The Either/Or Trap

For about 20 minutes in the early 90's, I worked at a commercial gym where we had meetings that were supposed to get us fired up about personal training. Not about conducting inspiring and effective sessions, but about selling the sessions as if our lives depended on it. Get people to sign up, doesn't matter how.

There's an oft-quoted scene in the movie of Glengarry Glen Ross in which the Alec Baldwin character--an unabashedly venal, ball-busting, heartless jerk--exhorts his staff of low-rent real estate scammers to "Practice the A-B-C's of sales: Always Be Closing."

When the sales-team leader guy at my gym quoted that scene sans irony, I realized it was time for me to hit the road.

One of the techniques he encouraged us to use was the old either-or scam. Ask your prospective client (who, remember, hasn't agreed to anything yet) "So when should I schedule your regular sessions? For the morning or for the evening?" The implication being that those were the only two choices. Not whether to sign up at all, but when.

I refused to resort to such nonsense, which is probably why i never won the Cadillac--or even the set of steak knives--at our monthly sales meetings. I always thought it was a cheap ploy that anyone with half a brain would instantly see through.

The shocking thing, which won't be so shocking to anyone who has ever come anywhere near sales, is that the either-or trap works. Brilliantly, On smart people who should know better.

I'm sure that psychologists have some name for our tendency to see only two choices when in fact there are many more. We're always looking for ways to reduce complexity--and that is probably a very good thing, most of the time. But when we "either/or" inappropriately (or when it's done to us, as in the sales-pitch trick), reducing our course of action to only two alternatives, we trap ourselves needlessly.

In the world of fitness you see this all the time:

"Don't work out at the gym. Stay home and do calesthenics."

"Don't use dumbbells, use kettlebells."

"I'm not a powerlifter, I'm an Olympic lifter."

"Don't do triathlon, you're a strength guy."

"I don't do CrossFit, I'm a distance runner."

"Strength training? No way. I do yoga."

Or even...

"I don't real novels, I read scientific journals."

"I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."

All variations on the either-or theme, all of which close down a vast universe of possible options to just two false alternatives.

Maybe it's our bilateral symmetry, or our single dominant-handedness, or the fact that it takes two genders to perpetuate the human race, but for some reason we like it when our horizon narrows to just two choices. That's why the sales-scam works so well. It may be uncomfortable but it's also a kind of relief. It means we really have no choice at all.

I'm studying the Feldenkrais Method, which is an extremely gentle, slow, easy, relaxing form of movement that has astounding potential to improve function, relieve pain and stress, and make movement more efficient. Among other things, the Method challenges our assumptions about the way we move and the way we generally inhabit our bodies. Dancers and athletes use the Feldenkrais Method--but so do people with all manner of movement restrictions, including people who have had strokes and neurological conditions that prevent more strenuous movement.

As everyone knows, I'm also a longtime student, practitioner, and teacher of intense exercise. If someone's doing something hard, I want in. Whether it's triathlon, martial arts, lifting maximal weights, hill running, or circuit-training till you pass out, I'm into it. I love bashing up against what I think are my physical limits--and getting others to do the same--and if I don't do it several times a week, I become hard to be around.

To be honest, in the last few years since I started working with the softer side of movement, I've started to feel a bit divided. Which thing is "mine"? Which one is my "path"? Which people do I hang out with? Which philosophy works for me?

The answer, of course, is both work for me, thanks, and I'm not willing to throw either approach under the bus. There's an enormous amount of wisdom and value in both approaches--and in many approaches that take a middle path or a different approach altogether. Again, the dichotomy between easy vs. hard, yin vs. yang, is false. Feldenkrais himself, an accomplished judo practitioner, boxer, soccer player, and teacher of self-defense, as well as the inventor of perhaps the least physically arduous method of formalized movement in existence, was an embodiment of the value of educating yourself in many different modalities of movement.

And in my own improvised, winding, self-contradictory way, I seem to be on a similar path.

Whether you're talking about exercise, your career, or even your religious or political beliefs, inappropriate either/or thinking can screw you up but good.

Watch out for it.