Are Satin Underpants the Secret to Success?

When you are deciding who to hire for a job, or who to go out on date with, what kinds of information influence your decision?  Do you consider his or her education and background?  Sure I do.  What about friendliness and social skill?  Of course.  And physical appearance?  You bet.

What about the kind of chair you happen to be sitting in while making your decision?  Or perhaps the kind of object you happen to be holding in your hand?   My chair? No – nothing like that could possibly be affecting my judgments, right?

Wrong.  Your sense of touch is influencing you a lot more than you realize.

Most of us have grown accustomed to the idea that our mood, and even our judgments, can be influenced by unrelated experiences of sight and sound – we feel happier on sunny days, more relaxed when listening to certain kinds of music, and more likely to lose our tempers when it’s hot and humid.  But very few of us have even considered the possibility that our tactile experience – the sensations associated with the things we touch, might have this same power.

New research shows that the weight, texture, and hardness of the things we touch are, in fact, unconsciously factored into our decisions about things that have nothing to do with what we are touching.   Potentially, every decision we make.

Let’s start with weight.  Heaviness is something that we usually associate with seriousness and importance.  Consider expressions like the “gravity of the situation,” the trouble “weighs heavily upon him,” or she is  “carefree and light-hearted.”  So what happens when we make a decision while we are holding something heavy?

In one study, people who held a clipboard that was nearly 10 times heavier than their peers rated a job candidate they were reviewing as much better overall, and as having displayed more serious interest in the position.  In a second study, heavy clipboard holders recommended allocating significantly more government funding to serious social issues (like pollution) than lighter clipboard holders.  So when we are holding something heavy, we see seriousness and importance in people and issues that we might not otherwise.

(Tip:  Perhaps if you want to make the best impression at an interview, you should start by asking your potential employer to please hang on to your set of encyclopedias, that you just happen to bring along, while you use the restroom.)

Next, the researchers examined the effects of texture.  We associate smoothness and roughness with ease and difficulty, respectively, as in expressions like “smooth sailing,” and “rough road ahead.”   Once again, the studies show that people unconsciously transfer their tactile experience of roughness to their interpersonal decisions.  For instance, people who completed a puzzle with pieces that had been covered in sandpaper later described an interaction between two other individuals as more difficult and awkward than those whose puzzles had been smooth.  In another study, feeling roughness led participants to negotiate poorly, offering their opponent a better deal than the smoothness-feelers offered, because they saw the bargaining task as more difficult.

(Tip:  Never try to buy a car or negotiate a raise while wearing a wool sweater.  Consider satin underpants instead.  Everything seems easy in satin underpants.)

Lastly, the researchers studied the effects of experiences of hardness and softness.  We often associate hardness with qualities like stability, rigidness, and strictness, and softness with flexibility and yielding.  Consider expressions like “an iron will” and she “melted like butter.”

As with weight and texture, hardness exerts an influence on our perceptions and behavior.  People who had earlier examined a hard piece of wood judged an employee interacting with his boss as more rigid and strict than did people who had examined a soft blanket instead.

The tactile experience doesn’t always have to come through your hands, either.  In a second study, the researchers found that sitting in a hard wooden chair (instead of a soft cushioned one) made participants adopt more rigid, less cooperative negotiation strategies.  Each person was told to make an initial offer for a new car (worth $16,000).  After their first offer was rejected, they were told to make a another.  Hard chair sitters’ second offer was, on average, $350 closer to their first offer than soft chair sitters – in other words, the hard chair sitters didn’t want to budge from what they had originally said the car was worth.  They had a feeling they should stick to their guns, completely unaware that this feeling was coming from their backside.  (Perhaps this is the origin of the expression “hardass”?)

(Tip:  When you want someone to grant your request, start out by making sure they are seated on something soft.  Or, perhaps, stroking a cat.)

In all seriousness, we are more strongly influenced by all of our senses in ways most of us fail to realize.  It’s worth taking the time to think not only about the sights and sounds and smells, but also the things you touch most frequently – the furniture in your home and workspace, your clothing, your bedding.   Would work seem easier with a lighter laptop?  Would your coworkers get along better with plush seats in the conference room?  You can make whatever you’re touching work to your best advantage.   Trust me, folks – this is hard science.

Get Busy and Get Happy

In defense of busywork

Busywork has a bad rep.   Keeping yourself (or someone else) busy doing meaningless or unnecessary tasks, simply for the sake of avoiding idleness, seems like a pointless waste of energy.  Only it turns out there is a point to it – recent research shows that keeping busy doing anything makes you a whole lot happier than you would have been doing nothing.   Just sitting around, bored and inert, is a recipe for misery.

But if that’s true, why then do we so often choose idleness?  Why do we do nothing, when we could almost always be doing something?  The study of human behavior is full of such paradoxes:  People are happier when they do X.  If you ask them, they’ll even tell you they prefer to do X.  Unfortunately, people often don’t actually do X – they do The Opposite of X.  And they have no idea why.

In this case, the answer seems to lie in our ability (or inability) to justify our actions.   We really do prefer to be busy than to just sit around doing nothing, and being busy does in fact make us much happier, but we just can’t bring ourselves to choose busyness over idleness without some sort of reason for the busyness.

Take for example a recent study, in which students were given the option of turning in a survey to get their candy reward in one of two places.  They could turn it in right next door, though they would have to wait outside the door for 15 minutes before turning it in, or they could turn it in at another location that involved a 15 minute round-trip walk.   The majority of students chose to sit and wait next door, rather than take an unnecessary walk.  They chose idleness over busywork (i.e., walking), despite the fact that the few who chose busywork reported being much happier when the 15 minutes were up.

But when the researchers introduced a justification for taking the long walk – that a different (though not actually better) candy would be offered as a reward for the walkers - the majority of students chose the busy option.  “I really prefer the candy you get after the walk,” they told themselves.  But really, what they preferred was doing something over doing nothing, and all they needed was a reason.   Any reason.

Two forces are usually at work whenever we do choose idleness.  First, we have an aversion to needlessly expending energy.   This aversion is probably built in to each of us as a part of our evolutionary inheritance.  Animals who waste the energy they need to find food and ward off predators are less likely to survive, so animals who spend their energy wisely have the survival advantage.

Second, human beings vastly prefer their actions to be meaningful.  We like the things we do to have reasons – so much so that often when we don’t really have a good reason for what we’ve done, we try to make one up.  We are loathe to undertake any action when we know there is no justification for it.

The good news is, now that you know that busyness is better for you and will make you happier than just sitting around, you will always have a reason to choose busyness. Get up and do something.  Anything.  Even if there really is no point to what you are doing, you will feel better for it.

Incidentally, thinking deeply or engaging in self-reflection counts as keeping busy, too.  You don’t need to be running around, - you just need to be engaged, either physically or mentally.    As Victor Hugo once wrote, “A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought.  There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.”  Keep those mental wheels turning if you don’t want to keep your feet moving.

Can you be too good-looking for your own good? Yes.

When attractiveness can actually undermine your chances for success.

I remember one year, when I was still in graduate school, a particularly beautiful young woman applied to our program.   She was extremely well-qualified, and had a strong background in neuroscience from a top university, but she looked like she had just stepped out of an issue of Marie Claire.   Frankly, she was the kind of girl I was loathe to stand next to, for fear of not faring well by comparison.  I’ll admit that I wasn’t totally thrilled at the prospect of having her around, competing for the attention of the few male graduate students who actually remembered to bathe, shave, and wash their clothes regularly.

But pretty or not, she was a top candidate, and I was certain she’d be accepted to the program.  So I was stunned when a senior professor in our department told me, quite causally in the hallway, that she had decided not to offer this young woman a position.  “I don’t think we want her here, do you?  I think she’d make the rest of us feel like we aren’t pretty enough.”

Her statement, coming from a respected and well-known psychologist nearly twice my age, seemed to me so ludicrous and appalling that I waited for her to start laughing or winking, but she never did.  And the pretty girl never did get the offer.  I doubt very much that when she later tried to figure out what went wrong, she ever considered the possibility that her good looks had been held against her.

Most of us assume that the beautiful people have it made – that being attractive gives you advantages across the board.  Much of the time, we are right.  Decades of psychological research has shown that when someone is attractive, we often unconsciously assume that they have lots of other good qualities too.  We perceive them to be warmer, kinder, smarter, funnier, and more honest, simply because they are easier on the eyes.

But recent research has shown how the advantages of being beautiful don’t always translate into greater successes. In fact, being good-looking can cost you opportunities – jobs, scholarships, promotions – depending on the gender and attractiveness of your evaluator.

Psychologist Maria Agthe found that attractive applicants for a graduate scholarship received more favorable ratings from opposite-sex raters, but not from same-sex raters.  Men were unimpressed by a male applicant’s handsomeness, and women actually penalized female applicants for beauty.

In a second study, Agthe found that the effect of an applicant’s attractiveness on their ratings also depended on the beauty of the beholder.  Good-looking raters didn’t seem to care one way or the other how handsome or beautiful an applicant was, but average-looking raters did – they penalized better-looking same-sex applicants.

In the end, we tend to think about the attractiveness of the person we are evaluating in terms of opportunities and threats.  Attractive members of the opposite sex (obviously, assuming you are heterosexual) are generally good to have around.  Their presence is an opportunity – if not for an actual relationship, then at least for some innocent flirting and wishful thinking.    Attractive members of our own sex, on the other hand, are The Competition.  Their presence is a threat – they “make the rest of us feel like we aren’t pretty enough.”   So, given the choice between a candidate with average looks, and one who is gorgeous, why choose the latter and end up feeling inadequate?  Ugly Betty wins every time.

We’d all like to think that decisions like these are objective and that the best man or woman wins, but bias is real and everywhere, and there’s no use pretending otherwise. So, what to do?

First, just to be practical, you might want think carefully about your appearance when you interview for a position, depending on who is doing the interviewing.  When your potential boss is a member of your own sex, consider a more conservative, professional look.  You want your interviewer focused on your credentials, not your good looks.

More importantly, I think each of us needs to try to be aware of our own biases when we are in the position to hire, promote, or bestow an award on someone.  Research suggests that probing your thoughts for potential bias can remove its influence.  Stop and ask yourself – is my decision being influenced by the candidate’s looks?  Am I being fair?  Would I want to be judged this way?

You can make better, bias-free decisions if you take the time to examine and question your reasoning.  If the best-looking same-sex candidate is truly the best-qualified and most deserving, hire them.  You can always avoid standing next to them at the office Christmas party.

No Thanks

Does your kindness leave your partner feeling grateful or indebted?

For reasons that, until very recently, I’d never really understood, my husband is rarely made happy by my spontaneous gifts or generous gestures.   When I bring home a favorite dessert from the supermarket to surprise him, or when I offer to get up early with the kids Saturday and Sunday so that he can sleep in after a hard work week, the response is usually lukewarm.  He says “thank you” (something he’s learned the hard way to do to keep from hurting my feelings), but I can tell that he’s a little uncomfortable, too.

This has been hard for me to wrap my head around, because I love it when he does those sorts of things for me.  It’s not the pampering so much as the thought behind it that brings me joy.  Knowing that he’s thinking about how he can bring a little happiness to my day, or ease my burden just a little, makes me feel terrific – and makes me love him just a little more.  Why in the world doesn’t he feel the same way?

The answer may lie in how our reactions to acts of kindness differ.  When someone goes out of their way to help you, you typically feel either gratitude or indebtedness (and sometimes a bit of both).

Gratitude is a great feeling.   It’s a pleasant, warm state – a sensation of being cared for and valued.  In a nutshell, experiencing gratitude makes you happy.  Research shows that we tend to feel grateful to our benefactors as a function of things like how costly the gift or gesture was to give, and how thoughtful it was (the extent to which is was tailored to our particular needs.) When we feel grateful to someone, we feel as if they have grown closer to us, we view them more positively, and as a result we genuinely want to be nice to them in return.

Indebtedness, on the other hand, is more of a focus on repayment.  It’s a sense of obligation – he gave me this, so I need to give him something in return to even things out.  Indebtedness has been shown in some studies to actually reduce gratitude, and to even be associated with negative feelings toward the benefactor, like guilt and resentment.  Feeling indebted does not make you happy.

In a recent study, couples who responded to their partner’s simple, every day acts of caring with gratitude reported feeling more connected to their partner, and more satisfied with their relationship.  But that’s not where the benefits of gratitude end – on days where one person felt gratitude toward their partner, the partner reported feeling significantly more connected and satisfied too!   Reacting to kindness with gratitude brings happiness to everyone involved.

Indebtedness, on the other hand, did nothing to improve anyone’s happiness or bring people closer together.    Receivers’ sense of obligation interferes with their ability to focus on feeling cared for and cherished, and givers get no joy out of watching their kind and loving gestures fall flat.

Interestingly, the study also found that women tended to experience more gratitude in response to gestures from their romantic partners.  For men, gratitude and indebtedness are more likely to co-occur – their happiness in response to an act of kindness is often tinged with a sense of debt, and in some instances is overwhelmed by it.

So, what can you do if you suspect that your partner feels more indebted than grateful when you do something nice? (Or, if you yourself are the one struggling with feelings of obligation?)   Really, the best approach is honest conversation.  Do you (or does your partner) feel indebted because you believe that is what expected of you?  Are you making your partner feel indebted in the way you talk about your kind gestures?  Do you make them feel guilty when they don’t respond in kind?  Only by talking together about your feelings and expectations can you clear the air, and get to a place in your relationship where thoughtful, loving support can be seen for what it is, and where it can give you both the happiness you deserve.

When More Isn’t Better…It’s Worse

Why more money probably won’t make you happy – and what will.

Study after study has shown that wealth has surprisingly little effect on how happy you are.  Most of us tend to think that if we just made a bit more money, we’d get more satisfaction out of life, or have a greater sense of well-being.  But on the whole, this turns out not to be true.   So why doesn’t money make us happy?  Recent research suggests that the answer lies, at least in part, in how wealthier people lose touch with their ability to savor life’s pleasures.

Savoring is a way of increasing and prolonging our positive experiences.  When we focus on what we are doing in the moment, when we eagerly anticipate something or relish our memories of it, when we relive it by describing it to others, we are savoring – and in the process we are enhancing our own happiness.

Taking time to experience the subtle flavors in a piece of dark chocolate, imaging the fun you’ll have on an upcoming vacation (and leafing through your trip photos afterward), telling all your friends on Facebook about the hilarious movie you saw over the weekend – these are all acts of savoring, and they help us to squeeze every bit of joy out of the good things that happen to us.

Why, then, don’t wealthier people savor, if it feels so good?  It’s obviously not for a lack of things to savor.  The basic idea is that when you have the money to eat at fancy restaurants every night and buy designer clothes from chic boutiques, those experiences diminish the enjoyment you get out of the simpler, more every-day pleasures, like the smell of a steak sizzling on your backyard grill, or the bargain you got on the sweet little sundress from Target.

These new studies show that people who have higher incomes spend significantly less time savoring their experiences than their relatively poorer peers do.  Interestingly, just being exposed to images of wealth can dampen your savoring skills!  In one study, college students who had recently seen a photo of a stack of money spent far less time eating a bar of chocolate, gulping it down rather than relishing each bite, and displayed far fewer signs of enjoyment, than those students who hadn’t seen the money.    Just thinking about wealth can make us lose sight of the good things happening to us right now.

Part of the reason I found these studies so interesting is that they fit so well with some of my own experiences.  A few weeks ago, my mother was visiting me in NYC, and we decided to treat ourselves to a special dinner at a particularly good restaurant in Little Italy.  We got ourselves all dolled-up for the occasion in dresses, jewelry, and high heels. (As the mother of two small, messy children, you’ll typically find me in t-shirts, yoga pants, and running shoes.) I was even carrying my one designer handbag (which I bought at an outlet, and treat like its made of gold).  I remember thinking in the taxi on the way down to the restaurant how much fun it was to dress up for a change.  And then it occurred to me that if I did this sort of thing all the time, I probably wouldn’t enjoy it at all.  I thought about what a shame that would be, and wondered if being rich could turn out to be, in some sense, surprisingly boring.

The good news is that you don’t have to take a vow of poverty to be really happy and appreciate your experiences to their fullest – even rich people can set themselves the goal of savoring more, once they realize that they aren’t doing enough of it.  Really, no matter how much money we have (or how little), we could all do with a bit more savoring of life’s simple pleasures.  The trick is actually remembering to do it – and that’s where if-then planning comes in.  I’ve written before about this strategy – if you want to remember to do something, decide when and where you are going to do it in advance.  (People are, on average, 200-300% more likely to succeed if they use this form of planning).  So, if you want to remember to savor, you could make plans like the following:

If I am eating, then I will remember to do it slowly and think about how my food tastes.

If I have a success at work, then I will tell my friends and family about what happened.

If I see something beautiful, then I will stop and soak it in, and feel fortunate to have seen it.

Make savoring life’s little pleasures your goal, and create plans for how to inject more savoring into each day, and you will significantly increase your happiness and well-being much more than (or even despite) your growing riches.  And if you’re riches aren’t actually growing, then savoring is still a great way to truly appreciate what you do have.

How to Put An End to Our Emotional Eating

When I’m feeling bad – whether it’s anxious, depressed, or simply frustrated - I often find myself wanting to seek comfort in the arms of a pint of chocolate ice cream or a bag of Doritos.  I know I’m not alone.  Psychologists call this emotional eating, and it is thought to be one of the major contributors to obesity in our country.

Americans are stressed out, and seeking treatment for anxiety and depression in record numbers.  Experiencing all of those bad feelings each day leads us to consume more and more high-calorie junk food, to try to make ourselves feel just a little bit better (ignoring the fact that binging almost inevitably leaves you feeling even worse).

At least, that’s how most of us, including the psychologists, think emotional eating works.  Only we are wrong.

Feeling bad does NOT make you more likely to reach for comfort food.  It’s turns out that it’s how you deal with your bad feelings that determines whether or not you’ll be brushing the potato chip crumbs off your pants.

Recent research shows that experiencing anxiety, depression, or anger is only associated with emotional eating when we try to suppress our feelings – to control them by not expressing them, by keeping them to ourselves and trying to push them out of our minds.

Aside from being a really lousy strategy for dealing with emotions for a whole host of other reasons, suppression is really hard to do.  It relies heavily on, and often fully exhausts, your capacity for self-control.  This leaves you unprotected -  completely vulnerable to temptation.  And that is why we reach for “comfort” foods – they are the sweet and salty snacks that we normally have the self-control to resist.  But if you’re using up all of your willpower trying to suppress your fear or sadness, then when the junk food appears you are practically a sitting duck.

So, how can we deal with our feelings in ways that don’t leave us vulnerable to temptation?  You can engage in what psychologists call cognitive reappraisal, which is really just a fancy way of saying “thinking differently.”  Try following these steps:

1. Don’t hide from your feelings – take a moment to examine them.  In particular, focus on what’s causing them.  Why are you feeling so anxious, so frustrated, so down?


2. Next, try to think about the cause of your trouble in ways that diminish its impact:
   
   
   
   1. Be objective (Would other people react this way?  Am I over-reacting? Am I blaming myself when I shouldn’t?  Am I being too pessimistic?)
   
   
   2. Put it in perspective (In the scheme of things, is this really a big deal?  If things don’t work out this time, is it really the end of the world?)
   
   
   3. See the silver lining (What have you learned?  How will you take this knowledge with you and use it to grow and improve?)
   
   
   
   

Tackling your feelings head on, and thinking about them in ways that will actually help you to cope with the circumstances that caused them, may sound hard, but it actually uses less self-control than suppression.

New studies show that when people use this strategy to cope with their feelings, they don’t succumb to the call of the cookie.  And of course, they tend to feel better much more quickly.  So it’s not just a good way to stick to your diet – it’s a good way to become a happier person, too.

I Told You I Would, But I Probably Won't

A surprising reason why some promise-makers are often promise-breakers

Recently, my friend Jane (not her real name, for reasons that will become obvious) sat with me over a long lunch, and listened patiently to tales of how my children were slowly driving me crazy.  “You know what,” said Jane, touching my hand and clearly filled with sympathy, “I’m going to come over sometime next week and take the kids off your hands for a few hours so you can go have some fun.”

“Thanks Jane,” I replied, with zero enthusiasm, and changed the subject.  You see, despite my fondness for Jane, I knew there was no way in hell she was going to do anything of the kind.  I’d heard it all before.  It’s not that she didn’t mean what she was saying, that the offer wasn’t genuine.  In her mind, she had every intention of coming over to watch the kids.   Jane is the kind of person who sees herself as a Good Friend, and would be outraged if I replied to her generous gesture with what I was really thinking:  “I won’t hold my breath.”

For some people, I’ve noticed, saying you are going to do something feels just as good as actually doing it.   Jane is one of those people – she had a visible aura of satisfaction about her after she made her offer to babysit.  You could practically hear her inner voice doling out the compliments. You are so generous, Jane.  What a wonderful friend you are.

Indeed, why actually follow through on the offer to watch the kids, with all the hassle that entails, when simply expressing your intention to do so feels so good in its own right?

How can we understand these promise-breakers like Jane, whose intentions start out both genuine and admirable, but who never seem to act on them?  And just as important, how can we keep from becoming one of them?

Most people assume, with good reason, that making your intention to do something public makes you more likely to actually follow through with it.   This should be true for (at least) two reasons. First, going public commits you to a view of yourself that you want to try to be consistent with.  If I tell my boss that I’ll have a project finished by the end of the week, then I’m thinking of myself as the Kind of Person Who Gets Things Done Quickly, and I want to live up to that image in my own mind.  Second, going public makes you feel accountable to someone else.  If I don’t have the project finished by Friday, then my boss will likely think I am the Kind of Person Who He Should Fire.

Telling others about your intention to do something does make you more likely to actually do it, but this is only true when the actual behavior you are committing to is desirable for its own sake.   For instance, telling your friends that you intend to watch less TV and read more is a good idea if you’re doing it because you want more time to read.

But Jane wasn’t offering to babysit because she wanted to spend time with my kids – she was doing it to be a Good Friend.   Much of the time, the actions we intend to take are desirable to us because they validate some important aspect of our identity, of how we like to think of ourselves.  And it turns out, that’s where the trouble lies.

According to Self-Completion Theory (Wicklund & Gollwitzer, 1982), when we are committed to particular identity goals, like being a good parent, a talented artist, or a successful business person, we engage in a variety of activities in order to prove to ourselves (and to others) that we are in fact good parents, talented artists, or successful business people.

Some of these activities are essential to the identity – an artist isn’t really an artist if she doesn’t at least occasionally create some art.  Other activities are purely symbolic – like self-praise (“Look at that brushwork. I am so good!”), or dressing the part by walking around in a paint-spattered smock.  When we fail at some task that is relevant to our identity (a rejection from an art gallery, a bad review from an art critic), we feel a sense of incompleteness – saddened and anxious that we aren’t living up to our mental image of who and what we are supposed to be.

To restore our sense of completeness, we try to engage in activities or show off status symbols related to the damaged identity.  A doctor who loses a patient may put in extra hours at the office, reflect on some of the patients he has healed, or spend a little extra time in his white lab coat and stethoscope.

Completeness is also enhanced by an audience.  When other people notice our symbols – like an intention to do something a doctor, and artist, or a Good Friend would do - it gives you the same completeness-boost you’d get from actually doing it.  In other words, when other people hear us talk about our identity-related intentions, we get a sense of completeness from just talking about it.  And since talking is usually easier than doing, why bother with the latter?

Recent research shows that when our identity-based intentions are noticed by other people, we are indeed less likely to translate them into action.  Ironically, the more important the aspect of your identity is to you, the less likely you are to go through with it.  In a sense, Jane may be such a lousy friend precisely because it’s so important to her to see herself as a good one.

In one study, undergraduates who were on the path to one day become psychologists were asked to write down their two most important study intentions for the coming week (e.g., “I intend to study more statistics” or “I will take my reading assignments more seriously.”)  Half of the participants watched as their intentions were read by an experimenter– the other half were told that the intention questions weren’t supposed to be in the experiment at all and would just be discarded, unread.

One week later, the students were asked whether or not they had acted on their intentions.  Just having their intentions read by the experimenter actually decreased their likelihood of acting by 30%!

In a second study, groups of second-year law students wrote about their three most important intentions with respect to becoming a lawyer (e.g., “I will read law periodicals regularly.”)   Half of the law students then made their intentions known to the rest of the group, while the others kept them privately to themselves.  Later, to measure their sense of completeness, each student was asked how much they felt like a lawyer right now, on a scale from 1 to 5.   Sharing their intention to do lawyerly things bumped completeness scores up a full point, from an average of 3 to 4.  So just telling people you are going to do some lawyer stuff makes you feel almost like an actual lawyer!

At this point, you might be wondering what you can do to keep yourself from falling into this trap.  How can you stop being a promise-breaker, someone who talks plenty but rarely bothers with the walking part?

Well, one obvious solution is to keep your intentions to yourself.   Without an audience, intentions alone won’t give you the sense of identity-completeness you’re looking for.

If you can’t do that, the next best thing would be to make sure that you think about and express your intentions in ways that emphasize how what you’re going to do is valuable in its own right, not just as a way to bolster your identity.  The father who vows in front of his pals to spend more quality time with his kids has probably just made himself feel like a Good Dad, but just reduced his chances of actually being one.  If instead, he vows “to spend more time with my kids, because they really need me right now,” or “because I love being with them,” he’s made it clear to everyone, including himself, that it’s not just about being a Good Dad – it’s about time with the kids, for its own sake.   You will get beyond the talk when you make a point of remembering why it’s worth taking the trouble to walk.

Gollwitzer, P., Sheeran, P., Michalski, V., & Seifert, A. (2009) When intentions go public: Does social reality widen the intention-behavior gap?  Psychological Science, 20, 612-618.

Wicklund, R. A., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (1982) Symbolic self-completion. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.