If I MUST, Should I WANT to?

In this article you will find out the truth about unwanted obligations and your desires. You will see how your perception of your activities alters your ability to do them and how to alter your perception in your favor. This is one of my longer articles (around 1200 words), but I think it is worth it. (Since this article concerns motivation, as soon as you finish it read how to get rid of the ‘Mondays’ and be motivated once and for all!)

If I have to do something, should I want to do it?

This question has plagued me since I became aware of my own thoughts around age 3. Prior to this, I loved vegetables. Whether spinach, broccoli, or Brussels sprouts, I would eat it, no questions asked. But something happened.

I don’t know if it was from Sesame Street or by means of an errant remark from my grandmother, but I suddenly realized that one couldn’t just WANT to eat their vegetables – they SHOULD eat them for their health! I was devastated because I had never before been aware that I was under any obligation.

Over time I began to fear obligation more than that to which I was being obligated. Meatloaf? Fine. Tell me I HAVE to eat it or I don’t get to play? No dice. (I sat at that little blue table almost the entire day before my parents finally relented.)

Despite my new-found awareness of the world’s desire to blackmail me into doing its bidding, school somehow flew under the radar. I know that I was subconsciously aware that school was something I had to do at the time, but I believe that it didn’t bother me at the time because I was too young to have the adult luxury of self-imposed obligation.

Should Happens: Self-Imposed Obligations

This is where the word ’should’ no longer becomes an external imposition. Once you reach adolescence, should becomes an all-encompassing imperative to achieve – a self-imposed obligation.

• I should do my best…
• I should make the family proud.
• You should…should…should…

For some, I’d imagine it reaches the point I just implied – statements that once started with ‘I’ now start with ‘you’. Once this happens, ’should’ becomes a part of your conscience which forces you to become something else in order to become what you, whoever you are anymore, feel that you should be.

In my case, I have slowly but surely forced myself to to do more for the ‘greater should’ over the past 4 or 5 years. This was never a bad thing until the sheer quantity of what I felt that I should be doing became so immense. Not being able to  shake the feeling that I SHOULD constantly be doing some things better and more often is something with which I struggle.

Here is an example of what was going on inside my head once I got back from France. It isn’t comprehensive.

Cover the middle column. With the ’should’ column covered, things seem a lot different, don’t they? All that is left is nothing more than making good grades in a couple classes, working in the theater, and a few things I want to do on the side. Only by constantly plaguing myself with all of the little fabricated obligations in the center do I begin to encounter problems.

Things in the left column only become external over time. We create them. Everything on the left may seem like an external obligation, but it is really something you have brought upon yourself, unless you are an unfortunate victim of illness or crime.

The goal, then, is to have as much as possible under the “want to” column with as little as possible under ‘must’ and ’should.’

(Obviously, some things, such as needing to take care of children, will never be moved since huge obligations like this encapsulate all three levels. But aside from this, most things can definitely migrate.)

Obligation Mentality

While filling out each column, I noticed that my mental state was very different for each of them. For ‘musts’, I felt like a middle-aged man nearing retirement. For ’shoulds’ I felt like a man in his upper-twenties killing himself for a promotion to middle management. But for the “want to’s”, I felt like a kid again. Each and every task under that column seemed reasonable and fun.

As an experiment, I tried moving “write more often” to the “want to” column. Do you know what happened? I started writing this article. Just by changing my opinion about something, such as writing more often, to become something that I WANTED to do, I began happily doing it. It might seem crazy and borderline-hypnotic, but this is a simple way to start taking baby steps toward altering your perception of obligation. But what if the problem isn’t so simple?

Handling Harder Things

One of my dreams is to become a comedian. Depending how well I sleep the night before, among other things, comedy falls into one of the three columns when I awake.

• Want to - Everything is fine. I write for about an hour and spend the rest of the day with a heightened sense of awareness of my sense of humor.
• Should – I slowly eat breakfast, glare at my notebook, and do something else. I search for a job while contemplating career choices. Later that evening I feel guilty – I watch some Comedy Central so I don’t feel like a complete bum.
• Must – Nothing seems funny, but I force myself to write one or two bad jokes. With the bare minimum done, I forget about it the rest of the day.

What surprises me the most is that any time I want to do comedy for a few days in a row, I continue wanting to do it. Must and should run a vicious cycle for me. One day I’ll feel like I should, so I feel guilty, and the next day I feel like I must. This burns me out and leaves me in an endless spiral of guilt and poor-quality work. The only way I can break the cycle is by changing the way I look at things.

Altering Your Perception of Your Own Expectations

How you perceive something will directly affect how you feel about it. If you alter your perception of something, it will almost always become more palatable. It also helps to take large, general tasks, and find a way to make them more immediate and specific. The basic formula is “I should… [Solution].” (You’ll actually feel like you are accomplishing something.)

• I SHOULD go running. [I WANT to walk to school today because the weather is nice.]
• I SHOULD be studying. [I WANT to find out why Queen Victoria's reign was significant.]
• I SHOULD work harder to get more visitors to my website. [I WANT to write an article that helps people, even if it is just a handful.]

For myself, I am going to take French out of my should column and put it into my ‘want to’ column.

• I SHOULD maintain my current level of French. [I WANT to watch some of my favorite movies with French dubbing or subtitles.]

What do YOU want to do?

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