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Maybe We’ve Been Asking the Wrong Question About Performance.

Today i learnt about the connection between happiness, psychological needs, and performance, and whether our usual way of thinking about performance is missing something important.

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  5. Maybe We’ve Been Asking the Wrong Question About Performance.

Maybe we've been asking the wrong question about performance.

On Monday, I was fortunate to be part of Motivation Talks! – Meetup Session 7, an informal monthly meetup for L&D practitioners, managers, consultants, HR professionals, and anyone who enjoys thinking more deeply about motivation and learning.

The session was facilitated by the Co-Founder/Director of LDA himself Matthew Richter — a genuinely funny and very welcoming man (More about him soon 😉 ) .

To be honest...

I had nothing to contribute.

I was only about 20 days into my instructional design journey.

So I did what I could.

I brought my pen.

And my notebook.

One moment from that session hasn't left me.

When the conversation shifted to happiness, Jacques Forest mentioned something I'd never heard before.

For the past 13 years, the World Happiness Report has been published every year on March 20th.

Then he casually mentioned something that immediately made me curious.

He has it marked on his calendar ?.

And every single year...

He reads it religiously ?.

I stopped and wondered...

"Why would someone read a happiness report every year?"

His answer surprised me.

Every year, the report explores happiness from a different perspective.

This year's focus was "social media and youth".

Then Jacques Forest said something that completely reframed happiness for me.

He explained that happiness isn't only about feeling good.

When you combine it with eudaimonic well-being—living a meaningful life while contributing to the well-being of others—you begin to see why the three psychological needs described in Self-Determination Theory matter so much.(I’m yet to look the SDT up to grasp an even clearer picture )

But then he said they're universal.

Every person has them.

What changes is how they're fulfilled—from person to person, organization to organization, and country to country.

I thought that was the takeaway...

Until the conversation moved somewhere I wasn't expecting.

A single research paper completely changed the way Jacques Forest thought about performance.

I mean how ?…

But honestly...

After listening to him express his thought…

It challenged the way I think about it too.

I'll share that in my next post.

Day 23 of Instructional Design

A Poster that says” a single research paper completely changed the way Jacques thought about performance

#InstructionalDesign #InstructionalDesigner #LearningAndDevelopment #LearningDesign #LearningExperienceDesign #LXD #Elearning #ELearningDesign #CurriculumDesign #CurriculumDeveloper #LearningJourney #Day1 #Day2 #LearningInPublic #BuildInPublic #SenseMakingNotes #MentalModels


Where this comes from

  1. Learning Science by Clark Quinn — If you design learning, teach, or train people, you need to understand what is actually happening when someone learns. Learning happens at the neural level, but we design for it at the cognitive level. There’s a lot more in Clark Quinn’s book that I can’t share because of **intellectual property**. Get the book and experience the learning yourself. 📚You Would Love It!