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)