Success or Failure? - 2

Further unpacking motivation

In the previous blog I unpacked two quadrants of the Quadripolar Model of motivation.

The next quadrant to look at is high on success orientation but also high on failure avoidance.  These individuals are referred to as ‘over-striving’ – potential failure is threatening so such individuals may experience high anxiety, self-doubt, and uncertainty about future outcomes.  These correspond to people who operate in the blue zone when the conditions to support the blue zone are in place, when they feel included, listened to, unjudged, for example, but their red zones are easily triggered and when that occurs they become self-focused and strive to avoid failing.

The final quadrant is low on success orientation and low on failure avoidance.  These individuals are referred to as ‘failure-accepting’ and no longer tie their self-worth to their performance – they have given up and are no longer success oriented.  These correspond to people who have an active red zone but who avoid it triggering not by being resilient to setbacks or challenges but rather by being indifferent to the work they do.  As such they cannot embrace the blue zone either and are simply uninterested in improving their practice.

These are the four archetypes implied by this model.  Each has distinctive characteristics driven by the underlying red zone-blue zone/success orientation-avoid failure balance.  What groupings exist in practice will also be shaped by the environment in which people are doing the work and by the profiles of people who are attracted to, or recruited into, the teaching profession and also the attrition rate at various levels of experience, attrition rates are higher for less-experienced teachers than for more experienced teachers, for example.

John Corrigan is an expert in helping individuals to bring their whole of mind to their daily life and increase their effectiveness and the effectiveness of those around them. This expertise scales from the individual to the team to the organisation. At the core of this work is the practice of encounter.