BooksReflectionSeptember 26, 20147Can You Make Yourself Want Something?

I’ve been think­ing late­ly about how we come to do things.  It’s been espe­cial­ly top-of-mind for me as I’m writ­ing a chap­ter of my new book that focus­es on “Aspi­ra­tion” — want­i­ng things (specif­i­cal­ly, in the case of the book, want­i­ng to learn new skills or capabilities).

My focus has­n’t been on why we do things — lots of very smart peo­ple have been focus­ing on that over the past few years.  Most recent­ly, Dan Pink made a huge wave with “Dri­ve,” his book that brought Self-Deter­mi­na­tion The­o­ry to a wider audi­ence.  In SDT (as trans­lat­ed by Pink), what most moti­vates peo­ple is mas­tery, auton­o­my, and pur­pose. That is, we’re moti­vat­ed to do things that we believe will bring us an oppor­tu­ni­ty to make choic­es (auton­o­my) to get good at some­thing (mas­tery) that’s mean­ing­ful to us (pur­pose).

I agree.  The ques­tion is, can we make our­selves want to do some­thing that we don’t now want to do?  We all spend a lot of time think­ing about doing things and then not doing them: exer­cise more, be kinder to our spous­es, save mon­ey, go back to school, find a bet­ter job… the list goes on and on. The rea­son we don’t do those things is — I believe — pret­ty sim­ple.  Even though we say we want to do them, we don’t do them because we want the alter­na­tives more.  We say we want to exer­cise —  but we want to sit and watch TV more. We say we want to save mon­ey — but we want to spend it more. In order to do some­thing, you have to want to do it more than the avail­able alternatives.

So the impor­tant ques­tion is: can we make our­selves want to do some­thing enough to actu­al­ly do it? For­tu­nate­ly, I believe the answer is yes.  The secret is to dis­cov­er how the thing that you’re not doing will pro­vide you with ben­e­fits that are impor­tant to you — with mas­tery, auton­o­my and pur­pose — and to ful­ly envi­sion a future where you’re attain­ing those ben­e­fits as a result of hav­ing done the thing.

For exam­ple, let’s say that some­one — let’s call her Alex —  has been say­ing for years that she wants to exer­cise — but she con­tin­ues not to exer­cise on any reg­u­lar basis. I’m con­vinced it’s because she isn’t rec­og­niz­ing the ben­e­fits of exer­cise — not the the­o­ret­i­cal, every­body-knows-them ben­e­fits, but the actu­al, per­son­al ben­e­fits to her. She tries to “should” her­self into exer­cis­ing (I’m so lazy, I’ll just keep get­ting fat, I ought to be able to do this), but that does­n’t work.  She reads arti­cles about how good exer­cise is for your health, but that does­n’t work either.

Then, final­ly, one day Alex talks to a friend of hers who just start­ed work­ing out and is lov­ing it, and one thing the friend says real­ly res­onates: “You know, I just need­ed to find the kind of exer­cise that works for me.” And Alex starts to think, Hmmm…I won­der what kind of exer­cise I’d like? Maybe some­thing dance-based, like Zum­ba.  I’ve always loved to dance.  And then she thinks, If I did that, I bet I could get pret­ty good at it.  And I would real­ly love to feel strong and good in my body. 

Voila: real, per­son­al ben­e­fits. Auton­o­my (her own choice), mas­tery (get­ting good at it), pur­pose (feel­ing strong and good in her body) — and she’s envi­sion­ing the future where those ben­e­fits are true.

I sus­pect that Alex will now sud­den­ly be much more like­ly to start exercising.

What aren’t you doing that you say you want to do?  Think about how doing that thing might pro­vide you with mas­tery, auton­o­my and pur­pose, and then imag­ine a future in which you’re get­ting those ben­e­fits.  See what happens.…