#121: Is your self-improvement self-rejection in disguise?
I know how committed you are to self-improvement. Self-improvement is a good thing, right? Well, it depends. If you're motivated to improve yourself because you don't like yourself as you are, then perhaps it's not as wholesome as you thought. But how do you tell whether you're doing the wholesome sort of self-improvement or the unwholesome sort? What even is the right sort of self-improvement? Step off your upward trajectory for a moment, friend, and let your Imperfectionist friend here decipher all this for you.
Find the 5 whys exercise here.
Episode transcript:
Is your self-improvement something you’re doing for yourself, or to yourself?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi friends, did you miss me? I missed you. But don’t worry, I didn’t forget about you. I’ve been working behind the scenes, putting together another interview episode for you, which I’m excited to share with you next time. It hasn’t all been work, though - my children and I went to Turkey for a week on holiday. It was really lovely. There was sun, swimming in the sea, runs along the coast, which were completely necessary because there was also amazing food and unlimited baklava. Best of all, though, there were SO MANY CATS. Cats everywhere. Strays, but treated with gentleness and compassion by the locals. Fortunately for the Turkish cats and for my cats, I managed to resist the temptation to stuff my suitcase with them and bring them all home. My father, when he heard about all the cats, rose to the occasion and did the thing that all dads are required to do in this situation: he texted me to remind me that every foreign animal has rabies. I don’t think I ended up getting mauled by any rabid cats, but from what I’ve read online, the incubation period for rabies can be up to a year, so stay tuned for updates, and if you encounter me in person, take extra care in case you get bitten. Apart from possibly (but hopefully not) catching rabies, the only down side of my holiday was getting my brand new knitting needles confiscated at Izmir airport. I have learned my lesson and will never again fly with metal knitting needles.
Right then. Since this is not meant to be a podcast about cats and knitting, let’s get to this episode’s topic. I’m really not much of a person for pithy, motivational quotes, but I did read something that gave me pause recently. It wasn’t something from the pen of one of the ancients, or even a glossy TED talk insight. It was a question posed on Reddit by someone who has since deleted their account. It said: ‘What if self-improvement is just socially accepted self-rejection?’ That really spoke to me, because it chimed with a worry I often have. I honestly can’t think of a better way to express this worry than the first comment on that Reddit post, by a user named NeatMacaroon5675, who wrote: ‘Maybe it's not always about growth - sometimes it's just us trying to be less of who we already are.’
Does that strike a chord with you, my friend? Is it possible that your efforts to change are motivated by an unhappy conviction that you’re unacceptable as you are? And that you don’t even notice that there’s anything wrong with your view of yourself because your deep desire to run away from yourself has the gloss of self-improvement, which everyone agrees is a good thing? How would you even know the answer to these questions? How do you distinguish between the sort of self-improvement that is self-rejection in disguise, and the healthy sort of self-improvement? What even is healthy self-improvement? These are all questions I’ve been pondering recently, and I’m going to share my thoughts on them with you.
First, though, I’ve already done an episode on a similar topic: it was episode #60: Self-acceptance or self-improvement? I actually went back and revisited that episode while I was working on this one, just to make sure I wasn’t going to be repeating myself. In that episode, I asked whether a commitment to self-improvement requires a form of self-rejection. That was a response to an attitude expressed by some of my coaching clients that self-acceptance is actually a bad thing, because (they thought) if you accept yourself then you have no reason to try to improve yourself and you’ll end up just stuck. Self-acceptance and self-improvement are incompatible, on that view. In that episode, I argued that not only are they compatible, but that self-improvement is best when it comes from a place of self-acceptance. That episode makes a nice companion to this one, so if you’re up for reflecting on your attitude to self-improvement, you might want to go and check it out if you haven’t already.
As it happens, the attitude I talked about in that episode makes for a helpful thought experiment to kick off our cogitations for this one. Perhaps, like the coaching clients I talked about there, you’re also tempted by the view that you mustn’t accept yourself, because that would kill your desire to self-improve. Let’s pause here for a moment to ask: what if that were true? What if accepting yourself really would kill your desire to improve yourself. Would self-acceptance be a bad idea, in those circumstances? Seriously, hit pause here and have a think about this, because the answer to this question is much less obvious than you might think it is. Just imagine it: you finally accept yourself as you are currently, and that acceptance brings with it a wholescale shelving of all your plans to better yourself. What would be bad about that state? What would be good about it?
I’m going to take a guess here that your answer to these questions might be helpfully revealing. Perhaps your hunch is that self-acceptance along with an end to self-improvement would be a terrible thing because then you’d be stuck with yourself as you are now, and you’d never get to do the things you need to do to prove that you’re worthy of taking up space on this planet. If that’s how you feel, then it sounds to me like your desire for self-improvement is grounded in a rejection of yourself. You’re trying to run away from yourself because you don’t like yourself, you think you’re unacceptable in your current state. If you were sitting on a bus next to an empty seat and you came to sit next to yourself, you’d groan at the prospect of having to keep company with yourself for the rest of the journey. (I can hear the philosophers listening to this exploding with rage at the incoherence of that last one - sorry, guys, but start your own logically respectable podcast if you don’t like it.)
Let’s think, instead, about what someone who doesn’t despise themself might think about the prospect of giving up all future efforts to improve. Because, surely, it’s possible to accept yourself and want to improve yourself? Of course it is - I told you so in episode #60. Perhaps that sort of person might, on hearing that self-improvement is off the table from now on, have thoughts along the lines of: Oh no, there are so many exciting things I’ll never get to do! I’ll never get to see what I’m capable of! I’ll never know - to paraphrase Moana - how far I’ll go! There’s nothing self-rejecting in those sentiments. If that person had themself come sit next to them on a bus, they’d be excited to have themself along for the journey.
Now, believe it or not, it’s not just deleted Reddit users and Disney princesses who have grappled with issues around self-improvement. Some philosophers have had a go, too. Aristotle is a very well-known example here. He believed that our purpose, as humans, is to exercise our rationality in accordance with the virtues, which is something we need to learn to do. If we manage to do that, we might hope to achieve eudaimonia, which tends to be translated as ‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’ or ‘living well’. When we think about virtues these days, or about ethics more generally, it’s common to focus on how we treat other people, other beings, and perhaps also the world in general. Behaving ethically is about treating others well, being respectful, not causing harm, fulfilling our obligations towards others. We don’t tend to include ourselves in the remit of beings or things we need to treat well. Very roughly speaking, we tend to think that we act unethically when we avoidably cause suffering to another being, but we don’t do anything wrong when we cause ourselves to suffer. But Aristotle took a different view: he thought that as well as having duties and obligations to others, we also have duties and obligations to ourselves. He believed that we should be developing the virtues not merely because we owe it to other people, but because we owe it to ourselves. And we owe it to ourselves not in an instrumental way - as would be the case if, say, we needed to be virtuous because it’s better for other people to be dealing with a virtuous version of ourselves rather than a vicious one - but for its own sake. Eudaimonia is an end in itself.
I’m not going to go any further down this ‘duties to oneself’ road. The lesson I want to draw from these reflections is that, for Aristotle, developing the virtues - which is a form of self-improvement - is something we do, in large part, for ourselves. It’s not something we simply do to ourselves. To make this distinction a bit clearer, let me give you an analogy. Suppose you’ve been enjoying classes in baking, or yoga, or tennis, or learning a new language, or your choice of other worthwhile enrichment activity. Your instructor, as a gesture of thanks for your support, offers you the opportunity to gift some classes to someone in your life who hasn’t tried the activity before. You’re pondering who to choose to receive the classes. One possible recipient is your best friend, whom you love dearly, and who would - you’re sure - really enjoy the classes and find them enriching. Alternatively, you could gift the classes to someone in your circle who you very much dislike. This person, who is, in your view, defective in all sorts of ways, would be fractionally less dreadful if they at least learned to bake, or do yoga, or play tennis, or speak Spanish. Would they actually enjoy the classes and feel enriched by them? Jeez, who cares. That question hadn’t even occurred to you. It’s not the point.
The difference I want to focus on here is that by gifting the classes to your best friend, you offer them an opportunity of self-improvement which is not predicated on rejection. You already love them. You don’t view them as defective. They’re completely acceptable just as they are - your reason for considering them for the gift is simply that you think they’d enjoy the classes and find them enriching. You’re viewing the classes as something for them. By contrast, gifting the classes to that person you dislike is predicated on rejection. You’re viewing the gift as a kind of cosmetic surgery for their personality. You don’t care whether or not they’d value the gift - it would make them a slightly more acceptable person. It would be an unkind sort of gift, if it can be called a gift at all. The classes aren’t for them; they’re something you think needs to be done to them.
When you think about your own impetus for self-improvement, ask yourself in what spirit you’re trying to improve. Are you wanting to gift yourself something rewarding and enriching, in the way you’d gift those free classes to your best friend? Or are you trying to correct your defective self, as you’d be trying to correct your defective acquaintance if you were to gift them the free classes? To put this another way, by returning to that bus-ride-with-yourself metaphor I came up with earlier: when you think about trying to improve yourself, are you happy to have yourself along for the ride, or are you trying to leave yourself behind?
Now, the way I’m presenting all this glosses over some complications. When I described the possibility of gifting some free classes to your unsatisfactory acquaintance, I characterised your sentiment as ‘I don’t care whether they’d enjoy the classes or not’. Sometimes, though, when we consider improving ourselves in a way that’s based on self-rejection, that ‘I don’t care whether I enjoy it or not’ sentiment might be difficult to spot. If you’re starting from a place of self-loathing, it might be hard to work out how you feel about that course in effective time-management or that weight-loss program. You might be excited by the prospect, not because it nourishes your soul, but because it carries with it the promise of an escape from where and who you currently are. How can we get past this? How do we know we’re improving ourselves for the right reasons, and in the right spirit?
I don’t think there’s a quick answer here. Sometimes it’s really difficult or impossible to tell why we have the motivations we do. Sometimes it’s only in hindsight - if at all - that we’re able to see that all that striving we were doing was coming from a place of tormented inadequacy. So, I don’t think I can promise you 20-20 vision on this. But even so, I think there are a couple of things we can do to course-correct a bit, and to help ensure that we aren’t inadvertently stoking self-rejection through our efforts to improve ourselves.
The first is to get serious about interrogating our motivations. Why, exactly, do you want to get that qualification or that job or that award? Why do you want to lose weight or learn French or be a better conversationalist? Do you have an answer that’s not formulated in instrumental terms - that is, that doesn’t frame the goal as a stepping stone to some more fundamental goal? This is something Aristotle emphasised. Eudaimonia is, according to him, desirable for its own sake, not for the sake of something more fundamental. Have a go at digging down into your motivations until you get to something fundamental. You can use my ‘5 whys’ exercise for this - you’ll find it on the Resources page of The Academic Imperfectionist website, and I’ll put a link to it in the episode notes. Getting clear about what your fundamental goal is not only helps you stop chasing the wrong things - it also opens up new possibilities to realise your fundamental goal in ways that might not have occurred to you.
Another thing you can do is use that favourite technique of mine: would you say that to a friend? Here’s how that manifests in this case. Let’s say you have plans to write more efficiently. Sit down with the 5 whys exercise and set out your reasons for wanting to do this. Imagine if your best friend had given these reasons for their choice. Would you see anything unhealthy or concerning in them? Imagine, for example, that one of your reasons for wanting to write more efficiently is that you hope doing so will help you feel less of an impostor in your job. (If it sounds like I’m choosing an over-dramatic example here, I’m afraid it’s depressingly everyday, and something I’ve heard again and again in coaching sessions.) If your friend were to express this, I’m going to guess that you’d be concerned. That you wouldn’t simply say, ‘Yep, sounds like a good reason, carry on’, and that instead you’d say, ‘Wait, why are you feeling like an impostor? Shall we talk about that?’ If it would sound alarm bells when your friend says it, then it should sound alarm bells when you say it.
In fact, you can go one step further here. You don’t have to treat the 5 whys exercise as a private thing you do without sharing with anyone else, although of course you can do that. Perhaps you’d benefit from working with a friend or colleague here. Do your 5 whys and show them to a friend. Ask them what they think. Is there anything weird going on here? Any missteps in logic, any implicit self-rejection? Talk it through with them. Perhaps you can swap your 5 whys and talk through both sets. It’s alarming how often sentiments that seem completely unremarkable when we entertain them privately turn out to be concerning when we say them aloud to another person.
Let me leave you with one final thought. I hope you’re not going to find it too shocking. It’s this: even with the right sort of self-improvement, the healthy kind, the doing-for-myself-not-to-myself kind, you don’t have to be doing it all the time. It’s ok just to be. Contrary to the idea we’re often fed, not everyday needs to be a school day. Imagine taking a day, or a week, or a month where you don’t try to do anything aimed at improving yourself. How do you feel about that idea? If it fills you with horror, give it a go. Sounds like you need it.
Next time, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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