PAMLife Podcast - How to Sustain Motivation With Elliott Newell

In today’s podcast, we are joined by Elliott Newell, a sport psychologist for the English Institute of Sport. Elliott boasts an impressive history having worked with international and national athletes from a range of sports such as professional football, kayaking, British Athletics and England Netball, to name a few. Elliott specialises in talent development of elite youth athletes.

In this podcast, Elliott and Casper, PAMLife Mind Coach, discuss goal orientation, the difference between Ego and Task orientation, how this might affect your motivation to succeed and how this can change as you get older.

What is goal orientation?

Goal orientation is an "individual disposition toward developing or validating one's ability in achievement settings". Previous research has examined goal orientation as a motivation variable useful for recruitment, climate and culture, performance appraisal, and selection. Studies have also used goal orientation to predict sales performance, goal setting, learning and adaptive behaviours in training, and leadership. Due to the many theoretical and practical applications of goal orientation, it is important to understand the construct and how it relates to other variables.

Goal orientation is best split between Ego and Task orientation.

Task orientated people place more of a focus on the essential steps required to achieve goal success i.e. learning, handwork and persistence. So it's important to set process goals around increasing knowledge and understanding, developing skills and experience necessary for goal success and comparing your current standard against you desired standard. Task orientated people's goal motivation often comes from seeing the gap between current and desired standard decreasing as a result of investing high levels of effort and improving themselves. Whilst, ego-orientated people's goal motivation often comes from outperforming someone else/social comparison with minimal effort.

If you’d like to listen to more expert podcasts from the PAM Life Coaches, you can do so by checking out the PAMLife app or website www.pamlife.co.uk.

If you want to hear more from Elliott, follow him on Twitter @ElliottSportPsy.