Chapter 7 Exercises: Motivation and Drive

Part A: Understanding Your Motivation

Exercise 7.1 — The Motivation Inventory (Level 2 | 30 minutes)

List 10 activities you engage in regularly — across work, relationships, hobbies, and self-care. For each, assess:

1. Type of motivation (using SDT's continuum): - Intrinsic (inherently enjoyable/interesting) - Integrated (part of who you are) - Identified (personally valued but not purely enjoyable) - Introjected (guilt or ego driven) - External (reward or punishment) - Amotivation (just going through the motions)

2. Wellbeing rating: How does engaging in this activity make you feel (1–10)?

3. Sustainability rating: How sustainable is your motivation for this activity over time (1–10)?

Reflection: Is there a correlation between motivation type and wellbeing/sustainability ratings? What does this suggest about how you are spending your time and energy?

Exercise 7.2 — The Needs Assessment (Level 2 | 20 minutes)

Rate how satisfied each of the three basic psychological needs is in the major domains of your life (work, primary relationship, friendships, family, personal projects):

Reflection: Which domains most satisfy which needs? Which domains leave which needs unmet? Is any need chronically undernourished across all domains?

Exercise 7.3 — The Stalled Project Analysis (Level 2 | 20 minutes)

Identify something you have been meaning to do for a long time and haven't done (like Jordan's proposal).

Apply the motivational analysis: 1. What type of motivation do you have for it? (Intrinsic? Identified? External pressure?) 2. What competing motivation is stronger? (Avoidance of aversiveness? Avoidance of failure? Comfort of current routine?) 3. What is the specific obstacle? (No implementation intention? No immediate reward? Task is aversive? Unclear next step? Stakes feel too high?) 4. Design an intervention that addresses the specific obstacle, not the generic one.

Exercise 7.4 — Flow Hunting (Level 2 | One week)

This week, keep a brief daily log of moments when you notice something approaching flow — complete absorption, time distortion, reduced self-consciousness, effortless engagement.

Note: - What activity were you doing? - What was the challenge level? The skill level? - How long did it last? - What enabled it? What disrupted it?

Reflection at end of week: What conditions most reliably produce flow for you? What disrupts it? Are there activities in your life you could redesign to produce more of it?

Part B: Building Better Motivation

Exercise 7.5 — Implementation Intention Design (Level 2 | 20 minutes)

For three goals you have been inconsistent about pursuing, write specific implementation intentions in the form: "When [situation/cue] occurs, I will [specific behavior]."

Examples: - "When I sit down at my desk Monday morning, I will write 300 words before checking email." - "When I feel the urge to scroll after 9 PM, I will put my phone in the other room and pick up a book." - "When Sunday afternoon arrives and my energy drops, I will go for a 20-minute walk."

The specificity is the mechanism: you are pre-deciding the response so that the automatic system can execute it without requiring fresh motivation in the moment.

After designing the intentions: - Test them for one week - Note whether they help bridge the gap between intention and action

Exercise 7.6 — Connecting Activity to Values (Level 3 | 30 minutes)

Choose one activity you want to do more of but find it hard to motivate yourself for.

Spend 10 minutes writing a genuine, specific answer to this question: Why does this activity genuinely matter to me? Not why it should matter — why it actually does. Connect it to real values, real outcomes, real relationships.

Then spend 5 minutes writing: When I imagine myself six months from now, having done this consistently, what is different?

Reflection: Did the connection to values change your motivation for the activity? What would it take to keep that connection vivid rather than letting it fade?

Exercise 7.7 — Restructuring a Stalled Task (Level 2 | 30 minutes)

Take the stalled task from Exercise 7.3 and redesign it using motivational principles:

1. Reduce aversiveness: What is the minimum viable version of this task? What would make it slightly more enjoyable?
2. Add structure: What is the specific first action? When exactly will you do it? Who will you be accountable to?
3. Create immediate reward: What small reward will you pair with completing each work session?
4. Lower the stakes: What would this task look like if you removed the performance pressure? (Write a rough draft you will throw away; do a practice version nobody will see.)
5. Connect to identity: How does doing this connect to who you want to be?

Design a one-week experiment and run it.

Exercise 7.8 — The Overjustification Check (Level 2 | 15 minutes)

Think of three activities you used to be intrinsically motivated to do — hobbies, projects, types of work — and then began receiving external rewards for (money, recognition, approval).

For each: 1. How has your intrinsic motivation changed since external rewards appeared? 2. Have the external rewards made the activity feel more like an obligation than a choice? 3. Is there a way to preserve or restore intrinsic motivation while still benefiting from appropriate external recognition?

Part C: Going Deeper

Exercise 7.9 — The Autonomy Audit at Work (Level 2 | 20 minutes)

Apply SDT's autonomy-supportive vs. controlling dimensions to your work environment:

1. How much choice do you have over what you work on, how you do it, and when?
2. How is feedback delivered — in ways that confirm competence (informational) or ways that feel controlling and evaluative?
3. How well do you feel known by people you work with and for?
4. Which aspects of your work most satisfy the three basic needs? Which most thwart them?

Reflection: Based on this analysis, what would most improve your autonomous motivation at work — changes in the structure, changes in relationships, or changes in how you are approaching your work?

Exercise 7.10 — Motivation Type and Performance (Level 2 | Ongoing)

Over the next two weeks, notice the relationship between motivation type and your performance quality.

For 10 distinct tasks or activities, rate: - Motivation type (intrinsic/identified/introjected/external, 1–5 scale with 5 being most intrinsic) - Effort (1–10) - Engagement quality (1–10) - Outcome quality (1–10, best estimate)

Reflection: Does motivation type predict your performance and engagement? Are there surprising exceptions?

Exercise 7.11 — Procrastination Root Cause Analysis (Level 3 | 30 minutes)

Choose one significant task you have been procrastinating on.

Write honestly about each of the following potential contributing factors:

1. Aversiveness: What is unpleasant about this task?
2. Self-worth threat: What might completing (or failing at) this task reveal about your ability?
3. Ambiguity: Is the first step unclear?
4. Temporal distance: How far away is the benefit of doing this task?
5. Competing motivation: What is more immediately rewarding than doing this task?

Now, for each factor that applies, design a specific countermeasure: - Reduce aversiveness → make the first step smaller/more pleasant - Reduce self-worth threat → separate performance from identity; adopt a learning frame - Reduce ambiguity → define the specific next action - Reduce temporal distance → create intermediate milestones with immediate rewards - Address competing motivation → change the environment to reduce access to the competing reward

Exercise 7.12 — Your Motivational Signature (Level 3 | 45 minutes)

Based on everything in this chapter and in your exercises, write a "motivational signature" — a brief, honest account of how motivation works in your life.

Include: 1. What intrinsically motivates you — the activities, problems, or domains where you experience genuine intrinsic engagement 2. Your dominant need deficit — which of the three basic needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness) is most chronically unmet in your life 3. Your characteristic avoidance motivation — what you are most powerfully motivated to avoid 4. Your procrastination pattern — what types of tasks consistently stall and why 5. What produces flow for you — and what conditions enable vs. disrupt it

This document becomes a reference point for designing your environment and choices around your actual motivational psychology.

Exercise 7.13 — Design for Flow (Level 2 | 20 minutes)

Identify one important ongoing activity in your life — work, creative project, relationship, skill development.

Analyze it for flow conditions: 1. What is your current skill level in this domain? 2. What is the current challenge level? 3. Are you in the flow channel, or are you in boredom (too easy) or anxiety (too hard)? 4. What specific adjustment would move you closer to the flow channel?

Design a specific experiment: what will you change for the next two weeks, and how will you know if it has increased flow?

Exercise 7.14 — Values and Work Alignment (Level 3 | 30 minutes)

List your five most important values (we will work on values in detail in Chapter 11; for now, name them as well as you can).

Now examine your current work and daily activities: what percentage of your time and energy is spent on activities that express or serve these values? What percentage is spent on activities that don't?

Reflection: Is there a significant misalignment between your values and how you spend your time? What is one concrete change that would increase alignment?

Exercise 7.15 — The Motivation Letter (Level 3 | 20 minutes)

Write a brief letter to yourself from your future self — one year from now — describing the life you are living as a result of having acted on your most authentic motivations this year.

What did you do? What did you build? How does it feel?

This is not a visualization exercise in magical thinking. It is a clarification exercise: if you acted on what genuinely matters to you over the next year, what would be different?

Read it at the end of the year.