There's no doubt that performance and success are influenced by motivation. Anyone who's played with a team or competitive group at high school knows this instinctively. Imagine how helpful it would be if you could assess your motivation before you took on a new career challenge. Guess what? Now you can!

Motivational appraisals are different than personality tests and aptitude tests. They don't focus on what kind of person you are - nor your strengths and weaknesses. Instead, motivational tests focus on your preferences. My favorite motivational test, the MAPP -- Motivational Appraisal of Personal Potential -- is free; click here, to try it now

Motivational assessments are usually designed as "forced-choice" tests. You progress through a bank of questions, identifying the activities you prefer compared to others you dislike. For example: from the following three items pick one activity you like most and least:

1. Driving a car
2. Repairing a car
3. Designing a car

Unlike your scores in an IQ test, your results in motivational tests aren't measured against those of other people to assign you a relative grade. Rather, an internal "x-ray image" of your personal preferences is projected against a background of career themes.

Using some pretty complicated statistical models, the relationships of all your choices are "calculated" to show the areas in which you are most (and least) motivated to succeed.

The MAPP revealed that I am motivated by "understanding the deeper or 'real' meaning of ideas and words." On the other hand, I am "motivated very little by physically working with things." Both statements are right on!

There's an old saying in career counseling that people work with some combination of three categories: things, data or people. Truth is, it's a lot more complicated than that. Any good motivational test will assess people across an array of fields. In each field there are dozens of career tracks.

For example, the MAPP has nine categories of worker trait outcomes and job ratings: aptitude for the job, capacity for mathematical applications, capacity for usage of language, interest in job contents, relationship to data, relationship to people, relationship to things, relationship to reasoning, and temperament for the job.

In my case, the motivation to "understand the deeper or 'real' meaning of ideas and words," points to the following career tracks: working on "books, other publications, historical documents, research information, drama, movies, television, the "information highway" or internet, etc."

The research and writing I've done for this web site is proof positive that my motivational test was dead accurate. So accurate, it's almost scary!

One of the great things about the MAPP is that you can take the full test for free. The results provide partial assessments - for a fee you can purchase various levels of test interpretation and career "pointers."

Statistical research on the MAPP indicates the test has extremely high "construct validity." All in all, it's a terrific assessment tool. To try the MAPP -- Motivational Appraisal of Personal Potential -- click here now.