Are you struggling to find a balance between your career and motherhood while chasing external rewards for success?

Many high-achieving professional women often find themselves caught between the demands of motherhood and their careers, seeking success but feeling trapped by external expectations.

We agitate this pain point by exposing the myth of external rewards for success, a belief deeply ingrained in our society.

🌟 BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL LEARN:

• The damaging effects of relying on external rewards for motivation.
• How intrinsic motivation can lead to genuine fulfillment and meaning in life.
• The importance of detaching from outcomes and embracing the beauty of the moment.
  
  

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Podcast Episode Transcript

Unveiling the secrets to true success, why society has been wrong all along. Join me as we redefine the very essence of what success is and uncover the shocking truth about external rewards. Get ready to challenge everything you thought you knew about achievement and discover the path to genuine fulfillment.

A few years ago when I started learning about life design, one of the things we look at is our definition of success. And part of that I really got into was external achievements versus internal motivation. So extrinsic reward versus intrinsic motivation. And also the idea

That in order to have true success, failure has to be possible. So today we’re gonna talk more about the external versus internal rewards, and we’ll do another episode at some point about the idea of embracing failure as part of success.

There’s a myth about external rewards and success. We think we can reward someone and they’ll get success or we’ll reward ourselves, we’ll get success. We’ll create this whole life and achieve what we want and that means success, right? Well, let’s talk about the idea of society’s definition of success. And it usually does revolve around external rewards and recognition.

Now there’s a book by Alfie Cohen and it’s called Punished by Rewards. And in this book, he talks about how our internal motivation is, can be, and often is diminished by external rewards.

He looked at two dozen studies that showed that people expecting to receive a reward for completing a task or doing it successfully did not perform as well as those who were expecting nothing.he’s studied this looking at these aspects of reward and punishment. people think punishment is one way to…

get the behavior we want and reward is another. But really they’re the same thing because really it’s something on the outside is gonna happen to us, either good or bad. And they’re really just both sides of the same coin of that extrinsic motivation. So he found that with young kids, older adults or older children and adults, males and females for

All kinds of rewards. The tasks that range from memorizing facts and to solving problems, it’s just a whole range of challenges. In general, the more cognitively sophisticated in, I guess, hard to figure out is a way to put it, and open-ended thinking that it is, that was required for the task, the worse.

People tended to do when they had been led to perform the task for a reward. So if something’s more complex, if they’re doing it for a reward, they performed worse.

So there’s different explanations that he talks about. And the most compelling is that rewards often cause people to lose interest in what they were, often rewards will cause people to lose interest in what they are rewarded for.

And there’s a reference on his website, alphacoen.org, that has all the references for all the studies that he looked at for this book.

One study that he refers to in his writing is about kids that were offered kefir. It’s a yogurt drink and they were unfamiliar with it. So some were just asked to drink it. Some were praised lavishly like, oh, you’re so amazing. What a great job drinking. They were just praised so much. And then the third group was given a reward.

And they found it worked. The kids that were given a reward ate more or drank more of the kefir than the other kids.

So that’s not surprising at all.You would expect they get a reward. You know, that’s what we usually think. They get a reward, so they’re gonna drink more of this beverage they were trying to get them to drink.

But here’s the kicker, a week later, the kids that were given the reward found it significantly less appealing than those kids that were given no reward, if they weren’t given a reward, they liked it just as much, if not more, than they had earlier.

So they’re saying if you substitute a different, like a subject in school, if you substitute that in instead of kefir, you can imagine what our schools are doing to kids and our workplaces are doing to us. It’s all about rewards. Let’s give you a bonus. Let’s do compensation. Let’s give the kids a free ticket for… bathroom break, whatever their rewards are. Rewards tied to so much in education.

And this data suggested that the more we want kids to want to do something, the more counterproductive it is to actually reward them. And this goes over to adults as well. So part of success is not to earn these outer rewards. If that’s what we’re after, it can be counterproductive.

If what we’re trying to do is create a meaningful life with intrinsic motivation.

So a big part of intrinsic motivation is curiosity and enjoying the journey, if you will, of enjoying what we’re doing along the way without being attached to the outcome. And this is in even the Bhagavad Gita, there’s a spiritual texts, there’s ancient wisdom attached to this too, of not being attached to the outcome. If we are doing it with our best intentions and hoping for the best.

but not just grasping to the outcome. That contributes to our wellbeing and success and enjoyment more than clinging white knuckles,

So if we nurture our intrinsic motivation, nurture our curiosity, nurture our enjoyment of what we’re doing, that can really add a lot to our authenticity in our life and add a lot to the feeling of a fulfillment and a meaningful experience.

So this leads to then what is success? Because if it’s not like getting something on the outside, then what is it? What does it mean to you? And I would encourage you to do a thought experiment or even journal about what success is to you personally. Reflect again, I talk about values, but they’re critical to knowing who we are and having a strong foundation in our life.

What does it feel like and what does it look like to live those values out? Is that success? And my definition of success, it is. It’s living these values while we’re here, creating something that we know we’re meant to create while we’re here on the planet. And how do we incorporate that into our definition of success? What is your definition of success?

So this can be really helpful when we align our values with our goals and our intrinsic enjoyment. We can just take off, right? If you decide I wanna write a book, instead of saying I can’t wait to hold the book in my hand.

The process can be difficult. I’m not saying that it’s not, but if we can enjoy the process, enjoy the reward, it comes from one day getting up and writing a couple hundred words or whatever the project is that you’re doing. If you can find enjoyment in that, that will be a fulfilling life. And that is a life of purpose and meaning. So it’s detaching from the outcome and attaching to the beauty in the moment, the flow of life. The … purpose that you’re creating by living your values, your mission and your goals.

Please come join us over in the Facebook group. We would love to hear from you. There’s a place for support, encouragement, some teaching. I would love to hear your personal definition of success, what that is, and maybe it’s evolved over time. Has it changed? Share that.

We will celebrate the different definitions of success and the diversity of ideas.

And if you haven’t already joined, come on over to our Facebook group for Living True by Design. Join the group. We love people to come into the community. It’s a welcoming, open, supportive community. And we are so excited for you to join us.

This week, take a moment and reflect. Has this held true for you? Are you more internally motivated or externally motivated? Or have you seen in your life things that, you got a reward for that didn’t feel as good as the internal motivation? I’m curious to hear if you’ve noticed that experience at all.

In our next episode, we’re gonna uncover the different levels of saying no. Y’all, this is, I love this whole idea of the levels of saying no. And we’re gonna talk about how to assertively set your boundaries and the levels that lead to embodied boundaries, yes.

Get ready to master the art of refusal with honesty and maintaining connection with those important relationships in your life while you’re doing it.