ourselves the lack of real change in our lives.
These terms are absolutely useless. They make zero difference!
What is “willpower,” anyway? A feeling? An emotion? A mood?
What about “discipline”? Is it thoughts or actions, or is that a feeling too? Don’t give me your bumper sticker answer either, the one that immediately comes to mind. Give it some thinking. Define it. We all use these kinds of words without really questioning them.
Here’s what I’ve found. When it comes time to make real change in your life, explaining yourself with that kind of shallow thinking makes not one blind bit of difference. I hear it trundled out by new clients all the time—“I just need a bit of self-discipline” or “I don’t have any willpower.” It’s all voodoo! You wouldn’t know willpower if it ran over you with a moped! If you are focusing on that kind of answer, you are doing the equivalent of implying that your car runs on stinky bathwater that costs you about four bucks a gallon and that you get your money from the kind lady at the bank, who sits in the back room making twenty-dollar bills out of recycled Target receipts and unicorn snot. Nonsense.
For example, if you’re one of life’s great procrastinators (and you might be still pondering whether you are or not), it’s not as if somebody says, “Yep, you’re a procrastinator, take two doses of willpower a day,” and BAM! The whole world opens up to you and off you go, motivated as hell and sucking up life goals like sugar-free bonbons on a Sunday afternoon sofa-fest, is it? The fact that you now understand you will need some sort of self-discipline to overcome your procrastinating tendencies doesn’t actually solve anything. In fact, it leaves you just as stuck as you’ve always been!
“Aha, Mr. Scottish man, but I bought that self-discipline book, and I’m going to read it . . . next week.”
*Sigh.*
That’s right, you’ve now got something else to procrastinate with. And the cycle continues. As I’ve said, knowing a descriptive term for how you live your life just isn’t enough. And if what you know isn’t making the difference for you, perhaps what you think you know isn’t what’s really going on after all!
Self-discipline is nothing more than doing what you say you will do, when you least feel like doing it.
In other words, acting in a positive way when you most likely feel negative. When I say “acting” I don’t mean “pretending”; I mean TAKE THE FREAKING ACTIONS! So, if you’re waiting for the energy or positivity or enthusiasm or for your chakra to glow a bold yellow, enjoy the wait. It’ll be a long one.
What if you are, in fact, not a procrastinator anyway? What if it’s something else entirely? (No, I’m not referring to some medical condition either.)
I’ll give you a clue. No, I take that back, fuck clues, this isn’t Scooby-Doo. Here’s the deal. There’s no such thing as a procrastinator; it doesn’t exist. It’s a descriptive term. A category. There is only someone who procrastinates from time to time and with certain things. We all poop from time to time too, but you don’t refer to yourself as a pooper, do you?
“Hello, everyone, my name’s Sharon, and I’m a pooper.”
Therefore, it’s not a case of “I am a procrastinator,” something you are, but rather “I procrastinate,” which is something you do. And if it’s just something you do, then you should do another thing instead. This isn’t some personal condition or affliction or something that you “have.” It’s not a fucking disease.
Sometimes it’s a case of just answering the email instead of watching TV. That’s hardly a great mystery of life, is it? There may be “experts” out there who offer sympathy and approval to make you feel better, but I want to give you the option of an actual better life. And sometimes that fucking hurts. Most of the great things you have done with your life included some level of discomfort, pain, or pressure. That’s just how it is. Whatever you are out to accomplish in this life, you’ll have to get more than a little okay with the experience of struggle or, hell, even overwhelm. In many ways, your all-out insistence that real-life change should be comfortable is what’s holding you down. Growth—real, seismic growth—hurts. Sometimes a lot.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
—Viktor Frankl
WRESTLING WITH EELS
When it comes down to it, it’s as if you are struggling to make your life go in a certain way while at times it seems magnetically drawn in another direction entirely. But you’re trying (or at least you’ve tried), right? It feels like you’re constantly wrestling with the things you want and feeling them slither and wriggle out of your grasp. Every now and again you come back to the fight, whether it’s with your body or your credit cards or your love life or your career, you see a glimmer of light, and then the whole thing falls apart. Again. In many ways it’s like being trapped in the cycle of being yourself. Not the great, awesome, idealistic, free-as-a-bird-with-Instagram-pictures-to-die-for self but rather the familiar, cyclical, WTF, own-worst-enemy, here-we-go-again version. That self.
You know exactly what I’m talking about here. Those times when it seems like everything is going relatively well and then . . . BOOM, you throw a hand grenade in the whole fucking thing. And you can’t stop yourself.
Y’know, those times when it seemed like you were “getting along” with your significant other and then, six, seven, or eighty-eight words later, all hell breaks loose and you’re suddenly scrambling to find someone with a pickup truck to help you move your shit outta there! Then you calm down. And they calm down. And you mumble some BS apology at each other and then you order a pizza and it fixes things, and then you both kinda forget, but you don’t, so you wait for the next incident. And then that one happens. Then the next one. And so on.
So now you’re spending $120 a month on make-up pizza while your ass is ballooning faster than a ten-dollar blow-up bed from Walmart. And you argue about that too.
All just because you couldn’t stop yourself from saying THAT THING, the one thing you always say. The thing that fucks everything up even though you KNOW you shouldn’t say it. And you say it anyway.
So, you take yourself on, bring back those twin devils of “willpower” and “self-discipline,” try a bit harder, eat a bit better, and knock out two fields’ worth of kale in a week. Then you pull the shit-pin again, and before you know it that slice of pizza that you PROMISED you wouldn’t eat somehow magically intertwines itself in your fingers and slithers unnoticed into your mouth like the sneaky little pepperoni bastard cheese-snake that it is, right? Now the problem is pizza and the battle moves to a new front. Damn, maybe the enemy really is gluten, huh?
Maybe for you it’s that dream job that you worked so hard to get. Six months in and your feet are already getting itchy. Again. Or that time you were so proud of yourself for paying down your credit cards only to blow them wide open with a mini you’re-only-young-once-I-work-so-hard-I-deserve-it spending spree . . . again! Apparently the “only young once” mantra extends well into your forties these days. And beyond.
If you’re in your teens, twenties, or thirties, yep, you have a lifetime of this madness ahead of you too. Stick that in your LOL for a minute or so.
