Mines the large one.... How to Motivate

This blog is concerned with the subject of Motivation. For any leader on any team/group motivation is key; to the enjoyment of their group and to the success of the task they have been given or the goal they have set for themselves.

This entry is going to discuss the Land's End 24 Hour Stomp, an event that myself and another student from college organised and undertook for charity at the beginning of April. We started from Land’s end at 12 noon on the Saturday and finished in Perranporth at 11.30am on the Sunday. Maintaining motivation during the event was vital and at a few points motivation did fail. For the first section; from Land’s End to St Ives my main motivation was a large pasty that I knew was waiting for me at the Sloop Inn in St Ives. This was a massive form of extrinsic motivation. There are two main types of motivation to participate and succeed; intrinsic and extrinsic. The former comes from within the individual and in many cases is why people undertake outdoor activities; be it a love of nature, the desire to improve fitness or the sense of challenge. Extrinsic motivation on the other hand comes from an external source; a medal, a prize, money or even a pasty…

From St Ives we walked on into the darkness with motivation becoming an ever decreasing commodity. The other student I was with dropped out with an injury around 11pm, luckily I was with two others, one of whom was a soldier and had exhibited some classic British Army motivation techniques earlier in the day i.e shouting. This had spurred us on during the day but at night it would have only pushed us further into our shells.

By 6am we had reached Porthtowan and the other two team members also decided to drop out from the event with injuries. This left me, with no readily available sources of external motivation other than my Ipod; I was alone physically and motivationally. In my opinion, the leader of a group will always need to be intrinsically motivated, there is no point in having a leader that needs to be coaxed up the hill by his clients or group members with a bar of chocolate or money. As such this was a massive test for my own motivation.

The main factor in my motivation was the feeling of challenge. We had set out to walk for 24 hours and I felt that it would have been cheating if I had not even tried to complete and just dropped out because I was all on my own. As a result after the other student rejoined me at St Agnes we both reached Perranporth at 11:30am on Sunday 1^st April. Sadly there was not a Pasty in sight.

Sport Psychology Matt Jarvis: Routledge (1999)

Needle in a Haystack

My third blog concerns groups and how they work. As an outdoor instructor you will get a variety of groups to instruct as a result an understanding of how groups function can come in handy. Moorhead and Griffin (1998) defined a group as “two or more persons who interact with one another such that each person influences and is influenced by each other person”.

As an example I am going to use around 20 minutes of my final day in the Lake District. After completing my Mountain Leader training on the first 6 days of the trip we got back together with the rest of the group and decided to do a walk together. I went into a group of five males, 3 of whom including myself had taken part in the ML training and 2 who had not. The proposed route was to leave Seathwaite, go around the side of Great Gable, find Nape’s Needle then summit Great Gable via White Napes and continue along the ridge to Green Gable dropping back down into Seathwaite. Setting a fast pace to begin we set off, within a kilometre we began going steeply uphill, I personally found the pace to fast, told my friends/other members of the group and we slowed down only to speed up again within minutes. This carried on for ten to fifteen minutes until I'd had enough told them only to be called a number of names. I followed this by swearing and cursing the other members of the group. After this “incident” we slowed down to a manageable pace for the whole group and in the end achieved a good day on the hill apart from finding Nape’s Needle in the clag.

Within that twenty minute section of the day, we as a group went through most of Tuckman and Jensen’s (1977) stages of group formation. These stages are; forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. At first we set up how the group was going to run, the forming stage. My outburst and the ensuing argument was the storming stage where according to Jarvis (1999) group members compete for status and settle into group roles. Stages three and four were where we worked together and achieved what we set out to do.

Another group formation theory is the Pendular Model (Budge 1981) which suggests that groups swing from cohesion to differentiation to conflict to resolution or back to cohesion hence the name Pendular model. Mills (1964) presented a life cycle model for groups and teams which like Tuckman’s had five stages. 1) encounter; 2) testing of boundaries; 3) creation of a normative system; 4) production and finally 5) separation and dissolution. In this situation Mills and Tuckmans theories are more applicable but Budge’s Pendular model is more accurate over a longer period such as an expedition.

Sport Psychology Matt Jarvis: Routledge (1999)


Sport Psychology: A Practical Guide Dr Arnold Leunes: Icon Books (2011)

Feedback....

The second of my blog entries is going to explore feedback, how we can use it as a leader and how it was used for me during my trip to Snowdonia back in November. Upcraft (1982) defines feedback as the exchange of information among group members based on behaviour.  When I started leading on my first day from the Helyg Hut in the Ogwen valley up on to the Carneddau Range, I charged on ahead concentrating solely on navigation and effectively ignoring the group I was leading. Within a hundred metres of leaving the bus I received my first bit of feedback from the Mountain Leader/ Lecturer who was overseeing me for the day. The feedback was basically that I needed to spread myself throughout the group talking to every member rather than charging off.  Taking this on board I relinquished the navigation and allowed a first year to take over and then ensured I spoke to every member of the group. According to Priest & Gass (1997) for feedback to be appropriate it must be specific, descriptive, well intended, solicited, well timed and directed towards change. All of these criteria were met in the feedback I received from my lecturer.

This feedback was an example of Extrinsic Feedback; feedback from an external source. There are many forms this feedback can take ranging from a comment from coach or instructor to a medal or certificate for an accomplishment. This then reinforces the feelings you get inside on how your performance went developing your intrinsic feedback from our senses.  As an example after my feedback I talked to the students in my group and heard their responses, the lecturer then gave me further extrinsic feedback which reinforced my intrinsic feedback. From then on during my first and second days of leading I did not need the external feedback from my lecturer. I could glean information on my performance through my senses, I could hear if the group were not happy with the pace or situation and then act upon it.

Bandwith theory comes into play when you are an outdoor instructor. Continual comments of “You’re doing really well… Keep going…. That’s fantastic…” are patronising to all but the novice participant and can get incredibly annoying during a long day on the hill. Bandwidth theory is the process of reducing feedback so much that only a comment or gesture would suffice as feedback. This narrowing of the feedback bandwidth has a positive effect on the participant’s performance by establishing extrinsic feedback parameters allowing intrinsic feedback to develop.

Effective Leadership in Adventure Programming Priest & Gass: Human Kinetics (1997)

Sport Psychology Matt Jarvis: Routledge (1999)

MACKENZIE, B. (2002) Information Feedback [WWW] Available from: http://www.brianmac.co.uk/infofb.htm [Accessed15/3/2012]