Episode 200: Dr Sarah Memmi Pt 1: Extrinsic and Intrinsic Motivation

We’re reached another podcasting milestone. This is episode number 200! Pretty staggering, especially when I think about the number both of listening hours and editing hours that represents.

In many of those episodes we’ve talked about constructional training. This concept draws on the work of Dr. Israel Goldiamond. Goldiamond poses four questions which form a very useful framework for structuring your training.

The first question asks what do you want? What are your goals? And the recommendation is to dream big.

The second question gives you your baseline. Where are you now? What skills are in repertoire? What component skills are missing?

The third question takes you to your training steps. How are you going to get from where you are now to where you want to be.

The fourth question asks what will keep you going? What will keep you motivated.

It’s this fourth question that we want to focus on in this conversation. Our guest is Dr Sarah Memmi.

Sarah joined us a year ago for a fabulous conversation about choice, control and goal setting, so in a way we were looking at the first question in that conversation. And now we’re going to jump to the fourth.

Sarah brings a great perspective to this question. She’s an assistant professor of Marketing at the College of Business at the University of Louisville. She’s also a lifelong horse person which makes her a perfect fit for also teaching in the University of Lousiville’s equine business program.

Our subject is going to be intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In this podcast we have talked mainly to behavior analysts. As a behavioral scientist Sarah is drawing on a different body of research, so I was very interested to hear her perspective on this subject. Sarah was trying not to overwhelm us with research references related to how humans behave, and instead in this conversation she is extracting what she thinks is most relevant to those of us who are interested in training.