It's important to understand that there are many ingredients and there are many factors that influence motivation.

The idea that we can make a list and only watch on the list counts and everything that's on the list counts is, you know, it's a bit naive.

Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. In this episode, I talked to a award-winning psychologist Ayelet Fishbach about the exciting science of motivation.

How do we motivate ourselves to do anything? From her extensive research, Ayelet shares with us four crucial strategies for successful behavior change.

First, identify the right goals, second, avoid what she calls the middle, third, resist temptations, and fourth, seek social support.

And equally important, Ayelet gives tips on how to sustain motivation for longer periods of time.

We also touch on the topics of reinforcement, flow, deliberate practice, self-control, and, of course, Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

So that further ado, I bring you Ayelet Fishbach.

Nice to finally meet you. We have colleagues in Angel Duckworth and others that love you, and it's nice to finally meet you.

Thank you. Same here.

So you're a leader in the field of motivation science is what you refer to in the book.

You kind of tell our listeners a little bit about the, you know, kind of trace the history of the field of motivation science and who were some of the original key players in the field.

And yeah, let's start there, sort of tell people what motivation science is.

The study of motivation, as we can infer from the name, we look at what gets people out of bed in the morning and into achieving their goals, be it their professional goals, their health goals, their academic goals, how you motivate others, how you motivate yourself, which is specifically interesting for me.

And so on. We are interested in this internal power that we call motivation that gets people going.

You asked about people that are so many. So we briefly chat about our mutual friend, Angela Duckworth.

And, you know, I work with hair a lot there. They are just so many work with Katie Meldmann, my advisors, Jakob Chorpen, Rikoblanski did amazing work on motivation, people like Walter Michel and Toy Higgins.

They were such a long list. I will stop there because they just said so many people.

It's an exploding field. Yeah, it isn't explain field. Would you consider Abraham Maslow as part of the origin story of the field?

Well, yeah, yes. Well, you know, you can go all the way to quote Lewin and you know, people that inspired our thinking.

William James.

Yeah, right.

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