, ritual's, habits that make this possible.
Speaker 1 (02:30):
I laugh every time I hear this question, because honestly,
I feel like I need you in my back pocket
so I can be more productive. This isn't a humble brag.
I'm not trying to play it down or anything like that.
I just feel like I am so staggeringly unproductive and
ridiculously lazy. And if I would really just pull my
finger out and do the work, I would get this
stuff done so much faster and so much more effectively.
(02:51):
I don't know if I've got a really good answer
for you, but I can break down what I do
and maybe you'll hear stuff that is useful. I don't know.
So basically, I'm a fitness fanatic. I get on my
bike at about four thirty and I go for usually
about seventy k's. I'll jump on the bike. My goal
is to do seventy k's by seven am.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
Yeah, So I'll do that three mornings a week. There's
also three mornings a week that I go to the gym.
In amongst that, my mornings also include thirty minutes of
what I would call spiritual or devotional kind of reading.
I have a faith background, but you don't have to
have a faith background to read. I do thirty minutes
of regular reading where I read something that I would
just call sort of self helpy kind of thing, and
(03:28):
I do a little bit of breath work as well.
So I usually do twenty to twenty five minutes of that,
and then I'm in the office somewhere between sort of
nine and nine thirty, assuming that I'm not traveling and
I an aeroplanet, that kind of thing. This is when
I'm at home, and then when I'm in the office,
it's kind of phone calls, podcast recording, talking with clients,
preparing talks through until around about four four thirty in
(03:51):
the afternoon.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Tell me about the twenty minutes of breath work, like,
what are some of the practical things that you're doing
there that maybe I can learn from.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
It's really silly. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. I'm
a really keen surfer, so I've got two sports. I
surf and I cycle. My wife doesn't like me surfing.
She's worried that I'm going to get dumped by a
big wave one day and get held under and drown.
So my breath work is basically free diving exercises, so
I can hold my breath for a long time. If
I build up my capacity, I'll do a two minute
(04:21):
breath hold, then have a minute off, then a two
minute fifteen breath hold, then have a minute off, then
a two minute thirty breath hold, then have a minute off,
and I go up to like three minutes or three
minutes fifteen, and then that'll be the day. And the
goal is, of course that you get better and better
at it and move up to four minutes or five
minutes or six minutes. So I do that kind of thing,
and then the reverse of that is getting used to
carbon dioxide build up in your body. And there's a
(04:42):
really great resilience metaphor here as well, which I love
to talk about in my presentations. So with the carbon
dioxide work, you do your two minute breath hold, but
then you only have a ten second break, and then
you do another two minute breath hold and then a
ten second break and then a two minute and so
what you're doing is your cells don't have enough time
to get rid of all the carbon dioxide, which when
(05:04):
you take a deep breath and then you feel like
you're going to pass out, so you have to get
more oxygen in. You're not actually running out of oxygen.
You've still got ninety eight percent oxygen saturation in your cells.
What's happening is that your cells, through your circulatory system,
are picking up carbon dioxide as they whiz around the body,
and the CO two build up in your cells is
what makes you feel uncomfortable. It makes you feel like
(05:25):
you need to breathe. You don't need more air, You
actually just want to expel the CO two and that's
the discomfort. So I do the breathing exercises because it
helps me to get used to discomfort. I feel like
if we can learn to tolerate frustration, learn to tolerate
distress better in our lives, it seems to transfer into
other areas. I find that when I'm doing my breathing
(05:47):
exercises consistently, I'm more patient on the road. I find
that when I'm dealing with CO two build up in
my blood more effectively, I'm more patient with my six children.
I just find that it makes me a better person
when I'm holding my breath and sitting still.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
I love that. I went through a stage earlier this
year where I was doing quite regular breath work. It
was guided through an app in this little device that
connected via Bluetooth, and I fell out of the rhythm.
But listening to you, it's making me go, I need
to get back onto that.
Speaker 1 (06:19):
Do you know what? Just on that, Amantha. There's a
health retreat on the Gold Coast called Eden Eden Health
Resort it's a favorite place of my wife's to go.
She likes to get there at least annually, but she
often will try to sneak in an extra few days
somewhere else in the year. And we did an exercise
last time. She was there with a guy who's all
about breath work. She was hooked up to a machine,
I don't know what it was called, and it was
measuring her breathing, the wave in and out. She's working
(06:44):
just on five breaths a minute, so every twelve seconds
time for a new breath, breathe in, breathe out, really regulated,
really easy. While she was doing that, this guy handed
my wife Kylie. He passed his phone to her and said,
I want you to just keep on breathing, but I've
got the news website open. I'd like you to just
(07:06):
scroll through the headlines please. She scrolled through the headlines
for a minute or two, and then he took the
phone back, and then he showed the breathing wave pattern
on the computer. And what had happened is Kylie had
gone from these beautiful twelve second in out waves of
breath to breathing about twenty times a minute, short shallow
(07:26):
breaths The funny thing is she's not interested in the news.
She doesn't ever read the news, and most of the
headlines she said with about things like Prince Harry and
I don't know, just things that were completely irrelevant to
her life. She doesn't care about any of it, and
yet it affected her that much. So we've taken that
as a really, really great signal that there's value in
(07:47):
us really really focusing hard on being present, being mindful
of getting our breath work right.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
I am smiling at that because I was at Eden
in early January and I went through the exact same
exercise and it blew my mind. And the device is
called the m wave and I'll link to that in
the show notes, but highly recommend. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Now.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
I feel like we could talk about breath for another hour,
but instead let's shift gears to Boys, which is the
name of your new book. And I remember when I
sat down to start reading it, and the first few pages,
I was just in shock, like terrified and stressed reading
(08:37):
about these horrible stories and anecdotes that you talk about
in terms of what is happening with boys. And I
want to know what is going on with boys right
now and how is that then playing out into these
boys becoming men and entering the workplace.
Speaker 1 (08:56):
When I first wrote the book, I had a couple
of chapters of like, there was so much because there's
so much news around boys behaving badly. My early readers
just said, I want to cry. I can't keep reading it.
It's too much. So I've shrunk it right down. It
still has that same effect, It's just that there's a
lot less of it now. Essentially, what we're dealing with
is a fundamental trust problem. What of my move by that?
So trust means that you believe the other person is
(09:17):
going to act in your best interest. And unfortunately, because
of the narrative that's been building for at least the
last several decades, but the last decade particularly has been horrendous,
we now have a mainstream societal narrative that men and
boys are a problem. And I was talking with a
colleague one day. She was in her early forties, divorced,
(09:42):
and we knew each other well enough and closely enough
personally enough that it was not inappropriate for me to say, hey, well,
are you dating? Like you're looking around you on the apps?
What's going on? And her response to me was really fascinating, Amantha.
She said, I don't know if I can find a
man who's going to be in my life and show
up as a bonus. And I paused, and instantly I thought,
(10:05):
imagine putting out on your on your Tinder profile, show
me a bonus. I don't know if that's going to
work so well. But at a deeper level, I'm halfway
through writing this book. I just lost my nephew to suicide.
He was twenty years old and he took his life.
And that had already caused me to do a really
big rethink on what I was writing. It was in
that conversation I thought, well, we're really fundamentally dealing with
(10:25):
a trust issue. She doesn't want a man child. She
wants somebody who's going to be a contributor. And she
was basically saying, he's going to want to cook, he's
going to want to clean, and he's going to want
somebody to organize him. I want a partner. I don't
want somebody who's going to be a drag on my life.
So if I go back to your original question, we
keep on saying in society now that boys are a problem,
and I think that's a really unhelpful narrative. We need
(10:47):
to actually start to say that boys are a solution.
I believe that they are the solution. They're not a solution.
They are the solution. But what they need is a
really healthy model of what masculinity is. So a healthy
man is one who helps the people around him feel
safer and stronger, full stop, end of story. If you,
as a man, use your power, use your strength, use
your capacity to denegrate, to demean, to dominate, then you're
(11:10):
not a man. You're a muppet. Right, That's not what
manhood is about.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
You talk a lot about motivation in the Boys Book,
and I want to talk about what are these three
leavers that we can start to pull or manipulate in
boys and also in adults in the workplace.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Yeah, so it's not just for boys, this is universal.
My PhD was in positive psychology, and once I finished
my studies, I moved very very clearly in a specific
direction towards a theory that some of your listeners might
be familiar with called self determination theory. And I've basically
spent the last twenty years deeply embedded in that specific
area of research. If I've got it right, the lead
(11:57):
researcher of the theory, is now the most to living
psychology professor on the planet, and the theory is the
most evidence based, the deepest richest vein of psychological work
that's been happening on the planet for the last couple
of decades. So there's plenty of research, loads of practical
evidence and theory underpending what I'm about to share. You've
talked about three levers. Can I go back a step
(12:19):
and talk about motivation generally? First, really quickly, so everyone's
familiar with the idea of extrinsic motivation, that is carrots
and sticks. I do stuff because if you dangle a
big enough carriage in front of me, I'm going to
go for it, Or if you brandish a big enough stick,
I'm going to pull back. I'm not going to do
the thing that I'm going to get punished for. It
wasn't until the nineteen seventies that researchers began to recognize
(12:39):
that there was another form of motivation. It's called intrinsic motivation.
And everyone gets the idea that I, hang on, I'm
doing it because I want to, and regardless of how
big the stick is, if I really want to do it,
I'm going to find a way to do it. I'll
do it without a bribe, I'll do it for free.
I'm just into it, right. That's that intrinsic motivation. That's
me and surfing, or me and holding my breath. I
just think it's wonderful. There are other forms of motivation
that have been discovered in this theory along the way, though,
(13:00):
and I think that they're really really important. Why because
intrinsic motivation, in my opinion, frankly, is too high a bar.
Like as an employer, I'll talk about parenting again in
a sect, but as an employer, if I really truly
believe that I want to have a purely intrinsically motivated workforce,
then I'm going to have a really hard time finding
(13:21):
people selecting people to work in my organization who just
love it so much that I want to stop. And
if I'm running accountancy firm, I know that there are
some people who can't get enough time in their spreadsheets,
but they're pretty rare. You're going to have a hard
time finding that many people. But if I'm running a
consultancy group or an architecture firm, like people do work
(13:41):
for reasons other than that they love it. If that's
our goal to get them there, you just never get it.
Doesn't matter how many ping pong tables and sleep pods
and shares you offer. That's not going to move them
to intrinsic motivation. So there are three other things that
we need to talk about here before we talk about
the three leads. After extrinsic motivation, a slightly deeper form
(14:01):
of motivation is called interjected motivation. So where I'm extrinsically motivated,
I'm doing it to avoid punishments or to gain a reward.
Interjected motivation means that I'm doing it because I should,
I have to, I must, I'm supposed to. Interjected motivation
is showing up at work on Monday, the day the
(14:22):
diet began, and somebody's brought a cake because their birthday,
and you're standing there in the corner singing happy birthday
along with the rest of the staff, and then you're like,
I really shouldn't have a piece of cake. I said
that I wouldn't have a cake. I told everybody that
the diet started today. There's a bit of ego involvement there.
I'm not going to do it and so you don't
do it. No one's making you avoid the cake. You're
making yourself. You've actually internalized the police, right. So that's
(14:45):
introjected motivation, and interjected motivation kind of sucks because it's
just a drag. It's like the person who says I
have to go to the gym. What happens is that
they quit because we don't like doing things we have
to do. The next form of motivation is called ad
to fight motivation, and this is actually where I think
that we should be setting the bar. Whether it's getting
our kids to clean their room, or getting our employees
(15:07):
to fill in their health and safety reports, or whatever
boring thing they don't really like doing, and you're always
on their case about getting it done. Identified regulation works
like this. Here are the keywords. I identify the value
in doing it. So if I can see that this
(15:27):
is valuable, I don't have to like doing it. I
don't have to want to do it. But if I
can see that it makes sense, what happens is and
here's the other key word. It means that I will
endorse the behavior. And once we get to endorsement of
the behavior, you as a manager or you as a parent,
or you as a husband or wife. You no longer
have to crack the whip because the person goes, yeah,
I get it, I get it. It makes sense. I
(15:50):
value it, I'll do it, And to me, that's the
workhource of the motivation continuum. Get people to recognize the value. Now,
it would be nice if they were intrinsically motivated, and
some people will be, but most people won't. The one
that comes after that is called integrated. Integrated regulation is
where it becomes part of who you are. Right, So,
I ride my bike because just who I am, I'm
(16:12):
a person who really I don't just value fitness. I
see fitness as an integral part of who I am
and who I will be for the rest of my life. Okay,
I don't actually do it because I love it. I
serve because I love it. I write books. I write books, Amantha,
because I value the activity I'm identified. Writing a book
(16:32):
sometimes is like having a four year long illness. You
wake up every day and go, oh, not again, when
am I going to feel better? And then finally you
get it. There true and so, but there are some
people who write books because, oh my goodness, this is
what I live for. I can't wait to craft this
new sentence. I can't wait to flesh out that idea.
I can't wait to see where the plot goes. Not me,
(16:54):
not me. I do it because I see the value
in it. I know that it's going to make a
difference in other people's lives. And so if we want
people to be motivated, the question isn't how motivated they are,
The question is how are they motivated? Because you can
motivate people or get them motivated anywhere along that continuum
based on the environment.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Coming up next, Justin explains where he thinks chasing intrinsic
motivation is setting yourself up to fail, and we also
get into one surprisingly simple move to make your motivation
problems disappear.
Speaker 3 (17:27):
If you're looking for more tips to improve the way
you work, can Live.
Speaker 2 (17:31):
I write a short weekly newsletter that contains tactics I've
discovered that have helped me personally. You can sign up
for that at Amantha dot com. That's Amantha dot com.
And can I ask Justin, with those different levels of motivation,
how can say a manager listening identify where is my
(17:56):
team at and is that just going to change every
hour every day? Then how do we know where people
are at.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
Yeah, I think that there's value in having the conversation.
Like I do a team training on this with my family.
I sit them down and say where are we at
with this particular issue. Like if I'm having ongoing conflict
with a child, I will make a guess that they're
probably either extrinsically motivated or regulated for something or there
at an interjective level. Let me give you a really
simple example. My family, as I mentioned before, we've got
(18:23):
a faith background. We go to church on Sundays. We
are in the distinct minority of Australians who do that.
Speaker 2 (18:27):
I know.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
But I'm currently raising my fifth sixteen year old daughter,
so I've been through this a number of times now.
Like I'm used to dealing with the whole teenage girl thing,
and usually somewhere between fourteen and sixteen, each of my
kids has gone, why are you making me go to church? Dad?
And my response every single time has been, kid, oh,
(18:48):
I'm not making you go to church, And they'll say, yes,
you are. You're going to get me in trouble if
I don't go. My response will be because they're familiar
with this motivation continuum, I'll say to them, Wow, it
sounds like you feel like I'm going to punish you.
That means it sounds like you're only going to church
for external reasons. You're extrinsically motivated, And I say pure,
(19:08):
because that's what teenagers do. Then I sort of have
this mic drop moment with them where I say, guess what,
I'm not going to make you go to church, and
I'm certainly not going to punish you for not going,
and I'm absolutely not going to reward you for going.
So if you're coming to church, it's not for extrinsic reasons.
And their response every time Amantha is well, i'm supposed
(19:29):
to go you think I should be there, And I say, well,
that sounds like an interjected conversation. That sounds like interject
like this is my family. All right, I'm so sorry,
but this is this is the conversation that we have
about everything screens and making your bed and cleaning the kitchen,
the whole lot, walking the dog, feeding the dog. And
so I say that sounds like you're interjected in terms
(19:50):
of your regulation style for church, and I'll go puah,
Maybe like they recognize that this is there making themselves
do it. My response to that is when you look
around the congregation on a Sunday and you see people
who are interjected, and you do see them, what do
you notice? How are they singing the songs, the hymns?
What are they doing?
Speaker 3 (20:10):
Like?
Speaker 1 (20:10):
What's there listening? Like when somebody's giving a talk or
a sermon and the kids will be like, they don't sing,
They're staring at their phone. I'm like, yeah, like they
hate being there because when you're interjected, you're doing it
because you should. And so my response to them is
as follows, I really think that this matters, and here's why.
So I provide a rationale for why I believe that
we should be going to church, that there's benefit in
(20:33):
being there. I'll talk about the social benefits. I'll talk
about the spiritual benefits. I'll talk about the meaning of
life benefits. I'll talk about the discipline benefits and so on.
And that little speech will normally go for twenty or
thirty seconds, because anything longer than that and the kids
start to doze off. Then I'll say, so here's the thing.
We're going to be in the car in about twenty
to thirty minutes. I'd love for you to be in
the car with me, but I'm not going to force
you in the car, and you don't have to be there.
(20:53):
If you can see the value in what I've just said,
if you can buy the why, if you can accept
the rationale as valid, that means that you will have
reached identified regulation. And if you can be identified when
you're sitting in the car, then we'll have a good
time at church, and you'll actually end up feeling reasonably
glad that you were there most of the time. Every
(21:14):
now and again it's a bit of a doug let's
face it, but most of the time you'll feel okay
about it. And in every case, my kids have been
sitting in the car twenty minutes later when we've gotten them,
and I haven't hastled that, I haven't said we've got
to go get in the car or anything like that.
They just do it. Back to your question about the workplace,
it's exactly the same. When you've got an employee who
is struggling with a policy, or with a procedure, or
with their sales, or with a staff member or whatever
(21:36):
it might be. You name, it doesn't matter what the
challenge is. If you sit down and work out what's
going on. You usually find that they're doing something because
they have to, or they're only doing it because they're
going to get paid, or whatever it is, and then
our opportunity is to help them to understand the value
of it, to explain the rationale so that they can say, Okay,
well I can get behind that, I can endorse that
(21:59):
I'm in, because once they say I'm in, once they
buy the why, then you don't have motivation problems, which
brings us to the three leavers that you asked about
about a half an hour ago when I started this answer,
I'm so sorry for long answer. I don't know if
it was third, probably been if I wasn't that long ago.
And the three leavers that we've got to pull, the
three leavers that helped to identify where we're going to
(22:20):
be situated on that motivation continuum what we call basic
psychological needs. So one of them is relatedness. Do I
feel a sense of mutual belonging in this environment? We
move towards environments where we like the people that we're with,
and we avoid environments where we don't like the people
that were with, Like on another's day, if I've got
to go and spend time with my mother in law,
and I don't have a great relationship with her. Here's
(22:41):
what's going to happen. I'm going to say to Kylie, Hey, honey,
we've had a great morning. You've had breakfast in bed,
the kids have made a mess in the kitchen, you've
opened up some gifts. It's been fantastic, and I know
that it's time to go to your mum's house now.
But if we leave, the hou's going to be a
big beness and then we're going to get back and
there's going to be stuff everywhere and we're going to
have a rush afternoon. It's going to be horrible for
I've got an idea, Why aren't you and the kids
(23:02):
go to your mum's and have a beautiful Mother's Day
with your mum. I'll stay home, I'll clean up the kitchen,
i'll tie to the house, I'll make the beds, and
I'll get everything ready for dinner, so that when you
come back from that beautiful Mother's Day activity that you're
having with your mum, everything's perfect for you for your
Mother's Day evening. So what I'm trying to do there
is I'm trying to avoid the place that I don't
want to be right, but I'm doing it in this
really pro social, helpful way. But essentially this is an
(23:24):
avoidance strategy, and you might often find that you've got
an employee or a child who doesn't want to do
the thing because they hate the people, where when they're
going to be with people they like, they just end
up wanting to be there, like they identify the value
of being there simply because they get to be with
great people. The second basic psychological need is called competence.
Competence means I can do this thing. I'm capable, I
have the capacity for it, or if not, at least
(23:46):
I'm making progress in that direction. And again you'll usually
find that a team member is refusing to do a
job or not doing a job well because they don't
know how. They don't understand the structure, the process, the framework,
the system, the routine, the algorithm, the way that it
needs to be done. So the key word for building
competence is structure. And that's why we do trainings and
inductions and all that sort of stuff, because you teach
people the structure of how we do it. Your whole
(24:08):
podcast How I Work is about providing structure for optimization,
maximization and efficiency and effectiveness in the workplace. As you
provide structures, people go, hm, I can do this more
competently now, and as they become more competent, they feel
better about being there. Their motivation or regulation style actually change.
It moves into those deeper waters because we love being
places where we're good at stuff and we avoid places
(24:30):
where we allowsier stuff. And the third basic psychological need
is autonomy. Autonomy does not mean freedom. Every time I
say autonomy, people are other. Their eyes are like, oh,
here we go. People want to do whatever they want.
It's got to be rules, and I agree that that does.
Autonomy actually means, if we go back to those words
that I use before, that we understand the rationale that
we buy the why, and therefore we are choiceful of
(24:52):
volitional in our action. So the example that I always
use is driving on the left hand side of the road,
where in Australia that's what we do. We drive on
the left hand side of the road. It ever gets
in the car in Australia, punches the steering wheel, swears
at Anthony Alban easy or the state premiere where whatever
state you're in, and says why are you're making me
do this. I just want to drive on the right
hand side. No one does that. And you might argue
(25:13):
that it's because you're going to get fined if you
drive on the right hand side of the road. But
you could get in the car in the middle of
the night with no traffic, no vehicles anywhere, and I
guarantee you would still drive on the lefts you're doing
it volitionally, you're doing it choicefully, you're doing it autonomously.
That is, you understand that it just makes sense that
you drive on the left, and so that's what you do.
(25:34):
When people understand the reasons for the policies, when people
understand the value in the activity, when people buy the why,
they will choose to do it autonomously, which means that
you don't have motivation problems. So those are the three
leavers to pull. Whether it's kids, or whether it's employees,
or even if it's your wife or husband, they're the
three leavers to pull.
Speaker 2 (25:54):
And can I ask out of those three levers? So
we've got related less or connectedness, we've got competence sometimes
also called mastery, and we've got autonomy. Which of those
three do you find tend to be the biggest problem,
certainly like in workplaces for adults.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
I think that autonomy is the lynchpin. I don't know
if I would say it's the biggest problem. Every workplace
is going to have its own challenges and unique variables,
attributes and characteristics, but I generally find that autonomy sits
at the heart of it. And what I mean by that, well,
let's say there's a relationship challenge somewhere. What will usually
(26:35):
happen is that a person in management will step in
and say, well, you guys need to sort this out.
They'll step in in a command control way, although they'll
step in with a whole lot of correction and direction.
You get really wonderful managers who will sit down sometimes
and say, I've noticed justin that you and Amanther have
had this ongoing, simmering tension for a little while. I
(26:55):
don't know where it started. I don't know where it
came from, but i'd i'd love to understand what's happening
and see if I can support you. And you get
that kind of a manager and you go, oh, yeah,
this this feels good. But that often doesn't happen. And
it's the same with competence. Quite often, if you're struggling
with competence, the workplace gets turned into a game show.
We're not getting our sales, well, let's give away a
(27:16):
holiday to Hawaii for the number one performer. And it
just band aids over the real reasons that we're not
getting sales. Maybe there's something going on in the economy,
something happening in the market. We get that kind of
performance challenge, and we need to look at the structure.
We need to look at the training, the processes that
we've been working through to see whether or not we
can help our staff. So I would say that autonomy,
(27:39):
understanding what's going on for them, making sure that they
understand our reasons, our rationals, and making sure that they're
stepping in choicefully to the tasks that they're doing is
at the core of it. When I do my doctorate,
I did a lot of work leaning into Amy Resnevsky's
tripartite model of workplace orientation, that is, to see it
as a job, a career, or a call. And I
(28:01):
don't have any data for this, but my sense would
be that people who see their work as a job,
they tend to do it in a controlled way. They're
not really that worried about competence. They're probably not even
loving the people that they're with. It's just a means
to an end. Whereas people who see their work as
a vocation or a calling, my sense is that they
probably work with people that they love. They probably just
(28:24):
get so embedded in the process of developing and progressing
and creating that sense of mastery. And just my sense
would be that they would score really, really high in
terms of their motivational style or their regulation style because
they see it as a calling. And when we can
make our workplaces feel a little more supportive of autonomy,
(28:46):
relationships automatically improve, and people feel more competent because they
have more of a sense of choice. They're orienting themselves
towards things that they're already attracted to because they do
them well.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
I want to know, justin if we're reflecting on ourselves
and how motivated am i? How am I going in
these three dimensions, and perhaps also reflecting on our kids
if we have kids, or our employees if we're a manager,
what are some of the questions that we can ask
(29:19):
ourselves to go How am I going with autonomy and
competence and relatedness.
Speaker 1 (29:25):
When I was writing the book, I threw a handful
of questions together in that vein. My sense is that
these conversations, either with self or with another person, should
just orient around how am I feeling about my relationships.
Let's pick school, for example, with a child, or university
with a young adult, and of course you can apply
this in whatever your context is. I might say to
(29:47):
my child, I've noticed that you haven't wanted to go
to school a lot lately. We've been having a lot
of tension in the mornings. You don't want to get dressed.
And it's not just because it's cold and it's winter
or anything like that. It's like there seems to be
a level of resistance around school that I haven't seen before. Now,
if I do that with my child, I'm already stepping
into a really relationally supportive environment with them. They're feeling
(30:09):
like I'm exploring their world, and so that makes them
feel safe, they can trust me, and they might start
to open up and say, yeah, there's this issue going on.
There's this person, there's this teacher. If it's a workplace,
there's this colleague, there's this client, there's this boss. And
then you say Okay, well, that's really tricky. The question
that I always ask next is is there anything else?
Because quite often you'll have a staff member or you'll
(30:30):
have a child who will just tell you what they
think you need to hear or what they think you
want to hear. And by just poking and probing that
a little bit deeper, it really makes a difference. By
expanding a little bit further and saying does it have
anything to do with how you're doing? Do you feel
like you're progressing? Do you feel like you're stuck in
a rut? That kind of a question just taps into
(30:51):
competence a little bit, taps into how's it all going
in terms of the quality of your output, and that
can be really revealing. But the third question is if
you didn't have to do it, would you be doing it?
And when you get a big fat no, that to
me is a signal that this is not work that's
lighting me up. It's not something that I'm choosing to do.
It's something that I feel compelled to do. And whileever
(31:11):
there's compulsion, we are down that shallow end of the
motivation continuum. We want to have people looking at the
tasks that they're doing. We want them to be in
a position where they're saying, I can see the value
in what I'm doing, and I'm on board with it,
like this is purposeful, it matters, it's meaningful. I'm in now, justin.
Speaker 2 (31:30):
I don't know where time is gone, because I feel
like I've got a billion more questions for you. But
let's just finish by talking about books, because Boys is
your latest one out now, who should be reading that book?
Speaker 1 (31:46):
Oh, this is easy if you are raising a young
man eight and above, So a boy or a young
man eight and above, this is for you. If the
kid's younger than that, it will be useful, but it's
probably not right up your alley. The difficulty we've got today, man,
there is we're sort of full circle. Now back to
what you said. You read the first couple of pages
and covered your face with your hands and said, oh,
my goodness, what's going on with boys today? There are
(32:08):
a lot of boys in primary school who are doing
it sane, horrendous things. I would say most of them
don't really know what they're doing in saying, or they
don't understand the magnitude or the severity of it, but
they are doing it. So once the kids are in
about grade three, grade four. That's when I'm saying, as
a parent, you probably want it. If you're an artie
or an uncle or a grandparent or somebody who isn't
raising boys yourself, but you've got a sister or a
(32:30):
brother or a friend who is grab a copy. I'm
going to sound like I've got such a big head
when I say this, forgive the conceit. I've written eleven books.
I've never written one that has been this hard to write,
and I've never written one that has had this level
of response. We're recording this podcast. I'm not sure what
day it's going to drive, but we're recording the podcast
the day the book has launched, and it's in the
(32:51):
Amazon bestsellers list as I think it was number fifteen
or number seventeen or something like that this morning, because
people are seeing the value in the book.
Speaker 3 (33:00):
Book.
Speaker 1 (33:00):
It's for anyone who's raising boys or cares about them.
Speaker 2 (33:03):
I've got a twelve year old daughter justin. I mean,
I have read a lot of your books, which I love,
But if I hadn't, where would I start If I
am raising a girl or girls instead of a boy.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
A couple of years ago before I wrote this one,
I wrote a book called Miss Connection, Why your teenage
daughter hates you, expects the world, and needs to talk.
And so if you're raising a teenage girl, i'd point
you there. Otherwise we talked about that motivation continuum and
those basic psychological needs. Boys is built on that framework.
But if you have younger kids, or if you are
(33:35):
raising girls and they're younger and you don't want to
go in to Miss Connection, I wrote another book called
The Parenting Revolution, which is also built on that framework.
It goes in a number of different directions because it's
not oriented towards boys. But that would also be where
I point you.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I mean, you've written so much, but you've also read
a lot. I would love to know what parenting book
has had the biggest influence on how you parent outside
of everything that you've put into the world.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
There are two, and they're both by the same author.
This is a guy who built his career as an
author working in that same framework, which is why they've
been so influential. One of them is not just about parenting,
it's also about the workplace in the school. It's called
Punished by Rewards. It was written in nineteen ninety three.
It's really polarizing. It's very very strongly worded, and I
(34:22):
think that sometimes it maybe gets out over at skis
a little bit, and yet it's just so helpful. It's
called Punished by Rewards. The other book is called Unconditional Parenting,
same author, a guy called Alfie Cone. He looks into
how we get it so wrong and how easy it
is to actually get it right. I think both of
them are exquisite parenting books.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
Justin I always love having you on how I work.
Thank you once again for spending this time with me.
And happy publication Day. I didn't know today was the day,
so happy pub day as well.
Speaker 1 (34:57):
That's really kind. Thank you. I love chatting with you
and ononeful listener, a wonderful interviewer, and Jehoe so much
that some of the things that we've talked about today
can be useful in people's lives. Thanks Smetha.
Speaker 2 (35:08):
So hopefully now you're realizing that most motivation problems aren't
motivation problems at all. They're rational problems. People aren't disengaged
because they're lazy. They're disengaged because no one has helped
them see the point. And this has got you thinking
about how you lead or how you parent. Justin's new
(35:29):
book Boys is out now, and if you're raising girls,
I recommend starting with a couple of his other books,
The Parenting Revolution or Misconnection and if Motivation Science. In
this episode got you thinking, I reckon you'll really enjoy
my conversation with Dan Pink where we get into more
(35:51):
of that. That episode is an oldy, but it's a goodie,
and I link to that in the show notes. Finally,
make sure you hit followed so you never miss an
episode of How I Work.
Speaker 3 (36:02):
If you like today's show, make sure you hit follow
on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop.
How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
the Warringery people, part of the Kulan nation.
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