Why taking stock of your future goals can feed your fulfillment right now.

by Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD, ABPP

Key points

• Within psychology, the well-known self-determination theory (SDT) explains what truly motivates people.
• A new paper pulls SDT together with personality theory to understand how people respond to life’s demands.
• Taking the time to look inward can help you gain a greater sense of control in setting your life’s direction.

When your days become filled with humdrum but necessary duties, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. You get up, go to work or school and/or tend to family, and then rinse and repeat the next day. Some of these duties you enjoy, but many leave you frustrated and feeling empty. You wonder how your life evolved to this particular point, and whether you could tweak it so that the pleasure outweighs the pain.

Even the humblest and most boring of tasks can have their little joys. Kitchen chores don’t particularly turn you on, but maybe you can glean some rewards from shining your countertop to glowing perfection. If these little moments are few and far between, what could you do to stretch them further?

The Joys of Inner Motivation

A new paper on motivation and personality by Australian Catholic University’s Richard Ryan (2025) offers some useful suggestions. Ryan is the coauthor of one of the most well-known motivation theories in psychology known as “Self Determination Theory,” or SDT. This theory proposes that people are most motivated when they can feel internally, or autonomously, driven. However, getting through those humdrum days that most people experience is often a matter of answering to the bidding of others. A boss gives you deadlines, a family expects food on the table, and even your friends expect you to show up when they need you. SDT’s answer to this dilemma is to suggest that yes, all of this is true, but the more autonomy you can carve out within these constraints, the better. When you don’t see much room to maneuver, this is when you’ll feel burned out.

The Internal Drivers of Personality

Because SDT is a motivational theory, it doesn’t directly deal with individual differences, or the stuff of personality. Ryan suggests that a “sibling” to SDT within personality comes from what’s known as Personality Systems Interaction theory. According to this view, there are two general personality styles which are called “state” vs. “action” oriented. A person who is state oriented tends to ruminate or overthink things, especially when stressed by life’s demands. Action oriented people cope better with their demands, rising to the occasion by figuring out what to do and then doing it.

If you know a person who fits the action oriented style, it’s likely you have seen them rise to the occasion but also falter when there’s not enough to challenge them. Conversely, although state-oriented people may ruminate rather than act, their reflective capacities can serve them well if no immediate action is required.

The connection between these theories, Ryan argues, comes from their similar focus on what’s called the “organismic” model in psychology. This model proposes that the individual’s sense of self is what drives people to act. The problem in daily life is that you don’t always have the freedom to do so (that food has to go on the table). State-oriented people don’t respond well to such external pressure, but if they can be made to feel a sense of control, they will rise to the occasion and feel good about themselves in the process.

Looking Inward to Move Forward

Compared to SDT and its long history, PSI is not as well-known. However, learning even these basic ideas could prove useful to you, especially if you tend toward the state vs. the action orientation. Maybe you didn’t realize that one of the reasons you feel so burned out is that you feel you don’t have the time or the ability to get “unstuck.”

Borrowing from the positive psychology movement, Ryan suggests that the practice of mindfulness could provide a route toward greater self-fulfillment. The ideal type of motivation in SDT is intrinsic, in which you are able to act in ways that are consistent with your sense of self. You feel most “you” when you’re doing what you love. The issue is how to get that same feeling from doing what you’re not particularly thrilled about. Through paying attention to what you’re doing in the moment, you’ll think less about what’s pressuring you and more about the actions themselves.

Consider how actors and musicians manage the stress of performing in front of an audience. If they focused their attention on whether they’re pleasing that audience, they would never be able to put on an effective show. They have to direct their attention to their interactions with their fellow actors or the way their fingers move across their instruments. What’s more, the very actions they must take to perform effectively are the ones that satisfy their sense of self. They got into this business because they love their craft. In the moments their on stage, they get to enact this intrinsic need for self-expression.

The lofty examples of professional performers may not jive exactly with your own experience of scrubbing the kitchen counter. But all you have to do is take just a bit of inner directedness into this mundane task.

To sum up, pulling together the ideas from self-determination theory with an understanding of how people respond differently to external demands can have practical benefits in your daily life. Your path to fulfillment may not always be paved with the most exciting experiences and events, but you can at least make the ones you have more expressive of who you are as a person.