Maintaining control over our lives

• Teachers that plan lessons to be interesting, curiosity-provoking, and personally inspiring have better success in motivating their students to read.
• Leaders have better success in motivating their employees when they take the employees' perspective and invite them to create their own self-endorsed work goals.
• Parents are more successful when they try to truly understand why their children don't want to do something and then take the time to explain to them the benefits of the activity.

Most successful interventions do not try to change another person's motivation or emotion directly. Instead, they make changes to the person's environmental conditions and the quality of his or her relationships to encourage them to leave behind neglectful or abusive ones.

According to Self-Determination Theory, there are three basic psychological needs which we want to satisfy:

• Autonomy (self-determination). We are motivated when we have a choice in terms of tasks, time, team, and technique.
• Competence (capability and effectiveness). Mastery is a mindset. When we strive toward something greater than ourselves, it demands effort.
• Affiliation needs (association and belonging). We are motivated to form long-lasting positive relationships with others.

External rewards do not work because we don't do rule-based routine tasks. Instead, we need to create environments where intrinsic motivation thrives, where we can gain satisfaction from the activities themselves.