Aspirational thoughts can be very motivating — if you believe them.

By an aspirational thought, I mean any statement about your ability to achieve something in the future, something that you haven’t achieved in the past. It could be a prediction, such as “I will lose 20 pounds for good this time.” Or it could be a stretch goal, such as “I will double my profit this year.”

If you believe the aspirational idea is true, it’s motivating to repeat it as an affirmation each day. Consciously reminding yourself of the belief refreshes your desire for the end and your confidence that you can take the necessary steps to reach it. By bringing the aspirational end to the forefront of awareness, you also see the opportunities for moving toward it — today — even if it is a long-range goal.

On the other hand, if you don’t believe it’s true, focusing on the aspirational thought will trigger objections and discouragement. And maybe frustration if you’ve been working toward it and failing, or guilt if you set a goal but haven’t put in the effort. That will kill your interest in even thinking about the end.

Faith to the rescue?

Many schools of motivation recognize this phenomenon and conclude you need to build belief around your aspirations. In its crudest form, this means going by faith — simply suspending disbelief. In its subtle form, it means brainwashing yourself with the aspirational thought by repeating it to yourself or putting it in writing many times each day.

With enough repetition, the thought starts to feel as if it’s true. But all that means is that when you think it, no questions arise about its validity. But that’s not because you don’t know things that might contradict this glamorous thought — it’s because you’ve been censoring them by willing yourself to believe or consistently ignoring objections. You’ve been keeping your attention on the idea rather than on the concerns and questions in the periphery that it originally generated.

Going by faith blinds you to potential problems and conflicts that need to be addressed sooner or later if you want your aspiration to come true. Faith makes those issues more difficult to address over the long term.

The logical paradox

But what’s the alternative? Can you validate an affirmation logically? It’s not clear you can.

An aspirational thought concerns the future. It is neither true nor false. The object the thought refers to hasn’t come into existence yet — and won’t without your effort. It is a prediction of sorts.

Moreover, it’s a prediction that, by definition, is not based on past achievements. Unlike a prediction that the sun will come up tomorow, the prediction that you’ll double your profit next year represents a break from the past. It’s only plausible because it includes the expectation that you will enact the necessary causes to make it happen.

Because your aspirational thought depends on your own effort to make it come to pass, some objections and doubts are logical. You literally can’t predict the future when volition is involved. So you can’t know all of the causal factors and get the kind of certainty that you get about the future movements of stars and planets hurtling through space.

And yet, you need certainty to act. If you are filled with doubt about whether you can achieve the goal, your doubts will undercut your motivation to take the actions to achieve it. If you are thinking, “I’m not sure I can do this,” you will not be motivated to try. Left unchecked, self-defeating beliefs motivate inaction, not action.

This is the pardox of an aspirational goal. You need to believe you will achieve it before you have the skills and knowledge necessary to achieve it.

How beliefs form

The way out of this paradox is to look more closely at how beliefs are formed.

“Belief” is a psychological concept, not a logical one. A belief is a thought that has been automatized. It becomes automatized when it has been linked directly to an affective experience consistent with the thought.  Typically a thought becomes a belief as a result of having been used as the basis for taking an action that proved successful. It’s the joy of success that cements it as a belief.

The thought doesn’t have to be logical. Nor does it have to name the cause.

For example, some people have a lucky charm that they call on in games of chance. When my brother was six, his charm was a large plush purple pig named “Pig Pig.” As he rolled the dice in Risk, he would call out, “Goody Goody Pig Pig,” and believe it or not, it seemed like he rolled triple sixes more than everyone else. When he wasn’t getting the rolls he wanted, he would bring Pig Pig to the table to help out in person. This was infuriating me, his 8-year-old oh-so-logical sister. In hindsight, ticking me off was probably an excellent success strategy that could account for some of his wins — and definitely accounted for his continuing to call on Pig Pig for assistance in family games for many, many years.

The point is, at six, my brother believed calling on Pig Pig helped his game, not because he had logically validated it, but because he had some experiences where it was correlated with success, and he attributed his success to his big plush pig.

The usual sequence is: have a thought, act on it, and get some positive result that you attribute to the thought. The thought becomes a belief. Qua belief it has a value charge on it that makes it easy for it to pop into awareness in similar situations, so it can easily become automatized if it is used again.

A logical conclusion doesn’t turn into a belief until it is linked to experience. Until then, it floats. And an illogical belief doesn’t get disintegrated until you have a clear experience that shows that attributing your past success to it was mistaken.

For example, I studied Ayn Rand’s non-fiction for years before I became convinced that altruism is self-sacrifice and is therefore wrong in principle. I was opposed to self-sacrifice, but I saw the essence of altruism as being “nice.” To me it meant, “Don’t hurt other people’s feelings.” I thought I understood her arguments and I didn’t see any logical flaws in them, but they didn’t convince me.

Then I had an emotionally shattering experience in which I tried to be “nice” to someone to whom I was giving negative feedback. The experience was over-the-top frustrating — it felt like my mind was going to explode by the end of the conversation, and it took me 30 minutes to get back to normal mental functioning. In hindsight, I realized I was holding a contradiction in mind, which accounted for my internal state. I wanted him to understand what was wrong with his work without my telling him. Why? Because that might make him feel bad. That wouldn’t be nice. I felt both that I had to tell him and that I couldn’t.

I told the story to a friend who said, “Wow, that really was a sacrifice.” Yes, it was a sacrifice of my mind, for 30 minutes, in the name of “niceness.” That was when I grasped that altruism is wrong in principle. It can’t be the standard by which you guide action. I had had an experience that showed the consequences clearly.

Rational standards for validating aspirational thoughts

So when is it rational to develop an aspirational belief and act on it? When is it proper to use an aspirational goal to guide action, though you don’t yet have all of the skills and knowledge necessary to make it come to pass?

In short, you need to find the rational basis in your own experience to validate it with respect to cognition, action, and motivation.

Cognition: You cannot establish whether a prediction of the future is true, but you can rule out some predictions as impossible given the facts. For an aspirational goal, you need to establish that it is possible for you to do it, which means you have a plan that you have validated as best you can.

For example, it is impossible for my business to make a million dollars in profit this year. I cannot imagine any causal chain by which I would even gross a million dollars, which makes this profit goal arbitrary.

On the other hand, it is not impossible per se for me to make $200k in profit. This is a highly aspirational goal for me, but I have a clear albeit abstract idea of how I could gross enough to net $200k. It involves selling more of the programs that already exist and already are valuable to my clients. It is based on past experience, though in no way “proven” by past experience.

Action: If you have an aspirational thought, it will not come to pass by your just repeating actions you’ve taken in the past. Something different has to happen. For an aspirational goal, the critical test is: Does your plan count on your action making the difference rather than something happening to you? Is achieving this goal essentially under your volitional control?

If my plan for netting $200k were based on creating a blog post or video that went viral, that would not be a valid plan because whether something goes viral is not under anybody’s volitional control.

On the other hand, if my plan is based on developing a marketing and sales process that expands on my past successes, that process is in principle under my volitional control. Granted, it will take a lot of experimentation, testing of the market, and developing new skills. But I have a proof of concept that there are people out there who benefit from my work, and I am willing to put in significant amounts of effort to reach more of them, which means reaching out in new ways. Thinking these issues through is how I establish that the steps in the plan are under my volitional control.

Motivation: Finally, you need to vet the thought to make sure it warrants being tied into your value hierarchy. This is what ensures it will pop up at critical times and will motivate corresponding actions. To justify believing the aspirational thought, you need to consider how it will impact your value hierarchy as a whole. Will it integrate your values or disintegrate them? How would this change the relative strength of your top values? How would it eliminate any old baggage that gets in the way?

In the case of my profit example, I needed to work out how embracing this goal would affect my central purpose. My central purpose is to explain my views on psychology to the world. It is a communication goal and it has been a communication goal for quite a few years now. Before that, my central purpose was a discovery goal.

One of the strategic reasons for setting a profit goal is that it focuses me on communicating my existing ideas better as opposed to developing new ideas. I’ve noticed that the pull of discovery is still much stronger than the pull of communication. I would like more money, too — it has benefits for recreation and relationships — but the psychological impact of this goal will be to rebalance the relative strength of discovery and communication in my psyche.

This money goal also challenges some old baggage very directly. As a result of doing this work, I expect to disintegrate another layer of worrying about what people think. In addition, it is consistent with an overhaul of my writing process that is in process. For now, I need to work on shorter pieces like marketing and this article, not a book, while I cement some new skills.

So how do you do it?

If this sounds complicated, well, it is and it isn’t. The explanation is complicated. Indeed, I only figured out how to validate aspirational thoughts and goals in principle just recently.

But fairly simple tactics are out there, and plenty of people use them and get results from them. I worked out this theory while test-driving a tactic for boosting motivation for a goal called “Intentional Thought Creation” by Stacey Boehmann. This is an application of Brooke Castillo’s “Creating New Beliefs” methods. Previously I used Jerrold Mundis’s method for affirmations, which I call “Positive Reinforcement” and some of the more logical versions of “law of attraction” type marketing.

The short version is: These processes use a special kind of value-oriented brainstorming to systematically test the idea and connect it to your values. You curate the kinds of questions you ask yourself to get solutions instead problems. Or if obstacles occur to you, you think about how you will learn and grow in relation to them instead of how they will stop you.

The problem is, if you are like me, you won’t use a process if you can’t validate it rationally. I make my living figuring out the rational explanations for woo-woo processes, so I can profit from them and teach them to logical types like you in the Thinking Lab. Now you have the general principles to do it yourself.

But if you’re really interested in how to, this is the subject of a master class in the Thinking Lab Tuesday (April 14)! And of course, there are some relevant tools written up in the Library there.