Motivation and acting 'as if'

'Evolutionary theorists argue that social intelligence was the primordial talent of the human brain, reflected in our outsize cortex, and that what we now think of as “intelligence” piggybacked on neural systems used for getting along in a complex group' (Goleman 2007:334).

Given the social model I’ve been pursuing on this blog, then in what sense can an individual act purposefully and ‘make something happen’? Fulfil a fantasy about an imagined future - a ‘desired outcome’? Change and adaptation provokes anxiety for anyone who has become isolated. But to find a different way of being in the world requires getting back into some form of social involvement, navigating and negotiating a way back into public spaces in order to gain acceptance from others, some mutuality and sense of social belonging despite the overt and covert negative messages that come from society at large. And in what has become an unknown environment you have no choice but to jump in at the deep end, and act ‘as if’ you already have a competence you don’t yet feel. Once in a new environment however, motivated by others who have become important to you, you can begin to acquire new skills in living, by taking risks and acting as if you were already the person others desire you to be.

People like mysteries and not the idea that psychological abilities can be learnt as a set of skills. But the mastery of a skill brings joy, flow or happiness. That loss of self-consciousness first experienced in childhood play. Improvisation is innovation in one’s own behaviour. The traditional ‘four stages of competence’ learning model on the psychological states associated with the acquisition of skill (the origins of which are unknown) can be adapted for self-awareness in general. Unconscious incompetence (I don’t know, what I don’t know), conscious incompetence (I know I don’t know, but can’t do), conscious competence (I know, I can do, but others can see I’ve not mastered the skill) and unconscious competence (I and others take my competence for granted).

I learnt how to be crazy from imitating the psychologically troubled and becoming progressively isolated from the mental healthy - and I learnt to be sane through others ‘taking me by the hand’ and placing me in new social environments where I was forced to act in novel ways, and realise the way to mental wellbeing is to imitate the mental healthy.

Goleman, D (2007) Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Arrow: London