You act or behave the way you do because you are motivated to act or behave that way.
Motivation gives purpose and direction to your behavior. It arouses you to take one action rather than another.
Motivation can help propel you toward a desired outcome or goal.
Unfortunately, it can also propel you away from it.
Motivation can be external or internal—or both. Sometimes you’re consciously aware of what your motivation is for doing something. That’s usually the case when the motivation is external. But much of your internal motivation resides in the unconscious and is the result of decades of programming.
When you have an intention to do (or not do) something, unconscious motivation that conflicts with your intention can derail you.
In Search of a Good Story
You can’t directly access System 1 motivation, so you don’t necessarily know that it’s impacting you. Nevertheless, you’re wired to come up with a story or an explanation for your behavior, so the left hemisphere complies. As is the case with almost all of the left hemisphere’s stories, this story is based on incomplete information. But as long as your explanations and stories are simple, straightforward, and unambiguous, you’ll buy them. (We all do it.)
The situation is analogous to the results of Michael Gazzaniga’s experiments with split-brain patients. The left-hemisphere makes up a story to explain choices made by the right hemisphere, even when it has no access to what the right hemisphere knows.
Unconscious motivation is like having a hidden agenda. At least it’s hidden from you. So when you have an intention to do X but do Y instead, your explanations are likely to consist of either rationalization or blame—whichever seems most satisfying in the moment—neither of which is helpful.
Of course, an obvious culprit is your brain’s prime directive to keep you alive by maintaining the status quo. If the behavior you’re trying to change is habitual, that may be all there is to it. But that isn’t always the case. You may have additional conflicting motivation that routinely overrides your intentions.
One of the primary go-to explanations for doing something other than what you intended to do is self-sabotage.
The Myth of Self-Sabotage
Self-sabotage is often used as a synonym for self-defeating, self-destructive, or simply inappropriate or maladaptive behavior. But sabotage is a deliberate attempt to hinder efforts to accomplish something. Having too many drinks or eating too many cookies, too often, could have undesirable consequences. But the drinking or cookie-eating could only be considered sabotage if one part of you intends to not overindulge but another part of you deliberately undermines that intention for an unknown reason.
But your unconscious, in spite of its flaws, doesn’t have it in for you. It doesn’t plot and scheme to try to keep you down or “protect” you from success. It has no vested interest in what you consider good behavior or bad, positive outcomes or negative. It doesn’t care about your dreams and goals, your ambitions, or your big ideas.
Self-sabotage might be a good story. But it’s a myth and buying into it only obscures the situation.
Motivation, as commonly discussed, seems like a straightforward concept, yet there are many different dimensions to it. At the next MONTHLY MEETING OF THE MIND (& BRAIN), we’ll dig deeper into what really drives us, take a look at the often unexpected effects of our ulterior motives on ourselves and others, and identify the best way to find out what some of those motives might be so we won’t be completely at the effect of them.