Episode Details

In How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett explains that you don’t see the world “as it as,” but rather you construct it, moment by moment, by filtering and analyzing the torrents of sensory input that you receive.

The main tool your brain uses to do this, once you’ve acquired language, is categories.

What category includes the following?: a house, a fly swatter, a beekeeper’s suit, and a degree in entomology.

Things that protect you from stinging insects.

Cool, huh? These items have nothing in common, except for a specific goal. And once you’ve formed the goal, you can add other things to the category: a bottle of DEET, a zapper, a plane ticket to Antarctica.

Conscious and Unconscious Goals

Whether you’re aware or not, you approach every situation with multiple goals. These goals shape what you notice, what you prioritize, and how you behave.

You’re aware of some of your goals: “find out what this person thinks” or “build team safety and camaraderie” or “impress the boss.”

But you also have goals that are running below your conscious awareness, like “be the smartest person in the room” or “avoid conflict” or “don’t draw attention to yourself.”

Can you see how the unconscious goals might interfere with and even sabotage your conscious ones?

How Unconscious Goals Affect Perception

Unconscious goals are even more powerful than conscious ones in determining what you experience in any given situation. That’s because you’re not aware of them, so you can’t perform any reality checks.

If your goal is “be the smartest person in the room,” your brain will be working as follows:

1. Other people’s ideas are stupid, or flawed, or incomplete
2. When people ask me questions, they’re challenging my competence rather than being genuinely curious.
3. All feedback is actually criticism.

If your goal is “avoid conflict,” here’s what your brain will do:

1. Anyone expressing a strong opinion is being dangerously aggressive.
2. All disagreement is a personal attack.
3. All sighs, glances, and movements signal tension that could erupt into conflict at any moment.

If your goal is “don’t draw attention to yourself,” your brain will automatically perform the following tricks:

1. Anyone who speaks up confidently is showing off, and is not to be trusted.
2. Any opportunity I might volunteer for will expose me to judgment, and is too dangerous to consider.
3. My own contributions aren’t good enough to share.

In each case, the unconscious goal acts as an invisible filter that constructs your experience of the situation before you even have a chance to think critically about it.

These goals are so harmful because you don’t experience them as goals. You experience the distorted perception they engender as reality.

Positive Thinking Doesn’t Tip the Scale

I’m a big believer in uprooting the schemas — the unconscious ways of seeing the world — that underly these goals. The process of doing so — activating the original belief and exposing it to disconfirmatory knowledge — can be surprisingly tolerable, brief, and effective.

But what do you do in the next meeting, the next one-on-one conversation, or the next performa