Beyond Perceptions: How Motivation Shapes Our Goals with Prof. Emily Balcetis

Prof. Emily Balcetis at New York University is an award-winning social psychologist and author of Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World. In the book, she highlights how the perception of our goals conditions our motivation and ultimate success.

Prof. Balcetis views motivation as the difference between where we are and where we want to be, warning that limiting stereotypes or narrow definitions of success impact our motivation and ability to reach goals.

When addressing the challenge of sustaining motivation, Prof. Balcetis suggests balancing short-term and long-term perspectives, allowing for incremental progress while maintaining a vision for the overall objective.

During our conversation, Prof. Balcetis also points out the interplay between perception and leadership and how expanding mental representations of leadership can inspire more people to see themselves as capable leaders.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast platform to learn how to become an authentic and emotionally engaging leader.

Subscribe to Pity Party Over for more insightful episodes. Questions? Email Stephen Matini or send him a message on LinkedIn.

Please check Prof. Emily Balcetis book, Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World, and use the affiliate links to support Pity Party Over at no additional cost to you.

TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: So listen, as I was thinking of you, there's a bunch of words such as, you know, perception and misperception, perceptual illusions, perceptual habits. How did you end up in this world?

Emily Balcetis: Well, there's lots of ways I could answer that. But to be honest, I really like magicians. I love going to magic shows. So there's that. I think I was already probably predisposed. But honestly, it was because when I was in graduate school, I went to study with a fabulous, fantastic, wonderful mentor.

But after the first year, I really wanted to go spend the summer in Europe. And I was a graduate student. I didn't have any money. So I needed to figure out how to afford it. So I was looking for like, well, what academic conferences are happening in Europe? And there weren't any in my field, but there was one that was in vision science. And I was like, well, I better do a quick study on something that has to do with vision so that I can get the data, put together a poster, submit to this conference, and then get my graduate school to offset the cost by $500 of this trip.

And then I did all of that and then told my advisor, oh, by the way, I like did all this stuff, I'm going to go to Europe for two months. And that's not how grad school really works. But he's lovely and said, like, okay, fine, but like maybe we should start working on these projects together. And so that's what sort of became the intersection, honestly, of my interest in social psychology, motivation science, which I had gone to graduate school to study. And how did you end up roping in visual experience? To be honest, it was to afford a trip to Europe when I was really poor.

Stephen Matini: When you work in organizations and you start talking about motivation, it is such a huge broad field. How do you make things simple for them to understand? 

Emily Balcetis: To be honest, I really do think that the concept of motivation is quite simple. The definitions that are foundational definitions, they vary, but they do have a commonality, which is that they're quite simple. One definition is just motivation is a discrepancy between where you are and where you want to be.

And that's a driving force, just to close that gap. That's mot