I was recently interviewed on the Yaron Brook Show on the topic of “Motivation by Love.” The main point of the interview is that it’s important to go deeper to understand the source of your motivation for any action. The fundamental motivation needs to be the desire to gain, keep, or create a value rather than avoid or destroy a threat. I explain the general principle in my article on “The Golf Course Analogy.” It is called “motivation by love” because love is the emotion that you feel when you contemplate values.

It was a 2 1/2 hour interview, with many questions from the audience. I woke up thinking of new ways to essentialize some of the main points, so I thought I would just write them up while I’m thinking about them.

1. The motivation that matters is your fundamental motivation

Often your motivation can look value-oriented when it’s not. For example, many people will name their motivation for doing something as “to make money.” They assume it is motivation by love because they see making money as a value. But making money is not a fundamental value. A desire for making money can be fundamentally motivated by fear.

To identify whether you are motivated by love or by fear in your desire for making money, you need to ask yourself why you want to make money and you need to keep asking “why” until you get to a root cause. It is the root cause that needs to be a value, not a threat, duty, or feeling.

For example, when I first started my business, I wanted to make money but I wasn’t motivated by values. I eventually realized I wanted money only out of desperation. I had ruled out making a living in academia because I disagreed with the generally accepted methodology. I had tried working part-time as an engineer to support my independent work in psychology, but I discovered it was not practical in my case. I thought I had no choice but to make money with a business. Not having an income was just unacceptable to me, even though my husband and I were comfortable financially. My deepest motivation was an out-of-context absolute based on fear — I had to make money or else I was not good enough. This created all kinds of defensive motivation around money and, of course, made me a terrible salesman and marketer. Nobody wants to buy from someone who is desperate and defensive.

2. You can change your fundamental motivation

I took many courses on sales and marketing, but they didn’t help me with the root cause of my problem with making money. It was my own work in introspection and motivation that enabled me to learn to value making money, and that is when the business started to grow.

How did I do it? I looked for values I already held and connected them to the many expected benefits of having a thriving business. My primary motivation to go into psychology was to discover new principles of psychology by using Objectivism as a framework. That is what motivated many years of work. Along the way, I also developed a very strong value of teaching people. I loved my Thinking Lab long before it was profitable, because I loved talking with people about my ideas and seeing them take them and use them in their lives. I also got very interested in the problem of explaining psychological ideas objectively. Principles that are discovered and validated by introspection are somewhat more difficult to communicate than other principles because you need to have the other person connect the principles to their own introspective evidence. Once I had developed these values, I could relate them to making money. The bottom line is: I value making money because every dollar paid to me is objective evidence that I have figured out how to explain the life-promoting principles I have been working out.

3. The change from motivation by threats to motivation by values can be fast

In the example above, it took me years to identify my fundamental motivation and then more years to change it. That was in part because there was no one to explain this process to me. (Believe me, I looked!) It is my own original work that enabled me to do this. But I don’t want you to think that shifting your motivation always takes so much time. Sometimes shifting from threats to values can be fast.

For example, my husband jumps into a cold pool every morning. This is a simple way to give his body a healthy stimulus that can contribute to longevity. However, every morning, like clockwork, he feels an aversion to jumping in. He’s going to be cold! You cannot prevent feeling aversion in such a case; it is going to be unpleasant and the emotion of aversion evolved to alert you to predicted unpleasantness.

This aversion is motivation by fear — fear of coldness — but you can shift to motivation by love if you identify the value at stake. Just ask what would be damaged or destroyed if you were cold. Answer: your comfort. If you think, “I want to be comfortable” instead of “I don’t want to be cold,” you are oriented to values instead of threats.

You might be wondering how that helps you. It helps you decide whether comfort is important enough to justify not jumping in. After all, you knew it was going to be cold. In fact, that is necessary for the therapeutic effect. Cold is not a bug, it’s a feature.

You can now compare the value of comfort (if you don’t jump in) with the value of longevity (the value if you do). My husband wants longevity very much, more than comfort, and once he reminds himself of this fact, longevity creates a desire that is much stronger than the desire for comfort.

Once you identify the deep values on both sides of a choice, you often resolve the conflict and feel motivated with desire to act to gain and keep the greater value.

When this doesn’t happen, it means there is another source of motivation that has not been identified. What I recommend when you feel ongoing conflict is that you accept the unpleasantness of conflict and do what you think you should do with the caveat that you’ll give it a limited time (e.g., 10 minutes) for the unpleasantness, with the expectation that the values at stake will become clearer. (This is a process of self-direction. There is much more to be said about self-direction, but the crucial point is that you need to identify all motivation in terms of fundamental values to be gained, not threats to be avoided.)

4. Deep rational values help you make the switch in context faster

The limiting factor in switching to be value-oriented is the time it takes to introspect your feelings to identify the fundamental values at stake. An incredible aid to this is a list of “Deep Rational Values.” This is a list of about 50 fundamental values that are always rational.

I developed this list after studying the work of Marshall Rosenberg on “Nonviolent Communication.” I see his method as a real-time process for orienting to values in a conversation. (My adaptation of his method is Rationally Connected Conversations.)

The point here is that having a relatively short list of deep rational values is a boon to speed up your introspection work. It enables you to go to the fundamental quickly, because often you can recognize the deep values that are at stake rather than need to logically analyze all of the quirks of your particular motivation. It gives you a vocabulary for introspection that is invaluable.

5. Deep rational values help you untangle stubborn irrational motivation

What I find particularly valuable about knowing a list of Deep Rational Values is that it can help you untangle a motivation that seems irrational but doesn’t disappear when you recognize it as such. It can help you figure out what makes an action feel compelling even though you think it’s wrong.

For example, if you realize your basic motivation for speaking up in a discussion is to get someone else’s approval, you may recognize that this motivation is secondhanded. It involves focusing on other people’s approval, not reality. If you value independence and don’t want to be secondhanded, you know that this is not a good reason, but this may not motivate you to do something else.

But secondhandedness is not a fundamental motivation. You need to go deeper both into why you feel the desire to speak up and why you feel a desire for approval. Rather than criticizing yourself for having irrational motivation, you need to recognize that you haven’t got the whole story yet.

On the list of Deep Rational Values are three categories of social values: connection, communication, and cooperation. Often, you can see that the deepest motivation is one of them. It may be that you want to speak up to show that you value what the speaker values (connection), or that you want to express your point of view (communication), or you are hoping to get alignment on a project that you are working on (cooperation). All of these goals could also result in approval from the other person, but approval is not the fundamental.

Moreover, it is possible that the other person will not approve of your speaking up if you are expressing a different point of view or looking for cooperation. It is even possible that they will not approve of your trying to establish shared values. But if you selfishly, rationally identify what you want from the interaction, you give yourself both backbone and options. It becomes okay if the other person doesn’t react the way you hoped — instead of triggering defensiveness.

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There is so much to say on the topic of Motivation by Love. And so much to learn about how to activate a value orientation consistently. For detailed tactics and coaching to help with developing the skill, you can join the Thinking Lab. The principle of orienting to values is a foundation for many, many of the self-study courses in the Lab: Do What Matters Most, Self-Direction: Theory and Practice, Rational Goal-Setting, Just-in-Time Planning, The Work of Happiness, and others.