Humanistic Psychology Essay

How can you use Humanistic Psychology to have better relationships?

Humanistic psychology aims to promote self fulfillment by increasing self acceptance and self-awareness by focusing on the present and future instead of the past. Humanistic psychology is important because it helps people realize and achieve their goals on their own. This requires three things: unconditional positive regard, genuineness, and empathy. Unconditional positive regard is showing someone you care about them. Genuineness means sharing and opening up about things as much as the other person shares with you. And empathy means reflecting their feelings or showing that you understand them. By doing all three of these things, allows the other person to feel welcomed, accepted, and cared for. And this lets them find resolution within themselves. The goal isn't to give them advice and to change them. The goal is to show the person you care enough so that they can find it in themselves to change and grow. One way to get a person to realize the change they want is to motivate them. However, there are two ways to go about it; extrinsically or intrinsically. Extrinsic motivation is doing a behavior because of its reward or punishment. Intrinsic motivation is a desire to perform behavior for its own sake. Between the two motivations, it is better to motivate someone intrinsically rather than extrinsically. Why? Because, “intrinsic motivation often results in high achievement, whereas extrinsic motivations does not” (Spence & Helmreich, 1983). When someone is motivated extrinsically, they are not doing it because they want to or because it's something they enjoy, instead they are doing because of fear of being punished or they are being rewarded. For example, “if your little sister loves to shoot baskets, but you start giving her a piece of candy for every shot she puts in the hoop, she may start playing basketball for the candy instead of the pure joy of the activity” (Motivation and Emotion). Sometimes adding rewards for something done through intrinsic motivation can stop the fun and enjoyment of the activity and that person will no longer be intrinsically motivated. Once the rewards stop then so does the person. They'll have the mind set of “there's no point in doing it anymore because I won't get rewarded”. Another example would be of me. At first, I enjoyed playing soccer, I loved playing it. However, as I got better, my grandpa would put soccer as a priority over my own personal needs. He would begin to force me to join other soccer teams and participate in more soccer camps. There was a point where I was playing for 4 teams at once and when I had a day off from soccer, he'd force me to find a team to practice with. If I didn't listen or resisted going, I'd get punished for it. He'd yell at me, put me down, and find any nonsense chore for me to do. Eventually, I was no longer intrinsically motivated to play soccer. Instead, I was playing soccer because I was forced to play. I was tired of being yelled at, so I continued to play soccer like I was told. However, overtime I started to rebel against my grandpa. I began to find ways to avoid going to practice and games and eventually my grandpa gave up on punishing me. Now, I don't play soccer at all and although I miss playing soccer, I would never go back to it. Motivating someone extrinsically is never good. Although soccer was one of my passions, as soon as my grandpa started to punish me if I didn't want to play, I lost that passion to play soccer. Motivating someone extrinsically causes the person to lose sight of their own personal reason as to why they're doing something. Knowing this, you know the right and wrong ways to motivate someone to do something. Instead of forcing someone to do something through bribe or punishment, you can say things like “I would appreciate it if you..” or “I care about you, and I feel bad that you're doing this..”; these things may motivate them intrinsically to

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