When I need to change something, I don’t go looking for some (as yet undiscovered) storehouse of will power. That’s just wheel-spinning, time-wasting. Most days I can’t even spell will power. Instead, I ask myself, how badly do you want this? I have to want to want to before I begin.
After years of trying to harness will power, I find I don’t stick to positive change just because I should. Pitiful – considering there’s so much room here for improvement.
I think about change and think about it, talk about it and talk about it, and still I know that until there is desire, no amount of will power will help. I only accomplish change when the deep-down want creeps in and sticks around for a while.
I once quit smoking for a boyfriend. That didn’t last. Went to the gym to impress someone there with my firm body. Hah. My toned muscles lasted about a minute after he left the class. (Obviously this behavior was when I was very young and impressionable.)
Then one day, years later, I really wanted to be a non-smoker, so I stopped. It was harder without a cheering section, but I wanted to be a person who didn’t buy cigarettes, didn’t carry them around, didn’t bum them from other people. And that worked. I’m nicotine-free about twenty years and counting.
Now to the body image thing. I am looking in the mirror and seeing a whole bunch of stuff that needs changing. I’ve made changes before, but when the urge left, so did the positive results. This time I want change to last. So I ask myself, are you really ready? Do you really want to? Some days, I don’t even want to want to. But I can feel it in the air – that day is getting closer – the day when I will do it.
With a history of both extremely NON-successful habit changes and a few major successful changes (quitting smoking) I know I won’t even try until there is a stirring of desire. It’s desire and not will power that precedes action in my case.
So here are my three steps. Boy how I wish I could claim something more logical, more mature, more focused. Nope. That would be the definition of will power. Instead, here’s what works for me.
Step One: I have to want to want to.
Step Two: Then I move to actually wanting to.
Step Three: Begin!
Or not. The or not factor is always the variable.
Ó Anita Garner 2009
Boy, oh boy. Such a powerful statement in a deceptively simple package.
I have always subscribed to your way of thinking. Problem is, it just leaves me continuing to do whatever it is I wish to change while waiting for the WANTING to arrive in its own good time. How do you summon WANT?
Then there’s the school of thought popularized by Norman Vincent Peale in The Power of Positive Thinking: It’s not enough to want or even to want to want, you must KNOW! (That goes back to will power, I suppose.)
And the funny thing is, I wrote a little ditty forty years ago when I was in high school and fancied myself a poet. Whenever it comes to mind I smile at my younger self and think maybe I had it right way back then, and all along:
I wish I was handsome,
I wish I was king.
But mostly I wish
I didn’t wish anything.
Lord have mercy, Dave/Bompah – you’ve gone and said it best.