Recently a woman was telling me about her eight-year-old son who, it seems, has an unusual facility for music. He can reproduce tunes he’s heard only once, singing them or picking them out on the piano; it looks as though he may have perfect pitch; and he can improvise a harmony if someone sings a simple melody. As she was telling me this, she got quite excited, talking about all the ways he might be able to take advantage of his gift.
“Is he interested in pursuing it?” I asked. She looked a little abashed. “Well, not really,” she said. “We have him taking piano lessons, but he doesn’t like to practice. In fact, he often tries to convince us that he’s bored with it and would rather focus on baseball. But he’s so talented, it would be a shame if he doesn’t do something with it.”
The italics are mine. I’ve heard people say some version of this sentence many times over the years: bosses of their employees; people of their spouses; parents of their children; friends of friends. When someone we care about has a gift or a potential in some area, we encourage them to pursue it, and then wonder why they don’t – especially if we think doing so could offer them something valuable (a better job, prestige, higher income, bragging rights, etc.).
But the problem is: You gotta wanna. When it comes to doing something new, or to developing a capability - aspiration is much more important than natural talent. Aspiration and talent are the ideal combination – but talent alone won’t get you there.
In fact, aspiration is the foundation of all real learning or change. It sounds ridiculously simple, but it’s true: if you don’t want to do something, you won’t do it. If you do it, it will be because you want to…or at least because you've come to want to do it more than any of the available alternatives. For instance, if people become truly convinced that smoking could kill them – they generally stop smoking: they want to live more than they want to smoke.
Every one of us has things we say we want to do - but don’t. These can be ‘good for us’ things (lose weight, stop smoking, exercise more, be more patient) or ‘it would be cool’ things (take advantage of our musical talent, learn to speak French, write a book). I would submit to you that getting yourself to do these things is not about discipline or willpower – you’re not lazy or pathetic or lame if you don’t do something. You simply don’t want to do it enough to actually do it.
So, how do you find your own aspiration? How do you bring yourself to actually want to do something so much that you do it?
Here’s a simple approach to engaging your own aspiration:
First, figure out what you’re doing instead. For example, if I’m not exercising when I have free time, I’m very likely to be sitting on my couch, knitting and watching TV. It’s clear that I have a choice, and the thing I want to do more at the moment is sit on the couch. Another example: For someone who says they want to stop smoking, the thing they’re doing instead that they want to do more is probably quite simple – they’re smoking. You get the point: figure out what you actually want to do (regardless of what you say), as demonstrated by the fact that you’re doing it.
Figure out how to get that same reward (or a better one) by doing the new thing. When I realized that I could read while using the elliptical trainer, it was the beginning of being able to form an exercise habit – reading pleasantly occupies my brain in the same way that knitting and watching TV do. Then I found I felt extremely cozy as a result of exercising – afterwards I felt happy in my body, relaxed and de-stressed. And though I couldn’t replicate the “making things for people” reward, I found another reward that turned out to be a big one for me – feeling stronger and more capable (especially important as I get older). My husband was able to stop smoking because he found three rewards in not smoking that were meaningful to him: worrying less about his health (especially given that he has a history of heart disease in his family), getting his sense of taste back, and not having his clothes smell like smoke. In both cases, we found rewards from the new behavior that were at least slightly more satisfying than the rewards we had been getting from the old behaviors: viola – aspiration and success.
Finally, enjoy your success. Which is, by the way, a whole separate reward, and is likely to make you want to do the new thing even more. I feel extremely self-satisfied every time I get up off the couch, go downstairs and work out…and that makes it more likely I’ll do it again next time.
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Check out Erika Andersen’s newest book, Leading So People Will Follow, and discover how to be a followable leader. Booklist called it “a book to read more than once and to consult many times.”
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