Maybe you don't want to

I sometimes think I would enjoy surfing, but I know I wouldn’t want to deal with strapping the board to the roof of my car. (Image by Pexels)

“I have to force myself to do it.”

Whenever I hear something like this, my ears perk up. We all have to do things we don’t want to do, so this should be kind of boring. But what’s fascinating to me is hearing about people who force themselves to do things that are completely optional.

They speak of forcing themselves to do a specific kind of exercise, eat a certain kind of food, or engage in a particular kind of work.

I can cope with a limited amount of necessary obstacles each day before my willpower is gone. I can fill out some paperwork (ideally with dark chocolate by my side) and get to the dentist.

But if I had to, for instance, force myself to go to a barre class, call a friend, or show up at work, I’d have to ask myself whether I’m living the life I want to live. I’m exhausted just thinking about it.

If I’m boxed into a corner like this, I have to reconsider the choices that got me here. Once I get to the point of having to force myself to do something, there have already been a number of things that have gone wrong. For instance, if I’m struggling get out of bed, I might have stayed up too late the night before, booked too many meetings for the day, and failed to program my thermostat to make the ambient temperature comfortable prior to my wake-up time. If I am reluctant to send an email, it’s probably because I didn’t reply right away when it was easy to do so. There are things I can do differently next time so that I don’t have to force myself to do something that brings significant discomfort or misery.

Yet there are some things that we don’t want to do differently, even though we don’t want to do them in the first place. In pondering the root of this dynamic, I wonder if there are certain ways that we like to see ourselves — certain identities we would like to adopt — that don’t quite fit us. We want to be someone who goes for a run every morning before work even though we usually eschew the predawn hours. We want to be the life of the party even though we’d prefer to stay home with a bevy of cuddly animals. We want to grow a “side hustle” even though we don’t like working on the weekends.

Thus, there’s a conflict between what we wanted to do and what we actually want to do, forcing us to force ourselves to follow through.

If we can let go of the specific identity that we are hanging into, we might be able to find a less grim and unpleasant means of achieving our intended result. We may find that we’re better suited to lifting weights in the afternoon instead of doing the morning run. We can connect with people through online communities and cultivate meaningful relationships one-on-one instead of going to late-night parties. And maybe if we don’t like working weekends, we can work our side hustle in the mornings before the day gets going.

Last summer, I took two online courses. One course I couldn’t get enough of; the other didn’t click at all. I could have beat myself up for not doing it, or I could have forced myself to do it. Instead, I simply let it go. It’s okay that I wasn’t feeling it. It didn’t make me a lazy procrastinator who was letting myself down yet again.

There’s nothing wrong with us if we can’t do stuff the way someone else does. We are who we are and we like what we like. Instead of forcing ourselves to do stuff that saps our energy, we can allow ourselves to express who we are by doing the things that we truly find fulfilling, setting up our lives in a way that makes it easier to do so.

Maybe you just don’t want to do the thing you’re pushing yourself so hard to do. What happens if you stop forcing yourself? What possibilities could open up for you?