Aligning Our Motivations.
Our motivations have power; they're forces that push or pull us through the environment in one direction or another. The decisions we make, the actions we take, and thus the reality we create for ourselves all flow from our motivations. If they're not aligned, not all pulling in the same direction, then we're struggling against ourselves and making the easy hard.
We individuals are not one unified, static entity. Instead, we’re a mixture of many different motivations that coexist in the same skin. We’re not the same person in every context; if we’re visiting Grandma, we have a different personality than if we’re at a party with friends. The ‘us’ that our grandparents, parents, friends, coworkers, and boyfriends/girlfriends ‘know’ are all different to some degree, given they ‘know’ us from our actions within different contexts. Their models of us - their understanding of us - are all different, and none of their models is completely accurate, nor is the model we have of ourselves.
We’re complicated, and we’re complicated because there’s a whole range of motivations within us; there’s a range of experiences we enjoy and therefore seek, and a range of experiences we don’t enjoy and therefore seek to avoid. At the same time, we understand that we don’t just exist in the moment; we know we’ll experience many future moments, so we juggle immediate gratification - grabbing pleasure now - with also wanting to build a very pleasant future reality.
In other words, most of us are able to sacrifice instant pleasure and do actions we don’t really enjoy because we believe the investment is worth it in the long term. Enduring 2 ‘units’ of pain is worth it if we calculate it’ll return us 20 units of future happiness/pleasure. Few of us enjoy studying, for example, and usually there are more pleasant options available, but we'll do it if we believe the investment is worth it.
We all constantly make these calculations, and this ability to understand we’ll experience a future is one of the big differences between our brain and other primate brains. Essentially, it's the ability to imagine, to generate 'movies' in our heads, and to feel attraction, or aversion, towards what we're imagining. If we can't do this, if we can't imagine, then we're not aware of any future and therefore can't juggle future pleasure against instant pleasure.
So we exist in the midst of many different motivations, some of which are contradictory. For example, we might want to experience the pleasure of eating a donut, but at the same time, if we know that doing so and developing such a habit will have negative consequences - it will detract from our future happiness- we juggle the competing motivations and act according to which force is more powerful.
Ideally, we want to manage these forces within us so that they’re all pulling us in the same positive direction. We have our motivations, but they themselves are blind, and it’s our brain's job to understand which motivations are useful (and therefore keep and feed well) and which are negative and therefore we should weed out.
As a useful visualization, see our complete selves - brain and emotions/motivations - as a horse and carriage, with the horses being our motivations pulling us through the environment and us, our brain, in the carriage wanting to go somewhere.
If our horses are all pulling in the right direction and our brain has control of them, then we can go anywhere quickly and competently. But if there’s little control and/or our horses and harnesses are all a tangled mess, with some horses pulling one way while others pulling another, we have no rational control and are just dragged randomly through the environment.
In such a case, there’s no discipline; we cannot get beyond simply bouncing from instant gratification to instant gratification, and so we cannot take ourselves to a better reality. We’re trapped, caught in a rut, and so we stay there, or we roll up our sleeves and figure out a potent strategy.
Have the attitude that this life thing is just an adventure, that we live, experience, and then die, and that's cool, then we begin to view it as just a game and don't take it, or ourselves, overly seriously. We take responsibility, become flexible and pragmatic, and we're willing to suffer some pain as we understand it's all just pleasure and pain anyway.
He said,
'If you're gonna play the game boy
you gotta learn to play it right
Cause every hand's a winner
& every hand's a loser
& the best that you can hope for
is to die in your sleep.'
'The Gambler'
Kenny Rogers
Of course, to change our reality, we need to change our actions, but if we think we already ( magically ) know everything, or we think it’s all just luck, then we don’t ever make the effort. Instead, we’ll feed our brain with yet more TV, or whatever, and then get frustrated because, for some unfathomable reason, our brains can’t navigate us to a happy reality.
When I look at myself, I don’t see
The man I wanted to be
Somewhere along the line, I slipped offtrack
One step forward and two steps back
Springsteen 'one step up'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKy-Dxtb6bI
Much of psychotherapy revolves around trying to help people understand this so they can prioritize their motivations and then weed out the motivations/horses that hinder their ability to take themselves to a reality where they’re actually happy.
In NLP, there are a number of interventions that aid this process, with the most well-known being the six-step reframe. This screen shot from Google gives a good enough overview
While the six-step reframe is a good tool, the logical first step is to detox and weed out the motivations that don’t belong; otherwise, we’re just shuffling motivations, some of which are just infections/habits. What’s the point of wasting time trying to train and align a motivation that is inherently negative? Just throw it away. Three 'horses' that have our own interests at heart and are aligned is enough; we can go anywhere with that. There’s no point in having horses that are not innate, or that we haven’t rationally chosen; it’s much better to simply weed them out than to be consistently fighting them.
This understanding is nothing new, of course; it’s at the core of Buddhism, and many others have independently come to roughly the same conclusions. One such example that I’m aware of is George Gurdjieff, and it was likely from reading ‘The Fourth Way’ that I first went, ‘ah, yeah that makes sense’.
NLP model far eclipses his, but for the time, his understanding was pretty impressive. Although, if I remember correctly, he didn’t really ‘get’ the Buddhist understanding that we can weed out habits/motivations; he tended to understand them as inherent parts of our personality that we must constantly fight against.
As mentioned, NLP is also much more about aligning what's there as opposed to weeding and then aligning, but this reflects the limitations of the typical therapeutic environment - they have to try and deal with what’s in front of them. Delving into underlying beliefs is a can of worms they steer clear of. Suggesting some of the client's beliefs are irrational, counterproductive, and should be thrown out is going to offend many people. ‘OMG, no I’m perfect!, I want to keep the same recipe because my recipe is the right and good recipe, but I want a different, much nicer taste, please..’
‘Um... ah, yes, you are indeed a good person, very noble; it's not your fault, it's the universe's fault. Here’s some anti-depressants.’
While convincing people to run a comb through their beliefs, and therefore motivations, is typically avoided due to the resistance doing so provokes, some scientists and doctors are making progress in proving the connection between cellular health and mental health. That our brain can’t work properly if our cells aren’t working properly should be obvious, and is to some doctors, but proving this is slow work as no one makes money from you or I being healthy, and encouraging people to detox is also not good business for the pharmaceutical industry…
The doctor at the forefront of this research is Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Chris Palmer, and his book ‘Brain Energy’ (2022) is great. Well, I assume it's great; I have it but haven't gotten around to reading it. He is also on Twitter and has done a number of podcasts. I’ve watched the one he did with Dr. Huberman, and it’s excellent. His personal story about how changing his diet changed his life and first got him interested in this particular field is very interesting.
But, back on track...
As the classic Maslow Hierarchy of Needs illustrates, motivations can be divided into instincts, which are ‘hard wired’, and beliefs and habits, which are just programmable software.
Our instincts are as they are, and they're universal for our species, although how they're expressed and their intensity vary. The strong motivations for food, shelter, sex, and status are examples of instinctual motivations that drive us via the poles of pleasure and pain. It feels good to eat when hungry, and it’s painful to not eat when hungry. When we fast, we have to withstand this pain, and if we cannot handle a little bit of pain, then we can’t fast. But if we can’t handle a little bit of pain, we’ll struggle to ever make constructive changes, as they all involve being able to resist instant gratification.
So, as we move through life, we want to run a comb through our motivations every now and again to weed out the ones that are negative as regards obtaining our ultimate objectives if they’re significantly impeding our progress.
The guy addicted to cigarettes might decide that he’s happy to keep smoking even if he has a reasonable idea of the negative consequences - cool, all good. It’s his life, and that’s his choice, but the main point here is to try and understand how our basket of motivations influences us greatly, and then to run a comb through them if we’re struggling to move in the direction we want to go.
The awesome thing about understanding the power of habits and gaining the ability to change them is that swapping out a negative habit for a positive one typically has a massive positive return for relatively little effort.
Think of it like this: you’ve got three horses pulling in a north direction, and that’s the direction you want to go, but you've got 2 habits/beliefs/motivations/horses pulling southwards, so the net result is you're moving only slowly northwards. 3 - 2 =1.
But swap one of those negative habits for another positive habit, and bang! Just like that, we now have 4 horses pulling in the positive direction and just one negative. 4 -1 = 3.
We’re now moving forward 3 times faster than previously, we're struggling against ourselves much less, yet we've only changed one motivation from negative to positive.
Again, this life thing is not an exact science. There are many variables, many of which we can’t control; sh*t happens. It’s not about heading in the exact right compass bearing; we don’t have the ability to discern that, and it's also not necessary. But we do have the ability to understand the general direction we want to head in. We do have the ability to understand what is healthy and what is not, so even if we’re not so well orientated, by aligning the obvious basics, we’re automatically heading towards increased happiness.
A detox is always a big shift in that direction, as we’re not only giving our bodies the chance to clean and refresh, but we're also weakening some of our habits.
It’s the combination that gives us a fresh orientation to reality, which, in effect, changes our reality for the better, and yet this change comes from having less, from letting go, and not from having more. Experiencing that less is more makes the hard easy.
