Are you a gently brave person? I want to make you better

10 min readJul 17, 2021

When you dare extremely — on the inside

People are talking about it and I ask myself, “How do you motivate habits and behaviors that bring out the best in you?”

With a good deal of curiosity, I am constantly faced with questions that generate reflections on aspects of life. These days, what stood out most in my thoughts was about the human motivational state. We may not be aware of this, but sometimes we notice its cyclic variability, influencing the state of psychological balance and social behavior. This content is intended to encourage people to conduct their own investigation, it is a message of support for autonomy. It’s also about how we can boost and strengthen constructive mindset, motivational and resilience over time.

→ Do what makes you feel good, the psychology of motivation

Getting started, about thinking of people and different ways to motivate them. And the nature of the task at hand makes us think creatively about how to generate motivation in a systematic way. Take a quiz, identify a task you’d like to motivate others to do, then list three ways you can motivate them yourself. According to scientific studies, the ability to realize someone’s needs and offer support produces an instantaneous increase in well-being.

In two major categories within motivational psychology we have extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. The first, extrinsic, is when you do something for some reason that not be the activity itself. It could be because someone asked you to do this and you value them. The idea is that whatever the reason you are doing something, the attitude is for the reward, not the situation itself.

On the other hand, intrinsic reward is an innate and natural human tendency, it means that you do something selflessly. You do it, not because of some external stimulus, but because you want it, find it rewarding, engaging, pleasurable, fun just to do it. For example, I love running on the beach, I’m not thinking about anything else, I just want to relax and recharge my energy in this place, taking a break before resuming the day’s activities / work. The focus is just, “I can and I want this, done”. Intrinsic motivation varies from person to person, and everyone is different at different times. The concept here is to understand that there are no benefits to be received.

In another perspective, recent advances in neuroscientific research have helped to inform about the global need to use their studies on the growth mindset and intrinsic motivation, applying them to activities collectively. And yes, let’s go a little deeper to understand.

→ Human nature

We already know that the hidden mechanism for people to promote their own discoveries of new knowledge is an intrinsic motivation. Now, how to encourage them to become adaptive, self-regulated and self-determined, promoting their best self? Studies presented the secret of the main brain regions associated with creative mindset and intrinsic motivation, we can build together a conception of individuals to nurture our inner state.

Okay, but what is a creative mindset?

For example, people with a growth mindset perceive task instabilities as a necessary part of the experience process and have the ability to recover by directly encouraging their effort and encouraging persistence. People with this profile tend to embrace this experiment, observing their intelligence and personality as disruptive characteristics, keeping their personal development process constant, creating and proposing new and innovative solutions for different situations. Self-motivation guides the direction of an individual’s behavior and self-determination.

Our self-determination is essential for us to be more effective and improved in our reflection on ongoing experiences. Intrinsic motivation enables us to learn new subjects and differentiate our interests, thus generating a sense of purpose and meaning.

Another example, if we are likely to voluntarily engage with a task during a period of free choice or a condition of self-determined choice. These findings indicate that an intensified activity stimulates the release of dopamine, supporting the autonomy achieved, promoting intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, positive and negative affects can also strengthen or weaken the intrinsic motivation on a particular subject, thus influencing the attitude towards it. Remembering that you have the free will to make positive and evolutionary choices, with common sense.

It is possible to affirm that individuals with a constructive mindset have greater awareness and attention to failures. There is a region of the prefrontal cortex responsible for monitoring failures and behavioral adequacy, being receptive to corrective feedback. Although the constructive mindset empowers and encourages intrinsically motivated behaviors promoting learning along the way, we don’t like to take risks and show weaknesses. However, with the support of the growth mindset, we are not afraid of making mistakes, as we have the ability to learn accurately post-error.

Therefore, those who have a growth mindset are resilient and self-regulated when they face obstacles or challenges during their learning process. Intrinsic motivation is complex to measure objectively. To identify it in someone, it is essential to carry out a long-term experimental task.

→ The influence of emotion on motivation, the prefrontal cortex

We know that we human beings can and do resolve social issues at any time of day. To better understand how we move internally, let’s consider the huge prefrontal cortex (PFC) we have. He is uninterruptedly using connections to simulate social possibilities and then choose the optimal course of action, providing harmonious and dynamic human relationships. According to scientific research, we can list nine functions of our PFC: empathy, perception, response flexibility, emotion and body regulation, morality, intuition, tuned communication and fear modulation. Being them:

1. Empathy: the willingness to see the world through another person’s perspective

2. Perception/Insight: the inner sense of knowing

3. Response flexibility: ability to respond flexibly; allows us to take a break, a space between momentum and action

4. Emotional Regulation: on how to achieve enough intensity for life to make sense, but not too much excitement for life to become chaotic or too little excitement for life to become rigid and drained.

5. Body regulation: the organization of different body systems to function optimally. An example is the balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system.

6. Morality: our ability to imagine, reason and represent behavior in favor of a broader social good.

7. Intuition: A term meaning the non-logical knowledge that arises from the body, especially the neural networks in the heart and intestines that send their signals upward to regions of the prefrontal cortex.

8. Attuned communication: affectionate connection in a relationship. An example is when internal states are the focus of attention and are “tuned” so that they are “seen” by someone else.

9. Modulation of fear: the ability to unlearn fear.

This is about what goes on in your heart and mind. It leads us to understand that emotions and feelings are only possible through the functioning of the limbic system, the unit responsible for coordinating all emotional responses to social activities, such as “Fight”, “Flee”, “Freeze the stress response”, “Am I safe?”, “Do people want me?” The prefrontal cortex provides regulatory influences on the processing and expression of emotion, emotions live here. Developing relationships that allow for community life depends on the activity of neurons located in these structures.

→ The natural “caffeine”, dopamine

To do this, one of our partners, dopamine, helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure, as well as motivated and emotional behaviors. Dopaminergic neurons, stimulated by unexpected reward events, project to other regions of the brain, such as the cortex, limbic system and hypothalamus (regulation of emotional and behavioral patterns), affecting physiological functions and motivated behaviors. Dopamine is considered a key substrate of intrinsic motivation, thus giving rise to attention and behavioral involvement. When it is at low levels, our organism reflects through a lack of motivation and pleasure, feeling tired or altered movements.

→ Dare, experiences are powerful

Finally, in practice, we have the potential to experiment activities to control and increase dopamine levels in the brain, activating the prefrontal region, associated with well-being and reducing anxiety. The quality of life depends on what we do, what goes on in our consciousness during our existence.

Therefore, we can opt for passive leisure, which includes media consumption (music and movies), exposure to sunlight and adequate rest. Socializing — talking to people just for the sake of interaction — is generally highly positive, although they are motivating and reasonably happy activities, they involve little mental concentration. Romance and sex offer some of the best times of the day, but for a good part of people these activities are infrequent, so they don’t make much of a difference in the overall quality of life unless they are placed in the context of a lasting relationship, providing emotional and intellectual rewards.

Active leisure is another source of immensely positive experiences. When we engage in a hobby — aerobic exercise, mindfulness practices, yoga, arts activities, going to the movies or a restaurant — we tend to be happier, more motivated and more focused than at any other time of the day. It is in this set that the dimensions of experience are most intensely focused and in harmony with one another.

What activities are happiest? Which ones are the most motivating?

The first step is to plan your daily activities so that you can get the most rewarding experiences of them. It sounds simple, but the inertia of habit and social pressure are so intense that many of us have no idea what we really enjoy, and what components of life contribute to stress and depression. Keeping a diary or reflecting on the day before at night is one way to systematically assess the various influences on mood. After realizing which activities produce the highlights of the day, you can start experimenting — increasing the frequency of the positive ones and decreasing the others. In this case, we have three main points to monitored:

1. Interpersonal relationships: being with friends provides the most positive experiences. Quality of life improves immensely when there is at least one other person willing to listen to our problems and support us emotionally. When someone claims to have five or more friends with whom they can discuss important issues, they are more likely to say they are “very happy,” showing positive moods. The strong effects of companionship on the quality of experience suggest that investing psychic energy in relationships is a good way to improve life. But for real growth, you need to find people whose opinions are interesting and whose conversation is stimulating, mature, sustainable relationships. It’s teamwork.

2. Own companion: A more difficult but even more useful long-term skill to acquire is solitude, the ability to be in a state of voluntary and positive isolation, or the ability to tolerate loneliness and even enjoy it. Raise your self-esteem with respect and self-love. Give yourself a chance to perceive yourself as a unique and special individual.

3. Environment: Locations also affect the quality of the experience, so making a creative change can be useful to test out some environments, as well as select activities and companions. Gaining control of your home or office environment — discarding the excess, decorating it to your liking, making it personal and psychologically comfortable — can be the first step in reordering life.

As with the other parameters of life, it’s important to find out what motivates you the most, which ones are best for you personally. There is no day or time that is best for everyone. Self-reflection helps identify preferences and experiment with different alternatives — waking up earlier, napping in the afternoon, eating at different times — to find the best set of options.

It is worth emphasizing that it is not the external conditions that count, but what we do with them. The excellence of daily life ultimately depends not on what we do, but on how we do it. Most of us are much more sensitive to the situations we find ourselves in, but we can have surprising revelations if we train to experiment. It may happen that you really enjoy being alone, for example. There is no law that says we should feel life the same way. What’s vital is figuring out what works best for you.

We’re not going to build a perfect system either. In fact, it’s a good thing that we live constantly in this movement, of high and low tides. It’s about thinking that we can promote from the beginning the idea of TRY, FAIL, LEARN, TRY AGAIN, and iteration means doing the same thing multiple times, but improving over time and experimenting in the process.

Every day for us something new.