Learning doesn’t end when training is complete. Lasting behavior change depends on understanding what truly motivates employees to learn, grow and apply new skills on the job.

In this episode of The Business of Learning, recorded at the 2026 Training Industry Conference & Expo (TICE), Jess Ekstrom, bestselling author and founder of Mic Drop Workshop and Headbands of Hope, shares actionable insights on the psychology of motivation and how L&D leaders can design learning experiences that inspire lasting engagement and performance.

Tune in now for insights on:

• The difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and why it matters for corporate training
• Common training practices that unintentionally undermine learner motivation
• Strategies for designing learning experiences that foster lasting engagement and manager support

More Resources:

• [Article] How to Increase Motivation and Learning With Interactive Training Videos
• [Article] Addressing the 5 Sources of Employee Demotivation
• [Magazine] Rethinking Engagement in L&D

The transcript for this episode follows:

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Hi, and welcome back to The Business of Learning. I’m Michelle Eggleston Schwartz, editor in chief here at Training Industry.

Sarah Gallo: And I’m Sarah Gallo, a senior editor. Today, we’re joined by Jess Ekstrom, bestselling author and founder of Mic Drop Workshop and Headbands of Hope, to discuss the psychology of motivation and really what it means for L&D leaders. Jess, thank you for joining us.

Jess Ekstrom: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Yes, thank you so much for joining us. I’d love to get started with: How do you define motivation in the context of the workplace?

Jess Ekstrom: I would say … I think the first thing I would think about when it comes to motivation is what your first thought is when your alarm goes off. When your alarm goes off in the morning, is it this dreaded, “Oh my gosh, I can’t believe it,” like Groundhog Day? Or is it, “I’m really excited. I know what I’m doing. I’m contributing”? I think motivation starts when our alarm goes off and with how we talk to ourselves. There was this really interesting study in the Harvard Business Review about willpower. For a while, we thought willpower was like gas in a tank: This is how much willpower you have in a day, and each time you do something, it gets less and less. And this study showed that willpower isn’t as much of a resource that gets depleted over time. It’s more of an emotion that we feel. It’s an emotion that is triggered by something. We’ve all experienced a time where we had motivation and times where maybe we typically don’t. Like, “I’m going to get up early on a Sunday before my kids wake up to work on this idea,” or, “I’m going to stay late and train this person even though it’s outside of my role.” That wasn’t willpower. It was this emotion we felt. That’s the kind of motivation I’m interested in: one that is connected to an intrinsic feeling. And that starts when our alarm goes off.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: And when we think about workplace learning, why would it be important for L&D leaders to pay attention to that psychology behind motivation?

Jess Ekstrom: I remember when I first created my training, Mic Drop Workshop, where we train women to become speakers, I was wondering why it wasn’t landing. Like, “But I’m giving them all the information. They have all the data, they have all the downloadable checklists and everything. Why am I not seeing women turn it into something big?” That’s when I realized I was giving them information without the mental context of what was possible for them. For example, today at TICE, I talked about the difference between being a spotlight speaker and a lighthouse speaker. Spotlights make it about them, while lighthouses make it about guidance. Once I started the training with instead of like, “The three things in your keynote,” but instead getting into the mindset of what a confident speaker is — which they come from service instead of selling — then that’s when the information became more digestible. I don’t think we can really absorb information unless we understand the psychology of how people like to be taught. You know, I say it’s like saying something really good but you have a bad signal on the phone. No one is hearing it. You can’t get to how people like to learn, how people like to work together, how people like to absorb information. What’s stopping someone from believing they can do this? Then the rest of the things can begin. A lot of times, people tell me after Mic Drop that the mental stuff was what they needed more than any of the checklists and contracts and things that we help with. It was like, “I just needed to know that I could.”

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Yeah, it’s that mental shift.

Sarah Gallo: And it’s really about helping learners kind of realize the why, so helping them realize not just what the content is you’re trying to teach them, but why it matters. It’s about helping them have that lightbulb moment and making those connections.

Jess Ekstrom: We’re all human, and we’re all individual. We all have different places and different stories that we are learning from. But we also are all human. I get so interested in the psychology of how we learn. When we can see everyone as different, but then, also we’re all just inherently the same. We all want to belong. We all want to feel valued. We all want to feel this. If we can understand the fundamental needs of humans, then we can get to everything else in more of an individual way.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Yeah. That desire to learn is really universal.

Jess Ekstrom: Exactly.

Sarah Gallo: Betterment. To perform and do a good job. People want to go home at the end of the day feeling like they did a good job at work, so, that’s huge.

Jess Ekstrom: But I think what’s interesting about what you all do is … I think it’s vulnerable for adults to say, “I don’t know.” It’s tough for people who are supposed to feel like experts to say, “There’s a skill that I need to learn,” or “I don’t know what this tech is,” or “I don’t know what AI is,” or, “This team is disengaged, and I’m not sure.” There’s so much pressure to know everything. A huge part of L&D is helping people realize that the ability to recognize where you need help or recognize “I have room to grow here,” is actually such an asset and such a strength. There was a study at MIT about imposter syndrome. We tend to see imposter syndrome as this terrible thing, but it really actually showed that people who experience feelings of imposter syndrome actually perform better at work. They’re more community focused. They’re more “we” than “I.” They ask better questions. They’re more curious, as opposed to someone who’s like: “I’ve got it. Don’t worry. I have all the answers.” I like to say that the goal isn’t to get rid of imposter syndrome. It’s to manage it and almost leverage it. As long as it’s not in the driver’s seat, it can be in the car with you.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: I love that. Yeah. That vulnerability, like teaching that in the workplace, especially the higher up you go career-wise and becoming a leader. Like you mentioned, it can be difficult to say, “I don’t have all the answers.” But recognizing the humanity in that is, your employees want to hear that. They want to connect with you on a human level, and the fact that you don’t know is actually really powerful.

Jess Ekstrom: Yeah. I don’t think enough people realize the power of saying, “Let’s figure it out together. I’m not sure, but let’s do it together.” Including myself.

Sarah Gallo: Definitely. I’d love if we could dig into the two different types of motivation: intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation. What do those look like, and how do those differences show up?

Jess Ekstrom: I like to think of extrinsic as a “must do” and intrinsic as an “I want to do.” So like “mustivation” and “wantivation.” Mustivation, extrinsically, comes from something or someone outside of yourself. “I must do this training because my manager is requiring it,” “I must do my taxes.” Whatever it might be. Versus, intrinsic motivation comes from a want: “I want to learn how to speak,” or “I want to learn what it’s like to excel in this job.” I like to think of extrinsic motivation as checking boxes and intrinsic motivation as connecting the dots. You can see that if you do this, it matters over here. Extrinsic is like, “I got the job. I got the promotion. I got the role. And now it’s this.” All of it is this never-ending cycle — this leaky bucket that you keep pouring water into and you don’t realize it’s coming out. You’re like, “I’m putting so much into this. Why isn’t it working?” But where I don’t want to lose people is that extrinsic motivation is bad. It’s not. Healthy competition and wanting to win and wanting a trophy can be great. But it’s about the ratio that you give it. How much of your motivation comes from extrinsic, and how much comes from intrinsic? I know these are hard questions to quantify, but if you say, like, everything you do is based on extrinsic factors, then it gets tough. And the irony in all of this is that people who are intrinsically motivated — who love the process, who love the practice, lights off shooting basketball hoops when it’s supposed to be closed — those are the people who get the greatest extrinsic rewards. Because the willpower is connected to emotion. It’s something they deeply love. A lot of the extrinsic things we’re looking for — the fame, the recognition, the money, the status — happen more effectively and more efficiently on the other side of intrinsic, like when it’s not the goal.

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Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: When we’re looking at intrinsic motivation, what are some common training methods that maybe undermine intrinsic motivation and we may not realize? How can we best leverage it?

Jess Ekstrom: I think making sure to take snapshots of moments when you can connect your work to an impact. A lot of times, when we’re doing something at scale, the individual person that we just helped get better leadership or get better speaking can feel like one in a million. If we can zero in on those snapshots as a team. I talked about this today at TICE. We have something called a “smile file.” Anytime we get any kind of reminder or evidence that what we do works, we put it in our shared drive. It’s a smile file. At the beginning of our all-hands at the start of each quarter, we start with the smile file. Because we’re going to get into all the nitty-gritty: where we made money, where we lost money, profit margins and things that need to be improved. It can be, again, a never-ending cycle where nothing is ever enough. And so if we can start with, “Actually, you’re in accounting, you don’t ever talk to anyone, but you’re part of an organization that produced this outcome. This person was able to give a TED Talk or lead a meeting at work, and you were part of that, no matter what your role is. It’s all part of the same mission.” So I think an intrinsic technique could be a smile file and figuring out, “What are those stories and moments that we can remind people, ‘What I do matters in the long run.’”

Sarah Gallo: That seems really powerful, especially when morale is down or there’s a big change or shift going on. Just reminding people, “Look at this impact we’ve already had, and see where we can grow.”

Jess Ekstrom: I think that’s why people get nervous during mergers, acquisitions or changes in leadership. It’s like, “Is what they want still what I’m working toward?” You know, Headbands of Hope, my first company, got acquired. It isn’t necessarily a regret I have, but something I wish I had done differently is ensure the team that was still there and ensure the buyer had the same North Star I did. Now, I see it from how they felt. My importance at the time was, “They all still have jobs. This is great.” And not, “Am I still working toward the same thing I signed up for?” I didn’t answer that question for them, and now I realize how important it is.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Yes, identifying the values.

Jess Ekstrom: Yeah, “We’re still working toward this.” And if that’s changing, great — but tell me, because I need to decide if that still works for me.

Sarah Gallo: From a psychological standpoint, could you dig into some of the key drivers of intrinsic motivation that L&D leaders should be keeping in mind when designing programs?

Jess Ekstrom: I think about self-determination theory, which I talked about today. I was laughing because, usually, when I get into self-determination theory, I can see people’s eyes glaze over. Their faces go, “Okay, it’s time to get on my phone. She’s talking about theory.” But everyone in the room at TICE was like, “I’m all in. Tell me what the theory is.” Self-determination theory was by Deci and Ryan in the 1980s. They looked at what self-motivates people: How can people become intrinsically motivated? There were three psychological needs that they discovered: autonomy, or feeling like they’re in control; connectedness, or feeling connected to people; and competence, or feeling like they’re good at it. Of course, it is not just a checklist that you can go off of, but it is a direction that you can head. I also give three questions: Who can I help? What can I control? How can I do it best? That help check those three boxes. They said if these three psychological needs can be met — feeling like we’re in control, feeling like we’re connected, feeling like we’re good at it — then that influences our ability to be intrinsically motivated and be self-determined. I don’t think anything is cut and dried or black and white, but I at least love to know the science and the direction my head needs to be in order to be intrinsically motivated. And self-determination theory is it.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: I love that. I’d love to hear how can learning professionals channel that into their training programs and create these learning experiences that really get to the heart of that motivation?

Jess Ekstrom: It was so interesting to hear Ken talk before me today about in-person and virtual and what’s trending in learning and development. I think people need to be able to see people. I think that virtual definitely has its place still, but I think that the connectedness part of self-determination theory is really hard to do sometimes over Zoom or in remote environments. I’m speaking as someone who, I have a remote team and I’ve run a remote business. We did all of our training and all of our events virtually since 2018, and this year, we held our first-ever in-person event where I was like, “Oh, this is why people do this.” I was seeing the price tag of a venue, this, that, food, beverage, lodging and not seeing the actual ROI of connectedness. There are so many things, but that’s one thing I’m seeing in the age of AI; how can we bring people together?

Sarah Gallo: Jess, I feel like one common challenge we hear from our listeners is that learners will go through a training and then it’s lost after the fact. There’s not really that behavior change a week later or a month later back on the job. So I’d love if you could share what role managers play in reinforcing — or hindering — motivation after training is delivered?

Jess Ekstrom: I think about this a lot as a leader myself: How I let what I learn trickle down. Maybe not by frameworks, structures, 360s, whatever, but by example. I know this probably sounds really cheesy, but I think that we have to emulate what we want our people to do. I’ve found myself sometimes in Zoom meetings with my team trying to do something else while being with them. Then I saw other people doing that and thought, “That’s so annoying. We’re on this meeting.” Then I realized, “Oh, I’m also doing that.” So they feel like it’s okay because, of course, their leader is doing it. The manager’s role, or supervisor’s, or anything, is just to lead by example. Which can sometimes be a gut check, and I know it was for me when I was like, “Oh. I’m not giving them my full attention, so I need to look at myself before I tell them to do something.”

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: That’s great advice, definitely. Lead by example.

Jess Ekstrom: I know it sounds overdone, but I think that it really is.

Sarah Gallo: It’s one of those things that’s easier said than done.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Definitely. Well, Jess, it was great talking to you today. How can our listeners get in touch with you if they’d like to reach out?

Jess Ekstrom: Yes, JessEkstrom.com is great. I’m also on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in any of our speaking trainings, you can visit MicDropWorkshop.com. We would love to hear from you.

[Outro]

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