Truth and fiction: Narrative Versus Reality and the Motivational Virtue Cycle

If we don’t understand how language creates meaning, influencing behavior is an exercise in futility.

Most of us would like to believe that we lead straightforward lives. We get out of bed, we eat breakfast, and go about the business of the day. If we ask someone to pass the salt, we are reliably passed the salt, and we don’t think about it anymore, whether we’re training for the national team or we’re a weekend warrior who thought about exercising a couple of times last month. 

There is a subtlety in how language works - how the phrase ‘pass the salt’ works - that has a profound direct effect on our ability to modify our behavior.  A thousand times a day, we get confirmation that the words we use are accurate referents to the elements of the real world.  Please pass the salt means “please pass the glass container filled with salt crystals with a steel top with holes in it.”  But what if we hear “pass the salt” on TV or the radio?  No one reaches for the salt or passes anything, because it’s understood that this is a fictional statement, part of a world that isn’t real.  

Language has a dualistic quality; it can be two things at the same time.  The very same salt can mean the salt shaker in front of you, or it can mean an imaginary salt shaker in a diner in 1955 in Cincinnati. This quality of language makes us all magicians:  we can tell a story using words borrowed from the real, tangible world, and put them together and create entire imaginary worlds in our heads.  Humans are incredibly good at telling stories.  We love to tell stories about the world around us in our own heads, and we use our magical powers to imagine many different scenarios and outcomes.  In broad cases, we’re good at telling the difference between what’s a story and what’s real, but in our day-to-day life, we have a constant narrative in our heads, interpreting and representing the world around us.  

This dualism is an evolutionary feature that has allowed us to prosper beyond our wildest dreams.  Our ancestors could come up with multiple versions of the hunt in their heads, and by choosing between the different scenarios, improve their odds of survival many times over. This extraordinary feature of our brains also introduced a bug to the system:  our brains aren’t always fully aware of the distinction between the fiction in our heads and the reality in the world.  

With this super flexible and slippery tool, we are constantly running imaginary scenarios, taking inputs from reality, and using those scenarios to predict outcomes, structured in words.  In the case of the salt, asking for it may trigger a whole scenario of questions about blood pressure and the remembered need to eat more healthy food, memories of a parent who loved salty food, etc etc.  

This gap between language and reality creates a conveniently flexible relationship; our brains can represent a fictional story and a hard reality in words with almost equal fluency.  

What does this have to do with motivation?  Every one of us has a story that we tell ourselves, and every story has multiple outcomes. When we are making choices about what to do for exercise, we imagine ourselves waking up early to hop on our exercise bike every day, and that story makes complete sense to us.  The reality is that more than half of the people who buy exercise equipment stop using it within the first few months. This isn’t outright self-deception; it’s more of an amalgamation of who we may have been, who we are right now, who we want to be, and who we fear we are.  The ability to tell ourselves a story gives us a lot of wiggle room around our real behavior, and we use a combination of real and imaginary factors to maintain some coherent sense of ourselves.  

The trick with motivation is to identify two things:  what are the key stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, what are our beliefs about ourselves, and how do they manifest?  Also, what’s the gap between the reality of what we believe about ourselves and our actual behavior?  If we understand those two things, we can go to work bridging the gap between our daily reality and the dream of who we really can be.