Intrinsic motivation is the ability to find joy in improvement. Choosing a challenging task and finding the joy in mastering it. Intrinsic motivation has been proven time and again to be much more powerful than extrinsic motivation.

When you listen to the best speak, you will hear the phrase “loving the process,” repeatedly. The best, love working to get better. They validate themselves by being better than they were yesterday. They seek challenge and constant improvement for the sake of improvement.  

When all you need to do is be better than your past self each day, you control your confidence. You know if you are putting in the work or not. You can past the mirror test. 

Now that we are parents, what do we want our kids to take away from sports when they are 40?

Have Fun - the joy needs to be there

Be Healthy - for life

Learn to master a skill set over time - This can then be applied to anything in life

Being in competitive group experiences teaches us how to handle various social and emotional situations. - That is life

The growth of adolescents as people comes from this process. Let's enjoy the process of development and learning the skills needed to be successful. 

The advantage of feeling intrinsically motivated to do something is obvious. So how can we increase intrinsic motivation for a new behavior or habit we are hoping to cultivate?

“Here are six factors you can address to do so.

1. Autonomy

In order to optimize your level of autonomy over the activity, identify opportunities to do it in a way that suits you best. For example, if you want to incorporate more physical activity into your daily habits, but you don’t enjoy running, is there a different way to exercise, such as cycling or dancing, that you feel more willing to do?

2. Competence

If activities are too easy or too difficult, they are not engaging and therefore less motivating. You can avoid this by identifying opportunities to adjust the level of difficulty of the target activity to match your own capability. Sticking to the example above, if you want to take up running, this might mean aiming for a challenging yet achievable distance rather than tackling a full marathon.

3. Relatedness

In order to increase your sense of relatedness or belonging, you have several options: you can pursue the target activity with someone else or even join a club or community. You can also identify opportunities to support others or serve your community in their pursuit to implement the same activity, such as by sharing your experiences with them.

4. Alignment with personal values

The phenomenon of integrated motivation shows the opportunity to harness internal motivation by aligning the activity with the concept of the self. You can do this by gaining clarity around your values and identifying how the activity fosters and supports them (Vansteenkiste et al., 2018).

5. Removal of factors impeding intrinsic motivation

Sometimes, the reason we do not feel driven toward an activity is not that we are not intrinsically motivated, but because there are other things that undermine our motivation (Fischer, Malycha, & Schafmann, 2019).

This can include too many other and potentially competing goals or unmet physical needs (e.g., imagine your motivation to go for a run after a sleepless night). In this instance, it helps to identify those impeding factors and remove them as best as you can.

6. Timing of extrinsic rewards

Time your extrinsic rewards. While in the past, external rewards have had the reputation of undermining intrinsic motivation, recent research has shown that more immediate rewards in fact increase intrinsic motivation by “creating a perceptual fusion between the activity and its goal” (Woolley & Fishbach, 2018, p. 877).”

https://positivepsychology.com/intrinsic-motivation-examples