How can you narrow your project and find a renewed motivation when working on a difficult master project? 

 That’s what we explored during the coaching session with Idoia Paucar Herrera 

In this short conversation, Ido shares:

• 3 concrete tips to handle the complexity of a research project 
• and 2 tips to boost your motivation  when things get hard as they always do, when doing such research and design work.

 Thanks so much to Ido for her generosity in sharing what she learned with the wider Student and Service Design community today.

Watch the video

Transcript

This transcript was generated using Descript, which means the text can be pretty creative or just plain wrong at times. So, take it with a grain of salt.

Daniele: Do you have a tip to share for people who might go through that motivation struggle, that you could share to them and say, maybe try this could help maybe boost your motivation for the next days.

Ido: Maybe two things.

So the first one: maybe we get lost in all this, overwhelmness but today I’m taking these steps that I can do today and it’s okay.

And second about this exercise. It’s like psychological that we say it and when we say it, we believe it. That has helped me a lot. Okay. I trust myself because I have done A foundational research that can be relevant for my research or for this process. I have enough contacts that I can rely to and that’s good and that’s enough today.

And if something goes wrong, I can reach them out, right? Those reminders are a big help. Yes, that will be a tip for my colleagues and my friends.

Daniele: Thank you so much. And It’s a little exercise that we did that anybody can do, even alone.

It’s a simple exercise:

On a scale from 1 to 10, how much would you rate your motivation?

And then the question that you can ask yourself:

If you said eight, why not six? And then automatically your brain gets in a kind of very optimistic mode.

Oh, I’m not at six because I already have all of the support. I already did all of this research and this and this. And then re read it out loud. And then suddenly your brain realizes that there is much more motivation and hope than what we previously thought.

Ido: Seeing the cup full or half full rather than half empty. Yes,