You Can Ignore Your ‘Self’ and Just Improve

How to shift from ‘I am’ to ‘I will’

Image by Author, via MidJourney

Hello, everyone! Another post from the Medium archive, as I work on a few slightly more complex and involved pieces. Peace and blessings to all of you. — James

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In college I learned an exercise that drastically improved my writing skills. Writers call the practice E-prime.

To write in e-prime, simply omit any version of the word “to be” from your prose. Drop is, am, are, were, or was, and also their cousins — the isn’ts, the will-bes, the would-have-been, could-have-been, should-have-beens — scrap them all.

Simple, right?

Not really. Writing in e-prime hurts like a donkey kick to the frontal cortex. But it works; you find yourself thinking constantly about how to replace passive be-type language with more active, verby sentences that haul major freight. Active prose front-loads your writing and gives it a satisfying “oomph.”

Your characters come into greater focus when you describe them using their actions. If I say John was wicked that could mean any old thing. If I say John shot the deer twice, once to kill it, and once because it made him smile, you feel John’s wickedness down in your stomach, and worry.

A picture equals a thousand words, but a good writer with action verbs can paint you a picture with a sentence or two. For those who excel at it, then, writing action multiplies prose, because actions carry far more weight than abstractions.

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We can take the lesson of e-prime and apply it further, to how we conceptualize ourselves. For example, if I say I’m an extravert, what does that mean? That phrasing works for setting expectations, I guess, but it doesn’t help much with self-understanding, since it says little about the concrete things we do.

In 1999 two researchers, Daniel Cervone and Yuichi Shoda, noted that two people can behave in opposite ways across social situations and still call themselves extraverts.

Imagine that one person enjoys partying around casual strangers because they love the adventure, but quiets down and defers when around friends. Now imagine that the other shuts down in an unfamiliar crowd but can’t stop chatting around their buddies.

Both can justify calling themselves extraverts, for different reasons. That highlights a major problem with is-based thinking; we construct it by referring to the whole network of self-relevant life domains in our memory, creating an “average” impression encompassing our whole character.

This sounds like academic hair-splitting, so you might reasonably ask why this matters. And most of the time it doesn’t. If you’ve got a good life you can absolutely wreck it using this kind of navel gazing.

But it starts to matter fast when depression hits, because for many people depression creeps in alongside the idea that they have a personality flaw nested somewhere deep in their “I am” network, which requires changing. Hence the problem; how the hell do you change an average impression encompassing your whole character?

For those who struggle with depression and shame, this type of global, is-based thinking can inflate the task of change to an impossible magnitude. Psychological researchers note that depression often occurs alongside a pessimistic explanatory style, or a tendency to think of problems in terms of global, stable, internal causes.

This type of thinking diverts immense amounts of energy into pointless self-scrutiny. If you have a flaw to fix somewhere in your I am… where do you find it? You can play a game of whack-a-mole with your soul (whack-a-soul?) all you want, but it probably won’t get you anywhere. Some problems:

1. Where does it start? Of all the things that contribute to your big “I am a xxxxx” problem, where do you even begin?

2. Where does it end? How much would you have to change across the many domains of life before you could say you fixed yourself? At what point can you treat minor lapses as mistakes instead of proof that the flaw remains?

3. How do you gauge progress? Using other people’s impressions? Your own? Which impressions count? Depression worsens this problem since it promotes the cherry-picking of evidence in ways that confirm our negativity.

This approach to self-transformation causes problems because it assumes we must consciously monitor the whole process of change. Few even get that far; most spend years playing whack-a-soul, fighting against vague intimations of their internal failures that pop up everywhere, one after another.

But… often it helps to have something to work on. Improvement matters to many people, even if sometimes it starts from a place of pain. So, can we do it differently?

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I like the gym. The gym does not like me back much, but the gym interests me because many gym-goers transform themselves without all the self-referential navel gazing.

Don’t get me wrong. We all know kettlebell bros who obsess over their kettlebell bro-ness. And fitness culture has a lot to answer for in terms of the damage its relentless promotion of peak physicality does to self-image.

But if someone wants to change, then over a few years at the gym they can transform themselves slowly into an athlete without ever having to worry about “being” more athletic. Gym testimonials often contain an element of surprise, where a person realizes suddenly that they have transformed themselves after a long period of slow work.

Of course, everybody trying to change does a lot of work, right? But if you start with a diffuse “I am” focus you get bogged down by diffuse projects.

Imagine approaching athleticism the same way some people approach vague goals like “being more organized” or “not being a failure.” Some people actually do this — picture a gym Jim who watches YouTube tutorials, attends fitness classes, hits every exercise machine once, and does all the right stuff on the surface, but bounces between projects like a racquetball during gym class. It doesn’t produce results.

For those who want change, the gym offers a more focused path; stop acting like a gym buff, pick one transformative thing, and do that thing until it changes you. Stop worrying about “being” athletic. Just do the thing. The rest will happen naturally.

It works because concrete action transforms a person silently, separate from self-monitoring.

You can treat a lot of “I am” problems this way, reframing them as simpler “I do” problems. Most traits we want to change have one or two simple actions at their core. Instead of “stop being messy,” clean. Instead of “stop being so shy,” meet people.

Finding the core action can release all of that diverted, shackled mental energy; once you find the core action — just do it a lot, at your pace, and relax about the rest.

You can implement this many ways, but I like this approach:

1. Pick your action. Make it broad; a narrow action like “clean my car” won’t work. A broad action like “clean something around me” will.

2. Pick a large but achievable number, like a thousand — one that will take you a few months to reach, doing your core action several times per day.

3. Do the core action as many times per day as seems reasonable. Push yourself, lightly; keep a tally, tracking it until you hit your number.

You can’t reach that number without something inside of you shifting.

For example, say you want to become tidy. Reframe it: Clean one thousand things.

As your tally grows your resistance to small acts of cleaning will drop. You will start monitoring for opportunities to clean more. You will develop opinions on cleaning well. You will identify frustrating barriers and figure out how to overcome them. If you fall into an unproductive loop, repeating the same tasks, you will notice quickly.

Soon you will run out of obvious things to clean. Your room and car will get cleaned too fast to accumulate a mess. At that point, you can either expand your radius of responsibility, or tackle subtler cleaning projects. Either way you will have grown.

Months into your practice, someone will comment on how you manage to keep everything so tidy, and with a start you will realize that you have changed.

Then, if you like it, keep doing it.

This method releases an immense amount of mental pressure. Find the core. Do it a lot. Learn what you need as you go. Trust it will change you.

Don’t look at your self. Look at your hands; actions carry more weight than abstractions.

Image by Author, via Midjourney