We all have one. You know it. I know it. But what do we do about it?
Our Inner Jerk
Our inner jerk is the part of us that judges and criticizes self and others harshly. It’s the part of our mind that calls others jerks and assholes – and also other things.
It resides deep in our brain and is imbedded in our ability to use language. If we didn’t have language, when something happened that seemed to threaten us or that we just didn’t like, we would snarl and grunt angrily about it for a bit and then forget about it. Either that or we would run like hell.
Language sets us up to have memories and to foresee our ultimate future. It also gives us the ability to judge, compare, evaluate, and imagine the worst. Our brains evolved to protect us from the dangers of the wild.
I’m not going to get into the way we get stuck in language as that is beyond the scope of this post.
But we can talk a little about the brain. A hundred thousand years ago, before we had anything resembling the language we have today, our brains were producing neurotransmitters and hormones that kept us at the ready to deal with saber toothed tigers and velociraptors.
Our brain protects us yet today. The difference is that today we don’t have – at least most of us don’t – lions and tigers and bears confronting us. What we do have is people, events, and things that we do and don’t like. And a little danger occasionally.
In a certain way, our brains don’t know the difference. It evolved to protect us from grave danger and that danger for the most part just isn’t there. But if that danger does occur, our brains are ready to react. The trouble is that it also reacts when someone or something – and that includes ourselves – get in the way of something we want or want to accomplish. That’s when the inner jerk tends to come out. Our brain sees those events as the tiger of old.
Seth Godin, in a recent post, wrote about our internal heckler -
“The heckler keeps a running critique going, amplifying its tone and anger as it goes on endlessly about all the things we shouldn’t do, all the things we’re not doing enough, and most of all, at our lack of entitlement to do much of anything new or important.
The heckler cannot be eliminated. It’s been around since the beginning of our species, and we’re hard wired to have it.
What can be done, though, is alter how the rest of the brain reacts or responds to the heckling.”
Mr. Godin has the process right, but he doesn’t mention that that same heckler, disguised now as our inner jerk, heckles us about what we are supposed to do to other people who do what we decide they shouldn’t do, what they’ve already done that we don’t like, or that just don’t measure up. Even worse, people are judged more harshly if we perceive they have done us wrong.
So, back to my original question. What do we do about it?
Mr. Godin is also right that we can’t get rid of the inner jerk. He (or she) is along for the ride no matter how much we attempt to resist.. We can’t change the way our brain reacts, at least not directly. But we can change the way we react to our brains. We can change how we react to those feelings of anger .We have choices as to how we act. We can change our behavior.
We have some wiggle room when it comes to the language side of the problem.
Mental Models, Redux
WE give language a lot of power because over time we shape it into stories we tell ourselves about the situations we get into. These stories make up the mental models of how the world is “supposed to work.”
We have choices to make about whether we buy into our mental models. We can begin to realize that these models are often wrong and hopelessly outdated. As the world turns, our mental models (our belief systems or better yet, our schemas) stay fixed in time.
The key to taming our inner asshole is to realize that this model exists and not to buy into the story our minds are selling. When we have the idea that somebody else is a jerk or a danger to us and deserves the full force of our wrath, we have a choice as to whether we want to buy the story.
I’m not telling you to change the story, to modify the mental model. It doesn’t work. As a matter of fact, research shows that the more we try to change the model the more intransigent it gets. When we acknowledge that the story is there and decide not to act on it, over time it may change itself. That’s not a guarantee, but it is possible.
The reality is that we are going to be more successful using behavior to change the way we think than to expect thinking to change the way we behave.
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