How and Why Failure is a Critical Ingredient for Behavior Change

Why reality can be more effective than willpower.

If we accept that storytelling is the foundation for our identity, exactly how do we go about leveraging this insight to create behavior change in the real world?  Like most things in life, it all goes back to literary theory.  

It’s a fact that every single person has motivational failures, but the key to turning them around isn’t any kind of magic or special self-discipline.  The disheartening truth is that when we rely on self-discipline, it frequently fails, usually long before we reach the goal that we were chasing. Daniel Kahneman’s work in Thinking, Fast and Slow describes why we are happy to default to behaviors with a lower cognitive load, especially when our environment conspires against our intentions. Intuitively, we may want to believe that we can will ourselves to an outcome, but blunt-force willpower hasn’t been able to solve population-level behavior issues like obesity and exercise adherence.  

There’s another way to approach the problem beyond willpower. Northrop Frye, the great Canadian literary theorist, spent his entire professional life elucidating what he believed was a universally shared framework for narrative, archetypes, and structural patterns that transcend culture and time. His work demonstrated that we don't just read stories using these patterns, we construct our understanding of the world through them in a shared cross-cultural framework. On some level, we all have an inherited knowledge of the stories we rely on to create a coherent sense of who we are.  We need heroes and villains in conflicts of one kind or another, and every single story since the beginning of time has some version of these ingredients, from Odysseus to Spiderman. 

These frameworks aren’t just stories about other people; they are the very same ingredients that we use to construct our own identity.  As Max Bennet points out, the key differentiator for humans as a species is our ability to imagine multiple stories about who we are.  We are all the central protagonists in our own imagination, and we are all on some form or another of a quest, not just in our real, concrete life but in our imagination.  Because the stories in our heads are framed in language, they are subject to the same rules that govern every story, and they can reflect as little or as much of our real, lived experience as we choose.  Frequently, our stories about ourselves stray from reality to fit into an archetypal frame that can cause significant trouble for our real self. 

The magic for motivation happens when we encounter a real-life failure, and we are forced to recognize a gap between our imagined identity and the real life we live.  If I imagine that I’m a heroic airplane pilot, and I tell myself every day that I'm great at flying planes, but I never actually fly a plane, then I can remain convinced that I’m very similar to Tom Cruise in Top Gun.  When I’m actually confronted with the reality of flying a jet, the truth will intrude on my story as I struggle to get the engines started, let alone take off.  

With the more nuanced stories that we tell ourselves around fitness, there is a lot of opportunity to avoid the reality of what’s happening in our bodies.  Skipping a workout or two doesn’t end up in a plane crash, and we can continue in our imagination to believe that we’re in reasonably good shape, without much to worry about.  The connection between our imagined self and our real self remains undisturbed by evidence, free to flow along the lines of a great story that we’ve constructed.  I was talking with someone who works in the same building that houses VitalSpark about our project, and he volunteered that the only thing that changed his workout behavior was the heart attack he experienced.  His reality intruded on the sense of self that he had cultivated over decades, and armed with this new story, he changed his behavior to include daily exercise, but it took a major intrusion on his imagined internal identity to change his behavior.  

Understanding how this mechanism works gives us a substantial advantage as we develop effective behavior change.  We can look around in our real life and compare the sense of identity we build using language, and we can find the gaps, the failures, large and small, that poke holes in our identity.  With a deeper understanding of failure, we can utilize the narrative tools that Frye and others have identified to transform our internal story of who we are.  Those gaps, identified early and often with the help of outside perspective from VitalSpark, are the fuel for our story, and we can transform our lack of adherence into the villain that must be vanquished in our own hero’s journey.  We’re working very hard to harness the power of imagined identity to change behavior, long before reality intrudes with a heart attack or any other kind of unavoidable life event that reframes who we think we are.  

I’m excited to continue building the experience at VitalSpark.  For too long, I’ve watched people with the benefit of a truly great coach overcome every obstacle to achieve their most cherished goals because they have an outside perspective that bridges the gap between our imagined and real selves, while most of us have to slog through the world without the benefit of impactful guidance.  As we build a deeper understanding of how our hearts and brains experience motivation, we can apply those insights to increase our ability to live in a fully integrated way that aligns our identity with our true motivation and actions.