Achievement, Power & Intimacy

Three Fundamental Motivations

A few weeks ago I learned about a personality theory that looks to describe the fundamental motivations of individuals as a distribution between three possibilities: achievement, power & intimacy.

(The first method of assessment involved having people write short narratives to go with relatively neutral scenes, like two scientists working in a lab. It's called the Thematic Apperception Test.)

This has been rattling around in my mind ever since, and on a weekend leadership training for the Boys to Men mentoring organization, one thing became very clear: Achievement is my dominant motivation.

After that, I think it's Power, then Intimacy. (Hence I titled this post according to my own ranking. That's power in action. ;-) )

One of the ways this became clear is that I noticed that while I did value the intimacy and connection happening between members of the group (including myself), I viewed this as one more accomplishment to check off the list!

What motivates you most?

Power? Aka: influence, leadership, dominance, having the respect of others, being acknowledged...

Intimacy? Aka: connection, group harmony, trust, consensus, sharing...

Achievement? Aka: completion of goals and tasks, progress, learning, challenge, expansion of skills and abilities...

Ways to use this: You could pick your top motivation, rank them as I have, distribute a certain number of points between the three, or give each a rating between 0 and 5.

And now, having written something and posted it, I have achieved something worthwhile for me, taken a position of potential influence, and connected with the readers of this blog, pretty much in that order. :-)