On Cognitive Dissonance

2023.11.05

Lindy Expectancy: 36 Weeks

The gap between what we believe about ourselves and the actions we take can be crippling. I think it’s either an origin of pain for ourselves or others, or, more optimistically, a wellspring of growth.

Cognitive Dissonance

Broadly, cognitive dissonance is when you perceive a conflict between different pieces of information. More specifically for our case, we’ll use cognitive dissonance to describe when we hold some belief about ourselves that our actions don’t line up with.

A simple example: you believe that eating fried food is bad, but you eat it every other day. I picture this as a literal gap between your actions and your beliefs:

For me, cognitive dissonance effectively creates a cycle of growth: noticing the gap, reducing the gap, creating a new gap, rinse and repeat.

I played with a few examples from my life in the realm of finance, programming, and martial arts. The easiest and most entertaining to write about is certainly in martial arts. 

The Marianas Trench of Pain

Noticing the gap is, perhaps, the most critical part. If you aren’t even aware of a problem, how can you hope to fix it? 

From experience, I’ve observed that having a massive gap between who you think you are and who you are that you refuse to address creates pain and discomfort for the people who care about you. The times that I’ve had such a gap, loved ones and friends noticing it was the pressure I needed to accept that the gap was there and improve upon it.

When someone you care about doesn’t notice it, and simply does not believe it is there, that can be quite painful and heartbreaking. 

You can also self diagnoses the gaps; I definitely do that too much. Too much focus on the gap, and you’re ignoring all of your wins. 

In my martial arts example, the way I noticed the gap is quite disappointing: I was between sophomore and junior year in college, had put on a decent amount of muscle mass, and simply realized that I would not win in a fight if I got in one.

I was bigger but there was very little, if anything, functional about it. It gave me that boyish yet masculine, testosterone fueled internal dialogue of “Oh, I could beat that guy in a fight!” without having any backing whatsoever other than I kind of looked maybe stronger than him.

At some point, I was real with myself and I identified that cognitive dissonance: I realized there was a gap between my perceived ability and my actual ability.

Catalyst

So, if you realize there’s a gap, what do you do? I think the responses are 4 fold:

1. Ignore gap and move on.

2. Make your belief about yourself more realistic

3. Take action to make reality meet your belief

4. Some mix of the above two

Option one is simply a non starter for me, hence the strikethrough; that being said, I can see why addressing a bunch of gaps at the same time may be unrealistic and oppressive. I often remain uncomfortable knowing that a big gap is there unless I initiate some movement, even if light weight, towards reducing the gap. Once I knew I could more than likely get my ass kicked by the bulk of the population, I certainly didn’t want to walk around carrying that belief with me. 

So, I did some mix of 2 and 3. I adjusted my inaccurate belief from thinking I could beat most people in a fight to believing that I had a very high chance of losing a fight… for now. And then, I started doing martial arts to bring reality closer to the belief I wanted to hold about myself. 

The Second Gap

After training Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for 6 months, I could beat anybody in a fight. Problem solved, right?

Hell no.

The photo taken above at the first tournament I went to was a great readjustment after I thought I had become ‘good’ at martial arts. I won one of eight rounds and maybe tied one. You can guess what happened in the balance of the matches.

I could have gotten upset and thought that the tournament was rigged and accused the other guys of being on steroids to protect my ego. Instead, I protected my ego a little bit by reminding myself that it was a white belt competition in a highschool gymnasium for a family dollar gold medal, while still focusing on the important part: I simply had a lot to learn. 

Fine Tuning Actions

Sometimes, how one might fine tune actions to match the beliefs that you hold about yourself can be obvious. If you believe you should be able to beat someone in a fight, start training in martial arts. If you believe you shouldn’t smoke, just don’t smoke.

Of course, both are easier said than done and can be overwhelming; I haven’t dealt with the latter, so I’ll focus on the former. 

What does it mean to train martial arts? There are as many answers to that as there are people who have opened some sort of gym, which does bring me back to one of my favorite quotes:

“If you don’t know what you want, the chances you’ll get it are extremely low.” -Ben Horowitz

If you have some nebulous, arbitrary goal to want to learn how to fight people, any instructor at any martial arts gym you walk into will tell you that their martial art is the single best solution. Hell, I walked into an Orangetheory for a trial class yesterday, told the trainer that I do martial arts, and he heavily implied the Orangetheory would be great cross training for that. 

Maybe it would be. But so would going for a run outside. 

Fine Tuning Beliefs

This brings me to the other part of the process I follow: fine tuning beliefs. This is critical, because really, there are a lot of simple actions you can take to bring yourself further in the right direction, but, if you’re not careful, outside interests can mold those actions to their best interest pretty easily. 

Maybe a McDojo is the best way for you to learn how to fight. Or, maybe, there’s an MMA gym down the street. Both might “work,” but one might work better. 

What do you want to be able to do? Show your friends a cool looking kick or take a threat down to the ground for a forced nap? 

The Gap

All of that is to say I still haven’t even been seriously punched in the face yet, so I’m sure I still don’t know what I’m talking about, either. That being said, I certainly know more than I did two years ago, so that’s progress, and I’m happy about it. 

Thus, the cognitive dissonance growth cycle:

It should be an optimistic thing, not a soul crushing one. It’s not, “Oh, no, I’m so far from who I want to be,” it’s “Wonderful, another opportunity for growth.” And part of managing it well is not trying to make an insane jump; you can’t seriously expect to go from jumping when someone bumps into you to being able to bring a 250 pound man to the ground overnight.

It’s a chance to get incrementally better, not an opportunity to get angry at the world for slighting you or pointing out something about yourself that’s not yet at the level you hope to reach. You have the capacity for improvement. Exercise it.

Great Matthew McConaughey soundbite comes to mind; it’s under a minute, certainly worth a watch. In short, he says that his hero is him 10 years from now. In 10 years, it will still be him 10 years from now. We’re never at the target; it’s always moving.

It’s exciting. The game’s not over. 

It never is.

Moral of the story? Identifying the gap between who you want to believe you are and who you are is nothing more than a chance for improvement. Hiding from it only hurts you, and it hurts others. 

Live Deeply,