Effectivity

Building Effective Attitudes Part 4 - Conation

If cognition is what you believe about skydiving, and affection is what you feel about skydiving, then conation is the likelihood that when your turn comes, you will throw yourself out of the plane and skydive. 

Conation is simply how we intend to act towards a particular subject or in a particular situation.  It is the component of your attitude that is most closely linked to your behaviour, but it is also interdependent with the other two components, cognition and affection.

Conation is very difficult to modify by itself.  Think about it logically.  If you want to increase your intention to practice your rodeo riding, then you might alter your beliefs about how beneficial the extra practice would be.  You might modify your feelings so that you enjoyed your practice more.  But it would be very difficult to increase your intention to train without changing these two other components.  Intention is very difficult to change independently.

The most effective way to increase (or decrease) our conation of a situation is to concentrate on either our affect or cognition.  As we saw in the first part of this series, the three components of our attitude tend to stay in balance.  If our feelings towards the subject increase, then we will automatically increase our beliefs and intentions to keep pace.  If our beliefs strengthen, then our feelings and intentions will also tend to strengthen.  This is our own internal balance at work.  We tend to see ourselves as coherent, balanced beings and any conflict between what we believe, feel and intend is quickly modified to regain balance.  We all aim for integrity in our attitudes.

This consistency between the three subjects can be described in terms of Valance or Intensity.  Valance is the polarity or direction of the feelings, beliefs or intentions.  Whether they are positive or negative, favourable or unfavourable towards the subject.  The Intensity refers to the quantity or strength of the feelings, beliefs and intentions.  Think of this as the degree of commitment that you hold to your feelings, beliefs or intentions. 

Both the valance and intensity of these three components always tend towards balance.  If one component moves away from the other two, then a tension exists until the three are realigned together.  What we have to realise is that it is intensity that determines which component gives way and which component drives the overall attitude. 

If you believe that walking in the park is a good way to reduce stress, and you feel relaxed after walking in the park then you will be likely to want to walk in the park regularly and so your attitude will tend to compel you to walk.  However, you find that over the course of a week, you gradually stop feeling relaxed after your walk, and in fact you keep feeling stressed after walking.  There is now an unbalance.  Do you still intend to walk?  The valance of the relationship is divided, the belief is positive and the feeling is negative. Something has to give way.  It all comes down to the intensity of the positive belief compared to the intensity of negative belief.  In our case we are fortunate, in that the belief that walking can reduce stress is still stronger than the feeling that it causes stress.  This means that the overall attitude remains positively inclined towards walking and so you will still intend to walk.  Your belief will overpower your feelings and you will tend to feel less stressed as a result.  You will continue to head out the door for your walks and will most likely discover that your feelings of remaining stress are not related to walking at all, and so your re-balanced attitude is justified.  This is how the attitude balance works.

What does this mean for us as we try to modify our attitudes to increase our effectivity?  We must concentrate on the valance and intensity of what we believe and what we feel towards the subject we are interested.  We should select the component that is most easily and powerfully modified.  We should then strategically control this component so that it has an intensity greater than the other components so that our overall attitude will tend to strengthen towards our desired outcome. 

This works as powerfully when we want to create a favourable attitude towards something we want to occur as it does when we want to create a negative attitude towards something that we want to avoid.  It will help us to give up habitual procrastination as much as it will help us develop a develop the habit of effective personal networking.  The secret is in using our beliefs, and our feelings to shape our intentions in directions that we choose.

What have you learnt about your attitudes from this 4 part series?  How will this make you more effective in pursuing your goals?

Thanks

Tom