S7E8: Intrinsic Motivation in Behavior Change

Discover the driving force behind effective learning and behavior change as we delve into the power of intrinsic motivation on the Experience University Podcast! In today's podcast, we discuss the complex interplay between various factors in shaping human behavior. Ultimately, this episode emphasizes encouraging individuals to discover and connect information themselves to promote lasting understanding and skill development. Thank you so much for listening, and be sure to follow along for more episodes in the coming weeks!

Today we are discussing:
Designing for Curiosity (1:37)
Brain Activation (3:19)
Drawing Connections from Information (4:49)
The Framework for Behavior Change 7:34)
The Two Layers: Curiosity and Connections (9:12)

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Transcript

Dr. K:
You are listening to the Experience University podcast with Dr K. Season 7, Episode 7.

Speaker 2:
Welcome to Experience University, where we aim to educate, inspire, and empower individuals who wish to design transformational experiences. Now, your host, Dr. Kristin Malek.

Dr. K:
Hello, my friends. Today, we have an incredible topic that was requested by a couple of viewers over the last few months. And it's about intrinsic motivation. If you've listened to my TED talk, we talk about the importance of intrinsic motivation in behavior change, about how you have to have this desire or want to seek out information to really seek out not even the changes but seek out information or new habits or new ways of being for it to essentially get planted if it was a seed for it to get planted into your subconscious mind. And this is really, really important. So, I was talking to a potential client over the last week and we've had two different meetings, and it came down to this exact topic. So, it's really fresh in the top of my mind here. When we say 'top,' that's more of your conscious mind, but it's fresh in my brain of how do we get people curious and how do we get people wanting to seek out information?

In the TED Talk that I gave, I talked about how for these engineers, they didn't necessarily care about this topic that we were trying to get them all to grasp. So the first step was designing for curiosity, to design for intrinsic motivation, and you have to meet people where they're currently at. So, engineers love puzzles, they love challenge, they love competition. And the idea of a game, in terms of this case, a murder mystery series, where they were actively seeking out the information about who the murderer was, so that way, they could beat their fellow colleagues, and they could find out who the murderer is, and they could win the game.

And then it was up to me to embed the information that they needed to know about this topic. They didn't care about into the clues. So they really actively were searching for this information, and you can see this in a variety of industries. This isn't just in events. You think about Taylor Swift and her swifties. How did that start? It started with the Easter egg hunting. It started with lines in her CD inserts that continued on through the different social media platforms and all the different types of messaging. She drops hints in clues, and her fans actively are searching for the clues. They're actively searching for the different pieces of the puzzle so they can put it together and then they advertise it or they just feel really good that they were right. It's just a puzzle to be challenged. They're using their critical thinking skills.

You can even see that in other mediums. For example, right now, I try to read one book a year that is fiction. So “not true,” whether that's a fantasy or a mystery or something. I am really big into self-improvement, self-transformation, those types of books, and leadership books, things like that. So, I try to read something that's “not true” to keep my brain activated in a variety of different ways. And I've become quite obsessed with Fourth Wing, which is a mix of like every single popular book in the past 20 years. Plus Dragons, right? Dragon Riding. There's like one scene that I'm like, oh, this totally reminds me of the scene in Twilight. There's a bunch of scenes, and I'm like, oh, this is so Hunger Games. But what Rebecca Yarros does as an author that makes the series so absolutely incredible is she's dropping all of these little hints that are foreshadowing.

So, even for example, when one of the characters, he said this thing, “and his voice was like lightning.” And then that foreshadows to a couple of scenes later in the book with lightning and the importance of lightning, which was also a foreshadow into another part of the book where lightning becomes more important. So, you're sitting there, and you're not just having one foreshadow moment, you're having two or three minor foreshadow moments.

So, I read this book, and I loved it, and then I started getting on the TikTok for it and reading all the theories, and I was like, “Wow, I really missed a lot of stuff. I need to reread this book.” And I reread the book, and I got even more things from it, and then I was hearing more theories, and I said, “I missed that too.” So finally, I just reread the book for a third time, and I wrote down literally 11 pages of notes, and I'm tying the pieces all together, just like Taylor Swift and her fans are tying all the pieces together. They're making the links; they're actively looking to make the links in their brain. And I think when we're talking about behavior change and when we're talking about events or the future of transformational events, this is what we also need to incorporate. I'm not saying you have to put Easter eggs. I'm not saying you have to drop little things in your marketing, but you've got to get your attendees, your potential attendees, or if you're calling them participants or learners or delegates, whatever the terminology you're using for the people who are attending your events and experiences, we have got to get them to actively try to search to make these connections. So, there's really multiple layers here as well. One, there's the curiosity to seek out information, and then there's the curiosity to link together the information.

And this is where, if I'm describing to people what I'm doing and I'm describing like, “Yeah, I'm doing this and this and this,” and they're like, “Oh, you're gamifying.” Yeah, kind of, at some level. But I think the concept of gamification has been, I don't know, it's kind of like greenwashing now where it's like we're going to gamify everything. And what that means is you're going to have a text number that goes to a Poll Everywhere or something. It's not exactly gamified anymore, right? That's just basic level, foundational, minimal engagement. It depends on how you're building it in, how you're getting the participants at your event to not just actively seek out the information but to actively seek out the connections between the information. It's a whole nother level there. And I frequently get asked on how I can teach people to do these things. There has to be a framework or a system, and the answer is “yes, and.” Yes, there is a framework that I use. I am writing it all out. I'm launching it the first week of December. I'm launching an official training program. I've talked about it before, and the “and” part of that comes from, you have to understand how the brain and the body work.

And that is way beyond just events, experiences, design. It's way beyond some of these concepts. I can give you a framework, but the reason why I have to do the training is because we're talking about the psychology, the neuroscience. We're talking about how different things interact with your body. So, not just how the brain works, but how communication works with certain parts of the brain, how we can use neurolinguistics, and how we can change behavior with that, how we can unravel things. We're also talking about our anthropology. We're talking about the different ways of our biology and how it's working and how memory is stored. There are so many different things that are a part of this from so many different areas, that I have literally had seven episodes this season alone specific to behavior change, and we have barely, barely scratched the surface.

There are so many variables at play. That's why I absolutely love what I do because every day I learn something new that interacts with things, and it's just such an amazingly beautiful way, in ways that make my head hurt because it scrambles up the things that I already know. It's like rerouting. I can feel now when my neural pathways are rerouting; that sounds a little crazy. But I'm like, “Oh my gosh, I could feel the little highway between my neurons exploding,” and then it's like looking for where it's going to reconnect to because all of this plays into this design that we have.

So, when you're thinking about gamifying, when you're thinking about true behavior change mindset change, you're thinking about all these levels, there are those 2 important things, and the 3 messages that I received across different modalities, they were all talking about like, “Can you talk more about designing for curiosity?” And as I was writing out the different elements for that, “OK, what does that look like?” et cetera, et cetera, it's really important to distinguish those two layers.

So, I wanted to make sure that I had a podcast dedicated just to that. You are designing for curiosity of the knowledge itself. And then you're also designing for the curiosity of how those pieces work together. If you give people the curiosity, you know, you don't give them curiosity, right? If you're designing your experience that inspires the intrinsic motivation to learn or for curiosity, then that's only half the bottom because you can't give people the pieces and then tell them how to put it together because they'll never learn.

So, think about that with children if you have children or have ever seen children trying to figure out a puzzle. If you say, “Here are the three pieces that you're missing in the puzzle,” and you tell them how to put it together, then the next time they do the puzzle, they have no idea how they go together because they never figured it out themselves. If you give them the three pieces or they discover the three pieces that they need, and then they struggle and they're actively trying to figure out how to put them together, it will significantly help them figure that out in the future.

They'll understand they want to separate out the edge pieces before they get to the middle pieces. Or they'll understand they want to sort by color or they want to sort by a specific item, they develop their processes. If we are telling people the processes and they're not discovering it themselves, not actually forming those neural pathways. So, that's an important thing I just wanted to differentiate on.

For everyone who's listening, I cannot believe how successful this season has been on behavior change. We have people logging in from so many countries all over the world. Hello. Thank you for being here. I am here at all points in time to take requests. If there's specific things that you're looking for, it's something short, I can cover easy, I can put it on my TikTok. I have a Tik Tok, Events with Dr. K, Events with Dr. K on TikTok, and I'm talking a lot about logistics and coordination and design.

And then when we're talking about behavior change and things that require a little bit longer to explain or to dive into, I'm putting all those on the podcast. I'm also generating a ton of content for these trainings that I know is just going to be such an incredible value add. People have been asking me to develop this for years, and I'm finally like, 'OK, I'll do it.' I want to make the world a better place. And if I'm the only one that's holding all of this knowledge, well, I can't say I'm the only one in the whole world, right? But with my unique training and skill sets and background as a polymath, seeing how they all overlap and work together, then teaching and training others to see things in a different way is definitely something that I'm passionate about.

So, thank you all so much for pushing me into this next phase and starting launching, kicking butt and taking names. I am just so humbled every day that you all log in and listen to it. It brings me back to the mic. I'm so happy to be in your car or in your ears wherever you're listening to this podcast, and I'm looking forward to next week.

Speaker 2:
Thanks for listening to the Experience University Podcast. Stay tuned for our next episode.