[MUSIC] So we're not only motivated by our internal needs, or we're not only motivated by the way our jobs are designed. But we're motivated by the goals we set for ourselves, and I'm sure this is something that you can relate to easily. Don't we all set goals for ourself? Something we want to achieve. Some end state where we want to be. We make our to-do lists with the goals that we want to achieve for today. We may engage in a more formal management by objectives, type of process in our organization. We tend to set goals with our managers, in terms of for what we want to achieve. Maybe you even set learning goals for yourself for this course, right? You want to achieve a certain learning, a certain state of knowing and interpreting where you want to be at the end. Goal setting theory is also a theory, which is really well supported in the literature. So we know that setting goals for people, or for yourself, is a very good way to move your behavior in a certain direction. And there's three characteristics that basically stand out that we have to think about when setting goals for ourselves or for others. And this is we want our goals to be specific, we want them to be challenging, and we want people to commit to them. So, we want goals to be specific. Can you remember when maybe in the early days your mother said to you, well you know just do your best, that is good enough there's really nothing more that we can do. Turns out, this is not a very good advice. Specific goals than to work better in terms of motivating us, driving our behavior in a certain direction than goals that just say, do your best or that are really more vaguely determined. What is specific goal then? Let's think back again on your motivation for this course. A very specific goal would be if you would say for yourself, I'm going to be working on this course on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday between seven and nine. This is a very specific goal because you commit to something. And you have specified exactly the time and what you're going to be doing with it, second aspect, you also want your goals to be challenging. And challenging basically means not too easy but also not too difficult. So challenging goals tend to do more for energizing us for moving our behavior than goals that are easy because we know, right, we can achieve it, we've done it in the past, there's nothing so much that we really worry about. On the other hand, if goals are too difficult, this is also not motivating us, because if we basically know in ourselves that it's unlikely that we're going to be achieving it in the first place, well, why bother? So goals need to be at that optimum level where it's difficult enough, so that we have some slight worry about whether we will be able to achieve it, but on the other hand not too difficult, so that we are demotivated. The third factor for our goals is we want people to commit to it, and this also is something that maybe you can relate to. If you get a goal from someone, someone tells you to achieve something is it exactly the same than when you set goals for yourself? It's not really the same and it tends really to depend on your commitment that you have for the goals. The goals that you set for yourselves, when no one is forcing you in anyway tend to be a more powerful driver than goals that are set for you by others. Now it's not really to say that people cannot set goals for others, or that if you get goals from your manager, it's not to say that these goals can never be motivating, not at all, but, it is important that from a personal perspective you commit to the outcome. You really have to want to achieve that goal in order for it to be motivating. So, just to recap, we've come to the end of understanding what motivates us. We've looked at our internal needs, we've looked at the job characteristics, and now finally we've been looking at the goals we set for ourselves. These are important factors in understanding our motivation, in understanding why we do what we do, but they're not the full story, because there's also something in the process. How are we motivated? And this is going to be the topic of the next sequence where we focus on process-oriented theories. [MUSIC]