What the Mockery of Self-Improvers Is Actually Detecting

Introduction: Why the Jibe Lands

Announcing an early start, listing the books read, setting out goals. Doing the very same things, one person comes across as natural and another gets mocked as a try-hard — someone performing self-improvement rather than living it. Many people know the peculiar way that jibe lands. It stings because some part of the person feels it is not entirely wide of the mark.

How to carry yourself so as not to attract the mockery, and how to manage impressions, are already well documented. What this article takes up is the structure in front of that. Why does the same behaviour look natural in one case and hollow in another?

Here is the conclusion first. The dividing line is not the content of the behaviour. It is whose self-image the behaviour is coming out of. And once this structure is understood, the mockery stops sounding like a verdict on a person and starts sounding like the noise of a particular friction.

First: Not Standing on the Side of the Mockers

Let me set out the position at the start. This article does not stand with those laughing.

Rising early. Reading. Setting goals. Going to places where things are taught. None of these is, in itself, anything to be reproached for. If anything, the movement to change one’s own life comes from a straightforward wish to improve. And the culture that jeers at it has its own effect: pulling down people who are trying to change.

What is being looked at is neither the rightness of those laughing nor the failing of those laughed at. It is one point only: where the difference comes from, when the same behaviour brings fulfilment in one case and leaves only exhaustion in another.

What We Copy Is Not the Habit but the Self-Image

When we copy a successful person, we take ourselves to be copying only their habits and phrases. What we are actually trying to transfer is something deeper: the self-image “I am the kind of person that successful person is.”

Rising early, reading — these are, so to speak, costumes for convincing yourself that you are that kind of person. The problem is that the self-image has not risen from inside; it has been borrowed from outside.

A borrowed self-image does not fit the body. Like a coat in the wrong size it slips, catches, and keeps registering discomfort with every movement. Say “I am a wealthy and successful person” and somewhere in the mind you know you are not. Between the part that knows and the image being reached for, a friction is continually produced.

The impatience and unsettledness are that friction — rising from the unclosable gap between a borrowed self-image and the actual person.

And this friction is visible from outside as well. The jibe lands not because it has hit on the person’s character. It lands because it is picking up this friction — the gap between performance and expression.

The More You Declare It, the More the Distance Gets Remeasured

A method is often recommended for moving the deep self-image: picture a successful person’s self-image as your own. Declare it to yourself in the mirror. Imagine vividly the self that has already succeeded.

There is a pitfall here too. What is being transferred is still someone else’s self-image.

A self-image is not a garment to be changed from outside. It is part of a deep system of belief, woven over long stretches of time out of everything that person has lived and countless small convictions. A borrowed image does not run well on top of it. The voice declaring “I am wealthy” skates across the surface of consciousness, collides with the conviction beneath it — “but in truth I am not” — and spins in mid-air.

It resembles repeating a sentence in a language you do not understand, having memorised only the sounds. The sounds leave the mouth, and nothing of what the words point to rises inside you.

The person declaring knows best of all how far the words sit from their actual conviction. So with each utterance, rather than coming to believe the content of the declaration, they confirm the fact that they cannot believe it from the heart.

This spinning sometimes makes things worse than before declaring. The mind cannot hold two contradictory messages at once. The experiment by Wegner and colleagues is well known [Wegner et al., 1987]. Told not to think about a white bear, people find images of white bears arriving one after another. The attempt to cancel keeps attention deliberately fixed on the thing to be cancelled.

The act of picturing intensely the self you want to become makes you remeasure, with each picturing, the distance from the self you are — the moment a language of wishing turns over into an apparatus for confirming lack.

▸ What happens when surface habits are copied is taken up in why copying a morning routine does not copy the results.

A Traced Self-Image and a Standing Self-Image

What has been said may sound contradictory. You will be pulled back unless the deep self-image changes — and yet the method of picturing a self-image spins uselessly. What resolves the apparent contradiction is the distinction between tracing another’s self-image and standing up your own.

Picture two people. One is trying to lay the image of an admired successful figure over themselves as faithfully as possible. The standard is always outside. “What would that person do” is the measure of action.

The other starts from a different place. From the question “what is it that I actually want to accomplish?” Becoming like someone is not the aim; there is a goal of their own that has risen from within. And the person who lives that goal must, of itself, be a certain kind of person — that image they stand up with their own hands.

The first self-image is an outline traced from outside. The second is a structure stood up from within.

Psychology has shown these two differ decisively in persistence. Sheldon and Elliot distinguished the goals people hold by where they came from [Sheldon & Elliot, 1999]. People holding goals deeply tied to their own values and interests are less likely to stop when they meet difficulty, and their sense of fulfilment keeps going over long stretches. Such a goal is not a performance for someone to watch; it wells from the person’s own core, and so drives behaviour without having to be pulled by force of will.

The road afterwards diverges too. The tracer has to redraw their behaviour every time the admired figure puts out a new method. The standard being outside, when the outside moves, they must move. In time, when the model dates or a more attractive figure appears, the image they have built collapses along with its footing.

The meaning of the same stumble reverses too. For the tracer, a stumble is evidence of “a self that cannot become like that person,” material for self-reproach. For the one standing, the same stumble is a single step in the ground on the way to their own goal — not something to reproach but something to cross.

This difference is neither a difference of ability nor of will. It is a difference of origin: whether the self-image was borrowed from outside or stood up from within.

Conclusion: From “How Do I Look” to “Whose Image Is This”

Trying to avoid the mockery, people usually move towards toning the behaviour down. But that is an adjustment made with the standard still set at “how do I appear to others” — and in leaving the standard outside, it stands in the same place as tracing.

The same motion produces opposite effects depending on whether the person’s self-image is genuine or borrowed. Expression fills a person; performance wears them down. So the question worth asking is neither “what should I do” nor “how do I look,” but “whose self-image is this behaviour coming out of?”

Standing on that question, the mockery loses its force. There is no longer any need to pare behaviour back to fit an outside gaze, nor to push through against it. With the standard returned to your own side, the early starts, the reading and the learning continue quietly — as expression rather than performance.

The whole picture is gathered in why copying a millionaire mindset does not make you rich.

References

Academic papers and theory

• Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., & White, T. L. “Paradoxical Effects of Thought Suppression” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1) (1987)
• Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. “Goal Striving, Need Satisfaction, and Longitudinal Well-Being: The Self-Concordance Model” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76(3) (1999)
• Swann, W. B., Jr. “Self-Verification: Bringing Social Reality into Harmony with the Self” in Psychological Perspectives on the Self, Vol. 2 (1983) Erlbaum