Embracing Monotony

I've loved my job in professional sports.

When people ask me about my job, what they often think about is what they see on TV - the fast-paced games, high-intensity performances, and the world's best athletes.

What they don't see is the monotony of the days between. Those days are, usually, pretty boring.

The same holds for the athletes. Many of them find practice unenjoyable not because they don't like their sport or getting better, but because going through the same routine, day after day, is hard.

Getting comfortable with boredom may be the single most important thing a high performer can do to improve their odds of getting to the top.

Boredom kills more careers than almost anything else.

Fortunately, there are psychological tools we can use to better regulate our thinking, feeling, attention, and action in the face of the tedious development of expertise.

For example, we know that personally meaningful goals increase a person's use of self-discipline (Fischbach & Trope, 2005). The question is, how do we get someone to set a personally meaningful goal that creates a sticky motivation over the long term?

Finding a purpose for the action

There are 3 ways to make a goal more meaningful.

The first is to find a goal that benefits you directly. These are goals that are either enjoyable and you're willing to do them for their own sake, or they lead to a better chance of you achieving a larger objective that's important to you (but not relevant to anyone else).

The second is to find a goal that involves serving others, an ideal, or something bigger than yourself.

The third and most powerful way is to combine the two. We'll call this combination a "purpose."

The benefit of this combination is that it focuses on the deeper motivation for the goal (e.g., helping others) rather than the content of the goal (e.g., becoming an NBA player). Combining these two types of motives into one larger framework for pursuing a goal or task can lead to greater task persistence (Eccles, 2009) and often naturally co-exist (Batson, 1998). As a bonus, these deeper motives can also lead to deeper processing of information (Vansteenkiste, Simon, Lens, Sheldon, & Deci, 2004), which is critical for the development of expertise.

Testing it out

In a series of studies with a few thousand high school students, David Yeager and his colleagues (2014) set out to see if they could motivate these students more and keep them engaged in the tedious tasks of school by helping them tap into their purpose.

Specifically, they were looking to find out if:

• A purpose leads to more self-regulation at school, both at the trait level (e.g., grit and self-control) and the behavioral level (persistence on a boring task)
• Whether or not this self-transcendent purpose actually caused a change
• How quickly a purpose intervention leads to change (in this case, deeper learning)
• Whether or not the purpose leads to choosing boring tasks rather than what they called "tempting alternatives"

Here's what they found.

Study 1: Having a self-transcendent purpose leads to seeing boring tasks as more meaningful and greater self-regulation and persistence.

Study 2: Having a self-transcendant purpose can impact performance several months into the future.

Study 3: Having a self-transcendent purpose increases the tendency to deeply learn from boring tasks. In fact, in this study, students spent twice as long engaging in a boring task if they were tapped into the larger purpose behind the learning.

Study 4: When people reflect on their larger goals and how what they are doing contributes to something bigger than themselves, they're better able to persist and overcome temptation.

Applying this research

Nearly every leader I've worked with, at some point, decries the fact that some members of their team do not align with the larger goals of their team or business. It can be both discouraging and difficult to manage a group of individuals pursuing their own goals and needs with no regard for how it impacts the larger group.

This research gives us a framework for unifying both personally meaningful and self-transcendent (e.g., team/organization, "larger than me" goals). These goals can coexist together, and there are exercises we can do and ways to talk about team goals that make them more salient.

First, we need to be cautious not to undermine the autonomy of the performers we work with. It's a tricky balance to strike, as we want to persuade them to adopt a larger team perspective (our goal) in their own way (their goal).

A clever way to do this is to establish how "people like you do things like this." In the case of getting your performers to buy into a self-transcendent goal, you might frame the exercise as "the other leaders on the team do this" or "this is something everyone will do" to establish a social norm that fosters self-transcendent learning. These norms can motivate new behaviors (Cialdini, Reno, & Kallegren 1990).

Second, you want to connect the larger, self-transcendent goal to a personally relevant motive. The reality is that nobody is going to forego their individual pursuits and fully give themselves to the team - there has to be a meaningful alignment between the two. But, if you consciously connect the two, it can make for a more powerful force and help people connect to the larger goal without losing themselves.

Third, you can ask your performers to self-reflect to identify a self-transcendent purpose. Rather than giving them the purpose (and undermining autonomy), asking them to reflect on how they could best make the team environment better or how they can contribute to the organization's goals can lead to them identifying both self-transcendent and personally relevant goals that motivate team-oriented behavior.

Finally, you can conclude the exercise by asking your performer to just explain their reasons for pursuing the larger goals. This pulls on self-perception and cognitive dissonance (Bem, 1972; Festinger, 1957), and research showing that, when people advocate for a message, they internalize it (Aronson, 1999).

If you can combine these four principles when you're setting a goal - whether it’s in the preseason, before a big sprint, or in the context of a tough streak - you can help people psychologically embrace the monotony ahead without losing momentum.

By leveraging these four principles, you can turn boring, tedious tasks into something that people do to support a mission larger than themselves. When it's tough to make something fun or interesting, tapping into a larger purpose can sustain motivation. Interestingly, in the research, this type of intervention worked even for disengaged students, which suggests these self-transcendent purposes can motivate new behaviors in nearly anyone, and that those new behaviors will sustain over time.

Falling in love with boredom is simple, but not easy. The intervention uncovered in this research, however, suggests we can help people find the passion for monotony by helping them connect it to both personal goals and larger meaningful goals. The end result is a willingness to persist when the going gets tough and improved performance as a result.

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References

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Festinger, L. A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press; Stanford, CA: 1957.

Bem, DJ. Self-perception theory. In: Berkowitz, L., editor. Advances in experimental social psychology. Vol. 6. Academic Press; New York, NY: 1972. p. 1-62.

Eccles JS. Who am I and what am I going to do with my life? Personal and collective identities as motivators of action. Educational Psychologist. 2009; 44:78–89. doi: 10.1080/00461520902832368.

Eccles JS. Who am I and what am I going to do with my life? Personal and collective identities as motivators of action. Educational Psychologist. 2009; 44:78–89. doi: 10.1080/00461520902832368.

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Yeager, D. S., Henderson, M. D., Paunesku, D., Walton, G. M., D'Mello, S., Spitzer, B. J., & Duckworth, A. L. (2014). Boring but important: a self-transcendent purpose for learning fosters academic self-regulation. Journal of personality and social psychology, 107(4), 559.