People with psychological determination: what are they like?

People with psychological determination have their eyes set on the future and know what they want. They are tenacious and, above all, perseverant. Now, this does not prevent them from having their bad days, their gray moments, those in which they navigate between doubt and fatigue. However, they also manage to recover from those moments to learn from them and apply new strategies.

Albert Einstein said that he never really saw himself as more intelligent than others.. The only thing that seemed to differentiate him from the rest was that he spent more time thinking about what he didn’t understand. That determination, that stubbornness to understand the incomprehensible and to answer questions that no one had ever asked was what elevated him in the world of science.

Now, it is not necessary to become Nobel Prize winners to develop these skills.. Each of us has sufficient psychological resources to be more determined.. And let’s keep it in mind… This value is what will allow us to achieve the goals we set for ourselves.

Characteristics of people with psychological determination

Determination is a very important element within the field of psychology. It is that engine that urges human beings to make decisions and chart the course of their own life responsibly and in harmony with their own values. It is possible, however, that people with psychological determination do not always achieve everything they want and that they fail more than once.

However, the inspiring thing about this mental worth is that it is useful to get up after every fall. Because determination has a lot of stubbornness, of not giving up and applying that cognitive flexibility capable of devising five proposals for each problem. And this, let’s face it, is a very healthy skill at all levels.

Let’s see what characteristics define these people.

They are guided by intrinsic motivation

The theory of psychological determination was enunciated by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan in 1985. Subsequent research works have outlined this concept a little more to qualify it in a more concrete and illustrative way. People with psychological determination They are defined by being proactive and making use of intrinsic motivation.

Likewise, they show three very basic dimensions:

Competence. They strive every day to feel competent in what they do.Autonomy. They always try to depend on themselves when doing something.Relationship. Ability to establish satisfactory social ties.

They do not have innate talent: they are perseverant

Angela Lee Duckworth is an academic, psychologist, and professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.who wrote a well-known book called: Grit: The power of passion and perseverance growth. In it he described what people with psychological determination were like, based on various investigations carried out in his department.

In this way, something that became evident was the following:

Determined people are not brighter than the rest nor do they show a higher IQ. However, they are the ones that achieve the greatest success. The key is not in innate talent, but in a trained mentality oriented towards perseveranceWe are faced with a psychological approach that is nourished by the aforementioned motivation, but also by passion, by the desire to achieve something, by having, above all, the feeling that one is in control of one’s own life.

In the words of Dr. Duckworth herself:

People with psychological determination use practice, purpose and hope

To the question if any of us can turn on the engine of determination, the answer is yes.. To do this, we must start from a very basic step. The one from which one looks up and wonders what he wants, what he dreams, what he expects from himself and from life.

Therefore, and as an example, if you want a better job, train yourself. If you are looking for a happier existence, make changes that will lead you to that goal. Set goals that are in tune with who you are and what you feel, and then move, act, work, put it into practice every day and every second. When we have a purpose in mind, hope ignites and rarely leaves us.

Courage to persist in the midst of difficulty (resilience)

Determined, persevering, builders of hope and guided by passion… What more do we need to make this competition our lifestyle? We are missing a component that we hear about almost every day: resilience. That ability to learn from dark days and rise after each adversity is also another root of psychological determination.

It’s about being brave, about remembering that we are responsible for ourselves, without depending on others, without allowing ourselves to be conditioned by other people’s opinions or criticism. Perseverance has a lot of stubbornness, it is true, but it is a healthy obstinacy that learns from mistakeswho knows his limitations and allows himself to reorient objectives when necessary.

In our day-to-day journey, it never hurts to integrate this powerful dimension into our learning backpack…

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