Beyond Perceptions: How Motivation Shapes Our Goals with Prof. Emily Balcetis

Prof. Emily Balcetis at New York University is an award-winning social psychologist and author of Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World. In the book, she highlights how the perception of our goals conditions our motivation and ultimate success.

Prof. Balcetis views motivation as the difference between where we are and where we want to be, warning that limiting stereotypes or narrow definitions of success impact our motivation and ability to reach goals.

When addressing the challenge of sustaining motivation, Prof. Balcetis suggests balancing short-term and long-term perspectives, allowing for incremental progress while maintaining a vision for the overall objective.

During our conversation, Prof. Balcetis also points out the interplay between perception and leadership and how expanding mental representations of leadership can inspire more people to see themselves as capable leaders.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Amazon Music, or your favorite podcast platform to learn how to become an authentic and emotionally engaging leader.

Subscribe to Pity Party Over for more insightful episodes. Questions? Email Stephen Matini or send him a message on LinkedIn.

Please check Prof. Emily Balcetis book, Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World, and use the affiliate links to support Pity Party Over at no additional cost to you.

TRANSCRIPT

Stephen Matini: So listen, as I was thinking of you, there's a bunch of words such as, you know, perception and misperception, perceptual illusions, perceptual habits. How did you end up in this world?

Emily Balcetis: Well, there's lots of ways I could answer that. But to be honest, I really like magicians. I love going to magic shows. So there's that. I think I was already probably predisposed. But honestly, it was because when I was in graduate school, I went to study with a fabulous, fantastic, wonderful mentor.

But after the first year, I really wanted to go spend the summer in Europe. And I was a graduate student. I didn't have any money. So I needed to figure out how to afford it. So I was looking for like, well, what academic conferences are happening in Europe? And there weren't any in my field, but there was one that was in vision science. And I was like, well, I better do a quick study on something that has to do with vision so that I can get the data, put together a poster, submit to this conference, and then get my graduate school to offset the cost by $500 of this trip.

And then I did all of that and then told my advisor, oh, by the way, I like did all this stuff, I'm going to go to Europe for two months. And that's not how grad school really works. But he's lovely and said, like, okay, fine, but like maybe we should start working on these projects together. And so that's what sort of became the intersection, honestly, of my interest in social psychology, motivation science, which I had gone to graduate school to study. And how did you end up roping in visual experience? To be honest, it was to afford a trip to Europe when I was really poor.

Stephen Matini: When you work in organizations and you start talking about motivation, it is such a huge broad field. How do you make things simple for them to understand? 

Emily Balcetis: To be honest, I really do think that the concept of motivation is quite simple. The definitions that are foundational definitions, they vary, but they do have a commonality, which is that they're quite simple. One definition is just motivation is a discrepancy between where you are and where you want to be.

And that's a driving force, just to close that gap. That's motivation from one perspective. Another perspective that I find myself in my work relying on more often is a multiplicative function. So motivation can be like motivation equals value times expectancy. Value, what is it that you want times? Do you think that it's possible to get it? So there can be stuff that you really, really want, like, oh, I really wish that I was a billionaire.

So like, what's my motivation to become a billionaire? None, right? Because you multiply anything by zero and the answer is zero. So you can have like the things that you care most about. But if you have no feeling of self-efficacy, no means to accomplish it, no belief that you can get there, it doesn't matter how much you want it. Because in some sense, you know that you can't achieve it and some motivation stays low. So the concept of motivation, I don't think is that challenging. What to do about it, how to harness it, how to sustain it, that's where the challenge comes in. But just knowing what it is in the first place, from my perspective, isn't the difficulty.

Stephen Matini: Has your own motivation changed over the years as you got deeper into the subject that you researched, you work with people? Is it different today compared to the way it was? 

Emily Balcetis: Yes. I mean, everything about life is different over those, like my life is just so different, right? When I started this work, like I was saying that first summer after graduate school, you know I was 24 years old, whatever I was, like early 20s and now I am much older and married with two kids.

So yeah, everything about motivation has changed. But in what way? I mean, I guess what I value has shifted. And so again, if motivation is value times expectancy, what is it that is the value, that's shifted. And I don't think it's like that unusual of a story, looking for balance, wanting to, you know, find a fuller life than just how you get your salary in the door.

Stephen Matini: Do you find it more easily to stay motivated now than it used to be?

Emily Balcetis: I feel lucky in that I've always been fortunate to be able to do the stuff that I really love. When I was an undergraduate, I went to study music. I have a degree in music performance, and I was fortunate to get to be able to go and be a musician to really develop that. At the same time, I was studying research in psychology. And so then when life events happened and pushed music sort of out the door for me as a career path, I still play.

In fact, just this morning, I was at my two-year-old daughter's preschool playing baby shark and row, row, row your boat and wheels on the bus on my flute for them all. That was a highlight of my morning so far before this. And yeah, but so I got to do music and I love music. And then when I couldn't really become a professional musician, then I was loving psychology and the psychology research. And then I just get to keep doing that here. So I get it how privileged I am to say that I've always gotten to do what I love.

Now it's not to say that like, oh, every day is wonderful. And like, no, it has its challenges too, but at the heart of it, the motivation for me isn't the problem because I've always been in a place where I have the resources and freedom to do the stuff that I love. And I really love writing. That's a big part of my job. And I really love writing. So a lot of people say that they struggle with, how do you go from a blank page to writing a book or to writing a scientific article? It can just be overwhelming to see that blank page. But I've never experienced that.

A lot of the students that I work with do. So I've been able to figure out how do you help people? How do you advise people through that? But the motivation has stayed high. Again, the challenge for me, and I think the challenge for a lot of people is what do you do with that motivation? How do you keep it high? How do you balance the fact that you have multiple goals that you might be highly motivated towards, but resources like time are limited? How do you manage that? How do you sustain the motivation when there isn't an outlet for it? 'Cause you just can't get to the things that you really are motivated to do.So that's where I feel like I personally reflect and struggle the most.

Stephen Matini If I ask the same question to myself, and I don't know if this is part of motivation probably, but I noticed that when I was younger, I've always had entrepreneurial ideas. There was this humongous gap between what I wanted and sometimes I really felt super, super far. Sometimes I would get excited. And then today's, I guess the approach has changed because I focus for the most part of today.

Today with you. We record the episode and I try to do my best. And I know that probably in six months, in a year time, you know, if I continue doing this, it's going to be better. And I just simply focus on today. And somehow I find that motivating. It kind of calms me down and let me keep going. What I'm saying is something has to do with motivation based on your studies. What is it? 

Emily Balcetis: Well, there's a lot to unpack with what you were saying. So that phrase of like, just focus on today, just get through today, that comes up so often. People are starting out in the Alcoholics Anonymous program.

That's like one of the slogans and the guiding values and principles and philosophies that can help them too, because it just feels so overwhelming to thinking about having to stick with the change for the rest of your life. And if you let your mind go there, then this goal feels impossible. So sometimes people use that phrase of like, I'm just going to focus on today because the alternative just makes it feel so overwhelming that it puts it into a definitional category of what is the goal that is in the perceived impossible.

And that's when you just see efficacy, perceived efficacy, the belief that I can do this just drop. And so again, then you're multiplying against zero and motivation goes away. Other people say that, like focusing on today because they want to live in the moment and they find value and focusing on a singularity rather than trying to multitask. And there's value in that too. That is a valuable strategy. It's a mindfulness technique. And if people go through the effort of thinking about what are the benefits of multitasking, multitasking is not always bad.

We can talk about that if that's of interest. Multitasking is not always good either. It's about knowing what multitasking can do and being intentional about when you use it. And so if people focus on today and what's happening today is a strategy to manage the negative consequences of multitasking, then it can be really effective. But there can be some cost to this focusing on today as well. And some of those costs can be that it can be challenging to make sacrifices today that need to happen in order to achieve a long-term goal.

So if you think about in the realm of health, for example, what are you eating and how much are you exercising? If we think about today, I want to focus on today. I want to have today be a really good day. You might choose different foods to eat than if you're thinking about, okay, in six months' time, this is where I want to be with my health. That could require making harder choices, making sacrifices today for the long-term payoff. So that can be a downside is that people may have a more challenging time connecting today's choices with the future's outcomes, which might need to happen to change behaviors.

The other thing, the last thing I'll say about this is that with my research team, we did study. What is the effectiveness? What's the impact of focusing on today versus taking what we were calling sort of a wider bracket, thinking about time in a wider bracket? So what we did was have people think about what's something that's really important, a goal that you care about. You're not going to accomplish it today. You're not going to accomplish it this week. Probably not even this month. It's a longer-term goal. What is that? For one week, they woke up.

Each day, they thought about, what can I do today? They took that narrow focus on the day. What can I do today to make progress on that goal? They thought about the concrete actions that would help them make progress. At the end of the day, they reported how much time did they spend working on something for that goal? They did that every day for seven days. We counted up how much time did they spend. A different week, they took that wider bracket. They woke up on Sunday. They thought about the goal that really mattered to them. On Sunday, they made a list of bunches of things that they could accomplish.

What are concrete tasks that would help advance the goal and bunches of them? And then thought about the next week and thought about, well, which one of these concrete actions can I put in on Monday? Schedule that another on Tuesday, on Wednesday, on Thursday and Friday. So they scheduled out by six days. Still at the end of every day, they reported how much time did you spend working on this goal? And what we found is that doing that was helpful. Regardless of whether they took that day by day or the wider bracket, the week-by-week approach, they spent time working on their goal.

But when they took a wider look at their calendar and planned out their week in advance, they spent two and a half more hours in the week working on goal relevant tasks than when they thought day by day and planned day by day. Strategy was effective for increasing the amount of time anybody spent on goal relevant activities for 66% of people. Two out of every three people found this to be a beneficial strategy for improving on how they spent their time.

So lots to say about like, should you focus on the day? Should you take a wider frame? It's a strategy. It's a tool. And just like a hammer's great, but a hammer won't always work. You need to know what is the job here? What's the challenge? And is the hammer the right tool? So thinking about that, like, should I be narrowly focused on the day? Should I take a more expansive look at time? Just remember, both of those are tools. And if the tool isn't working for you right now, then try a different tool.

Stephen Matini: Oh, wow. That's really interesting. You know, narrow and wide. Yeah, I do feel that way about a lot of stuff. Probably the latest project that require a lot of motivation is this very podcast. You know, in April will be two years that I've been doing in my podcast. And I never really worried about what is gonna happen with the podcast. Is it gonna work? People are gonna love it. I truly, genuinely loved every single interview working with colleagues, being out with you. But then, you know, it's a lot of work, particularly for a podcast when you have to publish every single week.

And so as of late, maybe because I'm sick, I started thinking, dude, what are you doing? I mean, are you going somewhere with this? You know, is this worth it? Because it so far has been enjoyable. But once again, it's not something you can do five minutes a day. So with that said, should I go wider? Should, should I go narrower? 

Emily Balcetis: I think this is a time for introspection and thinking about what your goal really is. Probably when you started, it was just, can I do this thing? And can I connect with people? And you answer that, yes, you can do this thing.

Yes, you are connecting with people. So that goal has been met. And so now it's time just to think about, well, what's the goal now? What is the goal? And it's about resetting. So, you know, I talk about being our own mental accountant and your accountant doesn't go in with you and look at your books and just say, oh, let's just keep rolling. Hey, look, things are moving up. Things are moving down. Here you go. Here's a description of your finances. They take stockable. What is it that you're working towards? And are you on track to what you're working towards?

And at least the ones I work with, they want you to check in at least once a year to talk about what those goals are. And are you on track for meeting those goals? So we do that with accountants. Why not we do that for ourselves and our own personal goals as well? At least once a year, take stock of what are the goals that I'm working towards and what's my progress like? And so maybe that's where you're at right now with this podcast is what's the next goal as it relates to this work?

Stephen Matini: When you feel the way that I do, if you ever feel the way that I do, so that you need to take the time for yourself to understand, is there anything specific that you do to regroup? 

Emily Balcetis: I mean, I literally just went through this myself. As I was working with the coach that I work with, and we were just thinking about how are you spending your time? And is this how you want to spend your time? Everybody needs more time.

So let's take inventory of how you spend it. And so there was something that I, you know, similar to you, I've been working on a project for years and it's just, you know, the return on investment right now just feels like, I don't know. It's not there for me. Do I feel like, oh, I failed at that? Well, I'm personally struggling. Does it mean that I failed on meeting it if the return on investment hasn't continued to be high? No, I don't think so. I think I have done what's possible with this project.

And now it's time to think about, well, why was I doing that project? So I'm not like, how can I keep iterating on this? But why was I doing it in the first place? When you ask why, why, why, why? You help yourself figure out what your value systems are. Why was I doing this thing? Why was I doing this for the years that I was doing it? Why doesn't it feel gratifying anymore? Why, why, why? And then you get up to, because this is the kind of work I want to be doing and this is no longer the vehicle for it.

Okay, great. So no, I haven't failed at my goal. It's that I extinguished that trail, ran its course. And now I need to find another trail. And that was really beneficial for me because it made the idea of quitting something, which I plan to do in the near future easier. 'Cause it's not like quitting my goal. It's about finding a different trail to get me further along towards where I really want to be.

Stephen Matini: You know, one thing that I was curious is your work is so focused around perception. And I love this is wonderful. And another focus of your interest is leadership and specifically leadership styles. So I was wondering, how does perception and leadership styles combine, if you don't mind sharing with me some thoughts?

Emily Balcetis: Oh, of course. Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think they are quite intertwined because leaders have to want it. They have to want to be leaders. But how do they get there? How do they want to be leaders? Well, how do people want to be leaders? How do they come to thinking like, I can do this? Again, thinking that they can, thinking we can do something isn't an integral part of what motivation is.

If you don't think you can, motivation is zero. So what leads some people to think I can do this and I value it. I want to do this? Lots of reasons. But one of them that we've discovered, especially as we work with adults, but also with children, is when I just pose the question, think about what a leader looks like. What's the image that comes to your mind? If you were to see a profile, what's the image that comes to your mind? And you don't have to answer, actually, but like listeners can do that for themselves.

What we find often is that it's somebody who's older, it's somebody who's male, and it's somebody who's white. And so that represents a lot of the population, but it doesn't represent all of the population. And what we find is that that is the majority view in people's minds, even people that don't identify with being older, with being white or with being male. And that mental image of like, well, what does a leader look like if it's discrepant from their own view of themselves because it is, because the demographics are different?

Or when we start thinking about what are the values? What does it take to be a leader? What are the qualities of a leader? We think agentic, loud, controlling, assertive. And those are traits that also don't align with a lot of people's own self-definitions of what they think their strengths are, or even maybe what they want to be. So when they think about the visuals of what a leader looks like, or they think about the personal qualities of what a leader looks like, if there's not a lot of alignment, then that reduces motivation.

This doesn't seem like a place for me. It doesn't seem like something that I could succeed in and or and/or a place that I want to succeed in. But we know both of those things aren't true, that there are lots of effective leaders who are older white men, but there are effective leaders who don't fit any of those demographic profiles. There are leaders who are agentic, assertive, who are domineering in that they can come in and control a room. But there are leaders that are quite effective that don't do that. Leadership can look in many different ways.

It's just that we have this stereotype. We have pretty constrained mental representation about what a leader looks like and how a leader acts that could suppress people's motivation to try to join that space and do well in that space. So with the work we do, we try to expand that mental representation so that the image that comes to people's mind is more inclusive. It's broader. The set of visuals, the set of traits and qualities is more expansive. So there's room for more people of different varieties of people to see themselves in that space.

Stephen Matini: The mental representation that people have of a leader, whatever leader you have in mind, does that depend on the figures, the important figures that you've met in your life? 

Emily Balcetis: Yes, absolutely. So there's disparity in who assumes leadership positions. So the role models that we see or the way that we see the space filled out is not representative of all populations. What we see on TV also, you know, people who are portraying or who we see on social media who are portraying leadership, even if they aren't actually holding power. That's also not representative of the population. And so that can contribute to that narrow mental representation, that narrow definition of what constitutes a leader.

But you can sever that. You can break that connection through role models and through who is it that you see, even if it's just one or two people that you connect strongly with, that's enough, that anecdotal experience of seeing a different type of leader is enough to help expand that mental representation as well, which is why role models are so important. The work that we've done in schools in particular shows us that the diversity of the teacher demographics within a school really matters for shaping kids' beliefs about kids' mental representations.

Literally when we give kids a box of crayons and a piece of paper and we say like draw what a leader looks like to you, we see those drawings are extremely different among black teenagers specifically when they're in schools where there is a lot of white teachers and it's really different when they're in schools where there's far more non-white teachers. So when they see variety and the leadership within their own school, the drawings that they make with those boxes of crayons show a more diverse understanding or more diverse belief about who can and should be a leader.

Stephen Matini: You have worked with a lot of different people. You work with athletes. You work with artists. If I may ask, is there anyone that somehow, for whatever the reason has a special place in your heart? 

Emily Balcetis: Yes, absolutely. So there's disparity in who assumes leadership positions. Kids, I mean, yeah, it's probably you're just catching me at this point in my life where it's the kids that I get to work with. And I have a seven-year-old and a two-year-old. So they're just magical creatures, my children, but children in general. You just get to see their brain growing and moving and shaping in real time.

It only takes one emotional experience to have an impact on their brain for the rest of their life. I don't know, maybe that's selfish, but just like all the power that you have, right? If you can just, if you can find a way to give them these experiences, it can really be transformative. But yeah, I've learned incredible things from some of the amazing people that I've gotten to work with. I got to work with the developer of one of the apps on the Apple Store that's been like the number one app for a long time.

It's hit number one, you know, like every day it changes what's number one, but it's had its place, the top, the most downloaded app on the Apple Store. It's called “One Second Every Day.” And this is an incredible app. What it is, you know, it's an app that encourages you, if you want to use it this way, to take a video of something every day. And it's a one-second video. And then this is what I'm doing this year. I've had the app forever. I've worked with this guy for many years.

But just like I saw a family doing this, which is for their New Year's Eve, they played their one second everyday video to just reflect on what was this year like? 365 days, one second each day. And I don't know, I just want that. I want that for our family too, to have this moment of reflection about what was this year for us. So that's sort of my New Year's resolution is to make sure that I do this one second every day.

So when he talks about it, when the app developer talks about it, I asked him, like, what were some of those one-second clips that were most meaningful for you? And one that he shares is like, there's one, there's a one-second clip of a brick wall. And I was like, what? I've got a one-second clip of our wedding. I've got a one-second clip of an anniversary or like the first time I got to meet my daughter or my son, right? And it's like the brick wall.

And he was like, yeah, that brick wall means so much to me because the moment that my sister-in-law was admitted to the hospital and we found out that her intestines were strangling themselves and she was on the brink of dying, that's the first thing that I saw after we got this news that she might die so unexpectedly, so oddly. She didn't die. But he said like that wall, when I see that one second clip of that wall, it just reminds me of this transformative moment that I had where all of his hustle and what he needed to do for his life and for his career, for developing this app.

And it just felt like it doesn't matter, right? My family matters more than anything else to me. And so that brick wall is a reminder of that for him. And that is surprising in some sense. I mean, it's not surprising when you hear that, it's like, oh my God, how awful. And I totally understand how that could center and ground him to have that visual reminder. But also in some sense, like remembering bad stuff. Who wants to remember bad stuff?

When you think about when you said something really embarrassing, when you hurt somebody's feelings, when you really messed up at work, if you got fired or all of our big, big mistakes, who wants to go back there in their mind? Nobody. Nobody wants to relive the worst days of their life. So it doesn't come as like intuition that like, yeah, let's capture the awful stuff in our life and let's reflect on it on New Year's Eve, and that'll be a good thing. But it actually can be.

It can help us make better decisions, like it did for Caesar, the developer of this app, that, you know, remembering what restaurant gave you food poisoning, yeah, you should probably remember that. Remembering when you had a choice point, you chose this way, it didn't go as well, or you regretted that choice. Great, you should remember that so that you can make a different choice in the future. And that also makes sense. But our intuition probably says like, no, I don't want to remember. I don't want to take pictures. I don't want to post on social media. I don't want to put the negative stuff out there.

And I'm not saying we should. I'm not saying tell people about how awful today was. Show them about, you know, show them your bet. I mean, whatever. How you manage social media is like outside of my sphere of expertise. But it is within my sphere of expertise to say like there are big benefits from having a more inclusive memory than what our memory wants to do. If you can remember the times when you did feel icky, when you made the wrong choice, that can help you make better choices in the future.

Stephen Matini: Out of anything we said, is there anything that, in your opinion, those who will listen to us in the future should pay attention to? 

Emily Balcetis: Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things that can be challenging is feeling like if you've been working hard at something, you're not making the progress that you want, sunk costs is a thing of just continuing to invest in something that might not be working out.

It could be a relationship, it's not working out, or it could be a project, or it could be like working for a promotion within a company that isn't giving you the opportunity to grow. And it can feel really hard to let go of these things that aren't bringing you joy, bringing you the value, and helping you manage and satisfy your goals. And why don't people leave? Why don't people relieve the relationships that they shouldn't be in or the jobs that aren't satisfying? Because it can feel like a failure. There's lots of other reasons.

People need jobs. They have responsibilities to others that doesn't allow them to just leave a job that isn't gratifying. I get that. But still, the idea is true that why do people hold on to a course of action that isn't paying off? Because we have such a stigma about failure. Because failing at something is, we try to avoid that at all costs. But leaving a relationship, leaving a job, giving up on a goal, changing a course doesn't have to be failure. It can be an important learning opportunity.

Yeah, it's risky. And it's sometimes really challenging or maybe even impossible to take big risks. But if we think about quitting something as not quitting and not as failure, but as a pivot point for reflection, what did I learn? What am I going to take from this? The next thing is a chance to start new, start fresh. How beautiful is that?

I would love it if I had a chance to just start some parts of my life over, but with all of the knowledge and expertise that I have now, God, that would be amazing if I could, you know, have a blank slate to reset, but being as informed as I am. And that's what it can do.

So rather than it being a failure, a goal failure, or a quitting, which are stigmatizing words that we don't want to apply to ourselves, going through the work of mentally reframing as like a beautiful opportunity for rebirth, I think can help people make some of those tricky decisions to learn from them and to, you know, maybe find more happiness than what the current pursuits are offering.

Stephen Matini: Emily, thank you so much for sharing this time with me. I've learned a lot and I think your work is beautiful. Please continue to spread the inspiration because your work is really important. 

Emily Balcetis: Thank you for this conversation, for the opportunity. Thank you so much.