Attitude adjustments and motivation

One looks backwards at a mood and one looks forwards at a task. I use both, I am wary of one of them, and the wariness is the useful part of this page rather than an afterthought at the end of it.

Consenting adults only. Everything on this page is about adults over 18 who have freely agreed to it.

Written from first-hand experience or extensive research by the editor.

Everything here concerns consenting adults over 18. Two ideas, related but not the same. One is a response to how somebody has been over a week. The other is an arrangement about something that has not happened yet.

What an attitude adjustment is

Not a response to an act. A response to a state.

The sulking that has been going on since Tuesday. The tone that arrived at some point and has not left. Answers of one syllable, a door closed slightly harder than it needed to be, the silence that is doing work rather than just being quiet. Nobody has broken a rule. The house has simply become unpleasant, and the person making it unpleasant frequently knows and cannot stop.

That last part is why people want it. A mood like this is self-sustaining: you are short with somebody, then embarrassed about being short with them, then short with them again because the embarrassment is uncomfortable.

What an adjustment offers is an interruption from outside, and a way of naming a thing that otherwise just hangs in the air while both of you pretend not to notice. More than one person has described the relief of somebody finally saying it out loud rather than tiptoeing round it for another fortnight.

It also converts an atmosphere into an event with an end, which matters more than it sounds. A bad mood that has been dealt with is finished in a way that one which merely faded never quite is.

The problem, which is a serious one

Attitude is subjective and unfalsifiable, and that makes this the most easily abused idea in the whole vocabulary.

A rule about behaviour can be checked. Either the message was sent by six or it was not. Both people can look at the same fact and agree what happened, which is what makes a consequence feel like one rather than like a mood.

Attitude has no such anchor. There is no fact to point at, only one person's reading of another person's manner, and once that is punishable you have built a system in which somebody can be sanctioned for how they seemed. Disagreeing becomes evidence. Being tired looks like insolence. A legitimate complaint delivered with any heat at all becomes the offence, which conveniently means the complaint never has to be answered.

That is not a slippery slope argument. It is the actual mechanism by which these arrangements turn into control, and it does not require anybody involved to be a bad person. It only requires one person to have a bad week and the other to have the authority to call it.

How to make it fair

Stop using the word attitude. It is doing no work except concealing the fact that nothing specific has been identified.

Instead, name the behaviours in advance, in the same way you would name any other rule. Not a bad attitude but the actual things: a particular tone you both recognise, walking out of a conversation, two days of not speaking, the phrase that gets used as a weapon. Written down, so neither of you is relying on how it felt at the time.

Then apply the test that decides whether any of this is legitimate: can the person receiving it agree that the thing happened? Not agree that it deserved a response, which is a separate question and can be argued about afterwards, but agree on the fact.

If she cannot, the charge is not fair and should be withdrawn rather than defended. A system where one person is the sole judge of whether the offence occurred is not discipline. See negotiation for how to write this down.

The version that works best

She asks for it.

This is the healthiest form and, in every arrangement I have seen work, the commonest one. Somebody knows they have been unbearable all week, cannot get out of it under their own steam, and says so. That removes the whole problem of subjective judgement, because the person best placed to know whether a mood has become a spiral is the person inside it.

It protects the other direction too. If the only adjustments that happen are requested ones, nobody has to worry about the authority being used to settle scores, and nobody has to become a monitor of somebody else's face.

Check it is not something else first

This is the part I would put above everything else on the page.

Bad temper is very often not bad temper. It is exhaustion, untreated pain, the week before a period, perimenopause, grief, a medication change, worry about money, or depression. All of those present as short-tempered, withdrawn and unreasonable, because that is what being ill or frightened looks like from the outside.

Delivering a consequence to somebody in that state is cruelty with a structure around it, and it does damage that outlasts the arrangement. So ask first, in an ordinary voice, out of role: is something wrong? If the honest answer is yes, the arrangement pauses and you go and be a partner instead. See health conditions and medication and periods and menopause.

Delivering one

Warm rather than cold, and short rather than severe. This is the one context where I would avoid the flat procedural register that suits a punishment, because the point is to break somebody out of an isolating mood rather than to underline it.

Then state the reset out loud at the end, because the reset is the point: the mood is finished, nothing carries over, we are back. A slate that has been cleared silently has not been cleared, because the person who was in the wrong mood is still privately waiting to find out whether it is over.

Motivational spankings

The other direction entirely. Prospective rather than retrospective: agreed before the task, attached to a deadline, meant to sharpen attention rather than to settle an account.

When it works, it works by putting a physical consequence on a date. Most of the effect arrives in the days when the thing is sitting in the diary and the work is not done. Anticipation is the active ingredient, which is why the announcement matters more than the severity.

What it can and cannot do

It creates salience. It does not create capacity, and confusing those two is how this ends badly.

A motivational arrangement is good for the thing you are perfectly able to do and keep not doing: the phone call you have been avoiding for three weeks, the form, the appointment nobody wants to book. A consequence on a date cuts through that kind of avoidance neatly.

It does nothing whatsoever for work that is blocked by depression, burnout or executive dysfunction. Applied there it adds shame to a problem that already has more than enough, and it teaches somebody that their inability to start is a character failing rather than a symptom. If the same target has failed three times, the problem is not motivation and no amount of consequence will fix it. See autism, ADHD and how this lands differently.

Designing one that works

• Specific, small and dated. Not get on top of the paperwork, but the tax return submitted by Sunday evening.
• Achievable this week by somebody having an ordinary week rather than an ideal one.
• The consequence agreed in advance and capped, so a bad fortnight cannot compound into something neither of you wants.
• An outcome for success as well as failure. A system with only a downside is a threat rather than motivation, and it produces avoidance of you rather than of the task.
• One target at a time. Three simultaneous ones is a way of guaranteeing failure at something.

Tracking belongs with the machinery at accountability and consequences, and there are ten worked versions at accountability and habit scenes.

The trap, and when to change the target

If the only reason the work happens is fear, you have built something brittle. It will hold for a few months and then break, either the first time she calls the bluff and discovers the sky does not fall, or the first week you are both too tired to enforce anything. Motivation borrowed from somebody else is a scaffold rather than a foundation, and the goal is for the habit to outlast it.

And targets change. People get ill, jobs get worse, the reason for the goal stops applying. A target that has become impossible should be renegotiated rather than enforced, and the person holding the authority should be the one who raises that rather than waiting to be asked. Enforcing an obsolete agreement is not consistency. It is inattention with a rule attached.