Autonomy support runs both ways: reading Why We Do What We Do
I’d been looking for my own intrinsic motivation entirely inside myself. What excites me, what I genuinely find interesting — I assumed that if I sat with those questions long enough, alone, the answer would surface.
Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation, by Edward L. Deci with Richard Flaste, quietly dismantled that assumption. Their central point is that people have two sides: one shaped by society, and one that shapes society back. Intrinsic motivation isn’t something that lives and dies purely inside a single person’s head — it grows or withers depending on the relationships around it.
Even inside a controlling environment, I’m not powerless
In a workplace or team with a heavy, controlling atmosphere, protecting your own intrinsic motivation can start to feel impossible. Deadlines and evaluations pile up, and all that’s left is the feeling of being made to do things. I’ve lived through stretches like that myself.
But the book didn’t let me stop there. If how I behave and how I engage with others can shift, even slightly, the mood and attitude around me, then there’s still something I can do, even inside a controlling structure. That line was a genuine relief to read. Even from what looks like a powerless position, you can still choose to be the one who supports someone else’s autonomy.
Intrinsic motivation isn’t something you find — it’s an environment you help grow
What struck me most is that intrinsic motivation isn’t only about searching for a pure feeling inside yourself. Just as important is paying attention to the relationships and environment that let that feeling take root and grow.
No amount of digging into your own interior will sustain intrinsic motivation if the people around you are steadily eroding your sense of autonomy and competence. The reverse is also true: shore up the environment even a little, and motivation tends to grow on its own. I’d been treating my inner life as the only place worth searching — reading this, I realized that was too narrow a frame.
I can be the one who erodes someone else’s autonomy, too
The other thing the book forced me to sit with is that I myself can be either the one who undermines someone’s autonomy and competence, or the one who supports it.
It’s easy to see yourself as the one being controlled. It’s much easier to overlook the possibility that you might be the one doing the controlling. A comment to a junior colleague, the way I phrase feedback to a teammate, how I show up at home — every one of these carries both possibilities: a way of engaging that respects the other person’s autonomy, and a way that quietly controls them without my noticing. The agent of socialization the book describes isn’t some distant authority figure. It’s me.
Treating the other person as an agent, not an object to be managed
So does supporting someone’s autonomy or nurturing their sense of competence require some elaborate theory put into practice? What I took from the book was a much simpler starting point: see the other person as an active agent, not an object to be operated on.
This connects to something I wrote in A manager’s job is asking, not answering — approaching someone’s quirks and preoccupations with genuine curiosity. A question meant to move someone is different from a question meant to draw out something that’s already theirs. What separates the two isn’t technique. It’s how you see the person in front of you.
Closing thoughts
Before reading Why We Do What We Do, I thought of intrinsic motivation as something you find by looking inward. Now I’d add that how you engage with others, and the environment you help build, is itself the soil that motivation grows in.
When I wrote about systematizing effort like brushing your teeth, I was treating motivation as a purely personal, internal problem. Now I want to add a piece to that: the way you build that system, and the way you treat people while doing it, is itself something that can nurture — or quietly erode — someone else’s intrinsic motivation.
Finding what I want to do matters. But I want to spend just as much care thinking about what kind of relationships and structures let that motivation actually grow.
Related Articles
- Don’t bring motivation to work — deliver consistent results through systems, like brushing your teeth — supporting motivation through systems rather than willpower
- A manager’s job is asking, not answering — treating the other person as an active agent through the questions you ask
- Knowing psychological safety isn’t enough — the four stages: understand, design, implement, reproduce — designing a space that supports autonomy