Research Paper

Your goals and motivations are driven by your underlying values—the reasons you desire to achieve certain things. Values inform our thoughts, words, and actions, and they help us to grow, develop, envision and create the future we want to experience.

Now that you have viewed videos and a reading that covered goals, motivation, and values, you’ll reflect on your own goals, motivations, and values and capture your reflections to complete the Unit 1 assignment. This assignment is about understanding your motivations for coming to the university and what drives you to accomplish milestones.

For the assignment you will download the “What Are Your Motivations?” assignment template, then use it to complete the three parts of the assignment.

Part 1: The first step in better understanding your values is by writing three to five goals for yourself. These could be personal or professional goals, and they could be short-term or long-term goals. Be sure to make them SMART goals.

Part 2: Once you’ve established your goals, think about what is motivating you to achieve those specific goals. Is it to get to a certain level in your career? Is it to achieve something you’ve always wanted to for personal reasons? Is it to set a good example for your family or friends? The second piece of this assignment is to establish two or three motivations for each goal you’ve identified.

Your motivation for doing anything generally stems from your values. Motivating forces could be values instilled in you from a young age, or values you hold because of what you’ve learned or been exposed to. Your core values are those that drive your behaviors, actions, and words. They are the reasons we dedicate our time and energy to most things in our lives. They are our guiding principles.

Part 3: Now that you’ve established goals and acknowledged your motivations, look at what’s motivating you, and write the underlying reason for each goal: These are your values. There could be one or several values for each goal that you have, and the values might be the same or similar for different goals.

There are no wrong answers for this exercise. The purpose is to establish your values and to recognize what drives you to accomplish milestones.

Part 4: Now that you’ve established goals, acknowledged your motivations, and reflected on your values, it’s time to consider how to go about achieving your goals. There are likely several steps you’d need to take in order to reach your ultimate goals, but writing down the first step that you can (and will) take can help you to form a plan of action.

Part 5: Finally, you’ll want to write two or more sentences about what you learned about your goals, motivations, and values from completing this assignment.