Our negative emotions play a fundamental role when we pursue a goal

To achieve your goals, there is no miracle recipe: discipline and effort! This anachronistic conception of motivation and the pursuit of goals still seems very widespread in our societies which excessively value the value of performance at the expense of pleasure. In the same vein, we should therefore not listen to our emotions or transform their valencevalence to always be positive to stay focus on its objectives. These different naive positions are in error, at least if you wish to achieve your objectives sustainably without suffering martyrdom. To understand why, we must take a detour to the psychology of motivation through a theory that seeks to explain why you are motivated to do what you do and to pursue the goals you pursue: the theory of motivation. self-determination (TAD).

Motivation depends on the feeling of autonomy

If there was only one thing to remember from TAD, it would be this sentence. Indeed, unlike theories which consider motivation solely as a quantitative variable, the theorists of TAD – Richard Deci and Edward Ryan – had the ingenuity to complicate the concept of motivation. Thus, we come to place and classify the drivers (called regulations in the TAD) of our actions on an axis of self-determination. There are five of these motors: external, introjected, identified, integrated and intrinsic motors.

Without dwelling on what these engines represent, what we must understand is that the more an engine promotes the sensation ofautonomyautonomy in a person, the more likely that person is to undertake a given action in the long term and to derive satisfaction from it. Conversely, the less a driver promotes this feeling in a person, the more likely they are not to undertake a given action in the long term and if it persists, it risks having a lasting impact on their mental health.

Goal orientation and the three-step model

In the context of TAD, our goals can be oriented towards autonomous motors (for example, I am going to learn my course because it interests me) or towards controlled motors (I am going to learn my course because I have to pass my exams ). Obviously, the engines are not mutually exclusive. You can learn your course because you find it interesting and because you want to pass your exams. It is the proportion of autonomous and controlled motors which will determine the more autonomous or more controlled character of the goal that we want to pursue.

The pursuit of a goal can be distinguished into three distinct stages. First, we must set our goal. This phase involves complex cognitive processes such as reasoning (what are the reasons why I want to achieve this goal and not another), planning (what will I have to do to achieve it), etc. Second, we must take action. This phase includes multiple cognitive, affective, motor and social processes in order to follow our planning to achieve our goal. Third, we must evaluate our success or failure. This phase is characterized by reflective processes and a counterfactual look at how the two previous phases unfolded. In other words, we undertake a critical dynamic over the entire process.

The place of emotions in the pursuit of the goal

Unlike a computercomputer executing a program (we are not talking here about artificial intelligence), the path towards the goal we have set for ourselves is generally not linear and it is strewn with pitfalls whether they come from ourselves or from our environment. Therefore, negative emotions can arise in this process for various reasons: we fail to scrupulously respect our action plan, we ask ourselves questions about the relevance of achieving the set goal, etc. This dynamic is an integral part of pursuing a goal in the second phase. Therefore, there are two main strategies for managing emotions: listening to them (integrative emotion regulation in English literature) or delete them (suppressive emotion regulation).

According to the theory, listening to negative emotions will increase positive affects and decrease negative affects in the long term. In doing so, we should progress towards our goal. Conversely, removing them will lead to the exact opposite. For theorists, negative emotions are not obstacles to the pursuit of our goals. On the contrary, they carry crucial information concerning the obstacles that stand between us and our goal and can enable us to respond in an appropriate way to the situation (overcoming the obstacle, reconsidering our goal, reconsidering our action plan, etc. .).

The links between goal valence and emotion management

In a recent study published in the journal Science Motivation interested in the motivation and management of emotions of university students, researchers demonstrate in part why goal orientation (its autonomous or controlled character) predicts progress towards a given goal and well-being . Part of the answer lies in managing emotions, which the authors call stylesstyles emotion regulation which are the two ways of managing negative emotions that we saw previously.

Indeed, when they measure motivations, goals and emotion regulation styles through different methodologies, scientists demonstrate that not listening to one’s negative emotions leads to maladaptive behaviors in the pursuit of one’s goal, which hinders one’s self-esteem. achievement and leads to discomfort in individuals who adopt this strategy. Sometimes, individuals using this strategy still achieve their goals but very often at the cost of great adversity and significant personal suffering. This strategy is consistent with the popular adage No Pain No Gain that we find in sports culture. However, research clearly shows that it is possible to achieve your goals without suffering (or in any case, with as little suffering as possible).

Do not underestimate the effect of the environment

We can draw two fundamental practical tips: try to pursue goals for the right reasons (i.e. reasons that promote the satisfaction of our psychological needs, see paragraph below) and listen to our negative emotions which will help us to be flexible to change course or overcome obstacles.

However, it must be remembered that these strategies only concern the individual level and that even by following them, it is possible that we will not achieve our objectives. The psychology of motivation, in particular DAT, does not in reality only have an individual scope. She also theorized universal psychological needs necessary to maintain good mental health, which are three in number: the need for autonomy (again), the need for sociability and the need for competence. Very often, our environment is the guarantor of the satisfaction of these needs. Just like physiological needs like eating and drinking that you cannot satisfy if your environment does not give you access to resources, it is difficult to satisfy your psychological needs in an environment that does not allow it.