Understanding these three fundamental concepts, in-groups/out-groups, schemas, and motivation, should enhance the effectiveness of your coaching. Remember that building trust and intimacy with your client is a deepening of the sense of an in-group, reinforcing a feeling of safety and security. Exploring a client’s current schemas and encouraging them to explore new ones can make the landscape of possible solutions appear much more expansive. And finally, investigating how motivated your client seems to be, or how confident he or she is to carry out the necessary actions, can play an important role in how successful they are at attaining the goals they set forth.
Calls to Action
- Do you see yourself as primarily intrinsically motivated, extrinsically motivated or amotivated?
- As you reflect on coaching clients who you now understand as being amotivated, how did the engagements work out and what ultimately got them moving if they were able to do so?
- What are some ways you have tapped into a client’s intrinsic motivation?
Further Reading
Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191-215.
Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: Freeman.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The” what” and” why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227-268.
Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2002). Overview of self-determination theory: An organismic dialectical perspective. In E. L. Deci & R. M. Ryan (Eds.), Handbook of self-determination research (pp. 3-33).
Download Article 1K Club
