Wanting What You Want To Want October 2007
Recently we rediscovered two major obstacles in the progression toward individual greatness. One is focusing our willpower on what we want to accomplish. Let’s face it, many of us are easily distracted from goals and dreams. But we face a larger impediment before we can focus our willpower. We don’t know what we want. We became aware of this while participating in an experiment by Dr. James Pawelski at the University of Pennsylvania.
Pawelski offers an exercise intended to increase the attention on wanting what we want to want. The entire exercise is offered at the end of this reflection. Briefly, “Wanting What You Want To Want” (WWYWW) involves helping someone focus on the reasons they want something and strengthening their will (William James defined will as the effort of attention). Once the will is strengthened the individual become self-motivated.
As we tried the experiment, it became apparent that the first challenge involves knowing what we really want. Over the years, we’ve discovered that many people have long ago put aside their dreams, wishes, goals and aspirations and have difficulty reconstructing them. When we’ve asked people to identify what they wanted to want, they had a difficulty doing this because so many other “wants” have gotten in the way. We’ve identified some of these superimposed “wants.”
Wanting What Society Wants Me to Want (WWSWMW). Society generates certain expectations. Some of them are necessary for society to function (i.e., laws, customs, language). Some expectations have been imposed by tradition, history and common practice (i.e., expectations of men vs. women, acting as an “adult”, etc.).
Wanting What the Media Wants Me To Want (WWMWMW). Many of us find ourselves driven by what the media wants us to want. We focus on the new BMW, or a bigger house. We stress about holidays because we attempt to replicate Hallmark commercials of the perfect family with their perfect holiday dinner scene.
Wanting What My Parents (family) Want Me To Want (WWPWMW). From an early age, either blatantly or by sharing desires, parents superimpose their desires on us. Despite the process of individuation, we still carry the desires our parents have for us. Some of us, never completing individuation process, are still trying to fulfill our parents’ wishes.
These are just a few of the “wants” we found that impeded people from identifying what they want to want. You may be able to identify a few more that impede you. How then can we discover what we really want to want? The process is two-fold, and takes time, quiet and some attention.
First, we need to identify all of the “wants” that are driven by others. Sorting through those wants we need to determine whether to keep or get rid of them. Second, we need to really listen to our inner desires and dreams – again! Many of us put our wants aside when we entered school, or as we progressed in our lives. We thought we were being selfish by focusing on what we wanted rather than on someone else. It’s not selfish to know what you want. It’s self-discovery and growth.
Having identified what we want to want, we can now focus on developing the strength of will we need to achieve what we want. Great individuals are very clear about what they want and focus all their will power to achieve it.
The Greatness ProjectTM is researched and written by:
Scott Asalone & Jan Sparrow
Copyright © ASGMC, Inc. 2007
What follows is the exercise by Dr. James Pawelski, University of Pennsylvania, on increasing the will. Please feel free to try it out.
Wanting What You Want to Want
One of the greatest obstacles to human flourishing is weakness of will. The Apostle Paul has given us a classic description of this condition. “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do….For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing” (Holy Bible,Romans 7:15, 18b-19). We often find ourselves in situations where we want to do something, but we know we should want to do something else. That is, we want one thing, but we want to want another thing.
In the Principles of Psychology, William James argues that what we mean by will is really effort of attention. Thus weakness of will, for James, is an inability to direct our attention appropriately. He writes that “the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will….An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence” (1981, p. 401). Further, he claims that the “essential achievement of the will…is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind” (1981, p.1166). Mastery over this ability is so crucial because our actions, he argues, follow from those ideas that are held stable in the mind.
This exercise is intended to help you cultivate your voluntary attention in order to bring your desires more in line with your values; that is, in order to help you “want what you want to want.”
Find an Aristotelian Friend (AF) to help you with this exercise. (An “Aristotelian Friendship” is simply one in which each friend focuses on helping the other become more virtuous.) Your AF goes first. Have your AF think of a particular thing in their life that they don’t really want to do, but that they want to want to do. Go with your AF to an appropriate place for exercising their voluntary attention. (For example, if it’s a matter of exercise, you might go to a gym; if it’s a matter of healthy eating, you might go to a restaurant or a grocery store.) Have your AF rate (on a scale from -10 to +10) how much they want to do the thing they selected (e.g. exercise, eat a salad, etc.).
(Here is the process.) Ask your AF what they would need to focus on to make them want to do the thing more. Keep it positive. Have them describe, in detail, the success (if it involves doing something) or the experience (if it involves some object they want). Continue this line of questioning until they get as close as possible to a +10. Remember, don’t tell your AF what to focus on; instead, ask them what they would need to focus on in order to shift their desire. If they get really stuck, though, you might offer some suggestions to see if any of them work for your AF.
End the exercise with your AF doing the thing in question (which they now—hopefully—actually want to do.)
Now it’s your turn. Switch roles and have your AF lead you through this exercise with something you don’t really want to do, but that you want to want to do.
(If you prefer, either of you can select something you want to do, but want not to want to do. In this case, you would use your voluntary attention to move as close as possible to a -10. And you would end by not doing the thing in question.)