Struggling with motivation
Having hope during dark times, part 3 of 3
Link to Part 2 | Link to Part 1
If you spend time with children, you know that there’s some drama in what’s for breakfast. Inevitably there comes a day when misfortunes align and the one thing they want for breakfast is the one thing that’s missing from the pantry. Often, tears abruptly follow. Then, exasperation on your part. Shortly thereafter, the best attempt at bargaining you can muster so early in the morning.
“We can get you some when we’re at the market!”… “This cereal is just as good!” … “How about this one! This one has marshmallows!”… “Well, you can have this cereal or you can have eggs and toast. Which would you like?”
You might be able to “sweet talk” them into a deal. But, the experience seems so visceral, any resolution feels arbitrary at best. If there is a resolution, it feels like you got lucky. You’re left thinking something like, “Well, that worked this time, but…”
At its core this interaction is about unfulfilled desires. It’s about what it feels like to want something you can’t have, to want something you just can’t get. As “the adult” in the interaction, it’s your job to deal with the reality of the situation. The kid needs to eat and for whatever reason they can’t eat what they want to eat. Their appetite is left unfulfilled.
Some deal with these kinds of realities by heading them off at the pass — you don’t really give the kid a choice to begin with or if you do, you give them only limited choices that you are certain you can fulfill (i.e. a “closed choice”). But, neither of these strategies get to the core of the issue; it feels crummy to want something you can’t have. It feels so bad, it hurts, hence the dreaded early morning tears.
If you’ve been following along in this series of posts, you may have noticed a theme around feelings — feeling your feelings is important! But, as I have mentioned before, there are lots of ways in which we are both subtly (and not so subtly) socialized to avoid our feelings, especially sadness and anger. This situation is but one of many where the feelings are real and the strategies proffered often come at the expense of the feelings. We learn to try to avoid negative feelings very early on in our lives, despite their lifelong utility!
While I am a big supporter of empathetic listening, for many of you it may feel like it falls short in the scenario above (though it may still be worth a try!). Being allowed to express a negative emotion may in itself facilitate coping with the negative feeling. But, saying something like “I hear you’re angry because you can’t have the cereal you want,” just doesn’t come naturally to many folks. It feels a little too passive (but, again, it may be worth a try!).
If you’re looking for a “more active” strategy, Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish recommend engaging children in their fantasies in order to demonstrate your understanding of their negative experience and to defuse the situation without squelching your kid’s feelings at the same time. Here’s an excerpt from their classic parenting book, “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So That They’ll Talk”:
At this point, you may be wondering what any of this has to do with staying motivated in dark times. So, let me cut to the chase: you may lack motivation because you’ve learned not to want as a strategy for coping with not being able to have what you want. You may, in fact, even positively label this strategy of learning not to want as “being realistic” or “being an adult.” Call it what you’d like, but while it helps you avoid the immediate pain of not being able to have what you actually want — it also snuffs out desires altogether. You simply learn to stop wanting, especially during dark times.
This is why Faber & Mazlish’s advice is so powerful and noteworthy. They relieve some of the pain of an unfulfilled desire by doing something completely counter-intuitive: leaning into the desire.
“I wish I had the magic power to make a giant box appear.”
It’s a playful response in the face of pain. It communicates understanding, without rationalizing or intellectualizing. There’s no attempt at explaining the feelings away or bargaining for better behavior. Simply and powerfully, it simultaneously allows the desire to be expressed and celebrates its expression.
So, this is the final strategy around motivation in dark times: allow yourself to dream your dreams. Lean into them. Actively imagine them. We talked about feeling your feelings in part one. We talked about savoring the small stuff in part two. Now, it’s all about dreaming your dreams.
Which leads me to one of the most difficult questions:
What *do* you want?
“It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.” Abraham Maslow
Let me be clear — it’s hard to know what you want. There are a lot of common pitfalls in this space. Situations where it seems like you know what you want, but you actually don’t. It’s not that you’re actively lying to yourself per se… it’s more like you’re of multiple minds (or hearts) about it. You kind of want Toasty Crunchies and you kind of want fruit and yogurt…
Here’s a common pitfall that’s also very timely: New Year’s Resolutions.
Resolutions are not desires.
Resolutions, as the name implies, are things we have resolved to do. They are, at best, strong intentions. Not to get caught up in the philosophy of action and the many debates around intention, but they miss the mark when it comes to motivation. Many of us have, for example, detailed lists of “strong intentions” to improve ourselves around this time year (i.e. lose weight, work out, make more money, drink less, read more…really any of the most common New Year’s Resolutions), but these intentions rarely seem “strong enough” to motivate a real change in behavior. So, discouraged and feeling a bit sheepish, we fall back into our previous habits and find ourselves on the eve of yet another new year, scribbling down the same set of resolutions we had the year before. It’s like some kind of weird, annually recurring, super de-motivating version of Groundhog Day.
Again, it’s not, exactly, that you don’t want to improve, it’s more that you want to want it (which is different from just wanting it directly). To make matters worse, you might fall into the trap of thinking that if only you had “more self-control” or “more willpower,” you’d actually achieve your goals. But, the science of self-control is pretty complicated. Even if you “master yourself” and create the circumstances to change your habits, this isn’t the kind of desire that’s inherently motivating in the long term. If you’re “mastering” yourself, then what are you doing to “the other” part of your self?
To put it kindly, this is the psychological equivalent of telling yourself to eat your vegetables. In the scenario above, you’re leaning into the role of the parent, not the child. I’m asking you to focus on the part of the child, to summon the kind of wanting that hurts if you don’t get it, not the kind of wanting that hurts when you do get it.
An easy test to differentiate between the two is to ask yourself if you’re “should-ing” on yourself. It’s as pleasant as it sounds. As in, “I should eat my vegetables.” Or “I should read more.” Or “I should work out.” These statements may all be true, but they’re also exhausting, which is the opposite of inspiring. They don’t motivate. They berate.
Inspiration requires vision. Dream your dream!
Few things inspire action like a great vision. In a professional setting, this means clearly establishing why you exist as a company and aligning decisions based primarily on that purpose. This is why most people will know exactly what company I’m referring to when I say, “the happiest place on Earth.” It’s because it’s more than a tagline or empty slogan, it genuinely inspires behavior on the part of the guests and the “cast members.”
On a personal level, your New Year’s Resolutions are likely missing a subtle, but important and visceral component. Why do you want to lose weight? Why do you want to read more? What’s your vision for each resolution? A careful reader may notice a parallel with the breakfast scenario — visions are a form of fantasy. “I wish I had the magic power to make a giant box appear.” The sentence makes you imagine a giant box of cereal, no? You *see* the box in your mind.
If you’re feeling a little cynical, you may find yourself writing this off as merely wishful thinking. But there’s an important distinction between imagining a compelling future and embracing a cognitive bias that holds something to be true or false, merely because we wish it so. The latter does not motivate action. Wishful thinking ignores or overwrites information that contradicts our wishes. It promotes living in denial and inaction. “Dreaming your dream,” on the other hand, not only acknowledges the differences between the current state of affairs, it also motivates movement towards a specific future. There’s no denial. If anything there’s a kind of “push” for making the new reality come true — the vision draws you towards it.
Put another way, visions root motivation in sensation. They make things visceral, specific, and immediate. They help bridge the gap between the real and the imaginary. The word itself bridges the gap between the intellectual (an idea) and the physical (sight). That’s probably not an accident!
So, instead of New Year’s Resolutions, what would New Year’s Visions or New Year’s Fantasies look like for you? Here are a couple examples that illustrate the difference: “Losing weight” is a resolution. “Going to the beach and feeling good about my body in a bathing suit” is a vision. “Working out” is a resolution. “Feeling good as I take my dog for a long run” is a vision. So is “being strong enough to pull off the most epic dance move” (you’re welcome).
What future can you imagine? What futures feel compelling to you? When you imagine your future, what brings a smile to you face?
Inherently motivated to play.
So, what’s going on here? Why is a vision so much more effective at motivating behavior than a rationally rooted argument? Plainly, I believe it’s because visions are a form of play. Visioning is engaging in fantasy and that’s way more fun than trying to “will yourself” into doing something. It feels good to imagine an idyllic future or an exciting future. It makes you smile and eager, whereas “should-ing on yourself” feels exactly like it sounds…crummy… No one ever says “Man, I should all over myself this morning” with a smile on their face.
Moreover, play is intuitive. If you have a dog, you know when they want to play (there’s even an evolutionarily established gesture around it)! If you have children, you know that they want to play too. Which really should make you wonder… why don’t you play more often?
As an “adult,” you may have a knee-jerk reaction here — you don’t play very often, because you have to work! Who else is going to get everything done around here?! I have responsibilities! There are bills to pay and chores to do! (You might as well add a “Bah! Humbug” for good measure.)
But, according to Dr. Stuart Brown author of “Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul” and founder of the National Institute for Play (awesome):
“The opposite of play is not work — the opposite of play is depression.”
When was the last time you did something for fun? Think about it. If you’re struggling with motivation, you probably have things you think you should be doing (i.e. things with lots of reasons supporting them), but when was the last time you did something without a reason? When was the last time you played? What did it feel like to play?
Dr. Stuart Brown lists common “play styles” or “play personalities” in his book, but this kind of thing should be pretty intuitive and I don’t put much stock into typologies generally. But take a look, especially if you’re having a hard time thinking about the last time you played. If you’re drawing a blank, then there’s probably a lot of opportunity to grow here — not in an “eat your vegetables” kind of way, but in a “get back in touch with your inner child” kind of way.
Regardless, tomorrow will be a new day. What are you going to eat for breakfast? Now that you’re “the adult” you get to decide! Why not a giant bowl of the one thing you always wanted as a kid? Maybe it’s not an “all-the-time” food, but it can be a “sometimes food,” no? Especially, if it’s a fun treat that reminds you to make time for play and for dreaming your dreams however big or small!
In all seriousness, if you’re struggling with motivation, I hope this brief series of articles has been helpful. I think starting with feeling your feelings makes a lot of sense. Then, learning to savor the small stuff and finally, allowing yourself to dream your dreams.
When you allow yourself to play, motivation follows.
Please share this with your Medium friends and click the ♥ button below to spread it around. Also please share how you’ve been playing recently in the comments below! Here’s to a 2021 full of play!
