Goooooooooooooooaaaalllllllllll (complex): Is Ted really an optimist or overstriver?

 In this past week, we learned that the motives behind wanting to achieve predict our achievement goals. (Conroy, 2017). There are 2 achievement motives that we focused on from Conroy: Hope for Success and Fear of Failure. Within those 2 achievement motives, we can further break it down into what achievement goals are trying to be obtained. 

With Hope for Success, often people are trying to achieve a mastery approach or a performance approach. To recap on those previous terms, mastery approach is when you try to achieve a goal that will strengthen your skills, increases your knowledge, and to dominate a task that is based on your own internal rubric. Performance approach is when you are trying to achieve a goal with extrinsic motivation. You go into it trying to showcase how your skills are better than the group at hand. 

With fear of failure, it is the opposite. People are aiming for mastery avoidance or performance avoidance. 

Dr. Andrew Martin combined Hope for Success and Fear of Failure to come up with 4 different personalities and their achievement motivations. The 4 combinations are: Optimist, Failure Avoiders, Failure Acceptors, and Overstrivers. (Martin 2003) In this post, we are going to be looking at the Optimist and Overstriver. 

In Season 2, Episode 2 of Ted Lasso, Ted gets introduced to a new character, the team therapist Dr. Sharon Fieldstone. One of Ted's continuous goals throughout the entire series is making sure people like him and that he becomes friends with, quite literally, everyone he runs into. Even down to the 3 guys at the local pub who talk trash about him every game day. 

When Ted meets Dr. Fieldstone, he indicates that he is nervous because he has never really trusted therapists after his run in with his couples therapist. However, he takes on the challenge of making her a full fledged part of the team and turns on that Lasso charm. In the beginning of this, we can see that Ted quite possibly has optimistic achievement motivations. With optimists, they have very high hope and low fear. They are success driven, mastery focused, and believe that their actions will provide them with feedback to be better. (Martin 2003). 

So, Ted begins to do all the normal things he would do to get this therapist to like him. He tries to give her a nickname, in which she promptly tells him to only call her doctor. He barges into her office like he does with everyone in his Ted way and she quickly admonishes him saying that she could have been in a session with someone. It is during these interactions where you see Ted go from optimist to overstriver. 

Overstrivers have high hope and high fear. Their fear of failing a task is what motivates their behaviors. (Martin 2003). At this point, Ted now does not want to get on this woman's bad side. He brings her cookies that are meant for Rebecca (the owner of the soccer club) to see if she will like him. He catches himself to make sure he says the full "Doctor" when speaking with her. He is constantly asking if there is anything she needs or anything he can do so that he can be more in her good graces and be her friend. This shows that he has high hopes he will become her friend but also high fear that he won't. 

In the end, Ted didn't have to do any of that because you see Dr. Fieldstone let down some of her defenses at the end of the episode. 

So what say you? Do you think Ted is more of an optimist or an overstriver?