Acting As If
“Intentionally act like the person you want to become.”
This quote from author and motivational speaker Mel Robbins, is a beautiful way to explain a type of cognitive behavioral therapy called behavior activation. It’s not a new idea, but is a powerful way of creating change from the outside-in. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a type of treatment that helps people learn how to identify and change the destructive or disturbing thought patterns that have a negative influence on their behavior and emotions.
In my social work training, I learned this principle from studying the work of psychologist Afred Adler. He called it acting “as if”. His idea was “As people begin to act differently and to feel differently, they become different.” So, for example, if we struggle to respond with empathy to others, Adler recommended we act “as if” we’re empathetic. We might practice empathetic behavior (i.e. careful listening, concerned facial expressions, etc.) and in time, Adler suggested, the feeling of empathy will come. And like Robbins suggests, acting leads to becoming.
“As people begin to act differently and to feel differently, they become different.”
We have an opportunity to reverse engineer this by deciding who we want to become and act our way into being. Is there a skill you want to learn or a trait you see in others you wish you could emulate? You can! It’s easy to believe this growth is impossible because as we move from childhood into adulthood, we get pretty firmly entrenched in our roles and even our idea of our personality or character. We start to believe the stories we’ve told ourselves about who we are. I’m funny or loud or a hard-worker. I’m lazy or uninteresting or selfish. Using “As if” thinking allows us to grow our strengths and challenge our perceived weaknesses. For example, if I’ve believed my whole life that I’m lazy, one way to challenge this notion and determine if it’s true is to act as if I’m a self-starter, hard-working and productive. As I begin to behave in these ways and see what that feels like in my body, I will notice new feelings of diligence and confidence. These behaviors practiced will challenge the notion that I’m lazy because everything in my behavior will prove otherwise.