#89: Doubting your willpower is holding you back
Do you ever tell yourself that it's your own fault that you don't have what you want in life, because you just don't have the willpower do get it? If so, willpower is not your problem, and thinking otherwise is stopping you from flourishing. Your problem is your lack of clarity and focus about what you want. Yes, really. Now, download the shit out of this episode and have a listen.
Episode transcript:
You really think you’re weak willed? Think again.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi friends. How are you doing? I have exciting news for you. Remember me telling you in the previous episode about how I was about to have a second go at the Wales Marathon, having failed to complete it last year? Well, this time, I did it. Go me. For the second time, my dad bought me some post-run fudge (probably because I pointedly reminded him beforehand that he’d done this last time), so looks like that’s a tradition now and he has to do it every time, if I ever do it again, and then there was a huge takeaway curry for dinner where I ate enough calories for 3 people and didn’t offer anyone else a taste of what I’d ordered. Those were the best bits, to be honest. I thought the best bit would be passing the point in the marathon where I dropped out last time, and while I did give a very weak, tired, internal cheer when that happened, I could barely hear myself above the the sound of my hips screaming. Big thanks to the unknown and very colourful guy in Swansea Vale Triathlon kit and odd, fluorescent socks for sharing his painkillers with me when I stopped for a stretch. A few days beforehand, a friend wished me luck and told me to ‘enjoy every mile’, which I don’t think I managed to do, but I survived, and here I am telling the tale.
Anyway, the fact that, despite plenty of highlights to the experience, running until it’s actually painful isn’t enormous fun led me to reflect on why I was doing it. For me, the answer is basically that I sign up for marathons and other longish races in order to force myself to do the training. Basically, any time I notice myself thinking about how I’d much rather sit on the sofa drinking tea than go out for a long run, and about how perhaps it won’t matter if I give the run a miss just this once, I sign up for a new race. I do like running, but amount of runs I think I ought to be doing is greater than the amount of runs I actually feel like doing, which leaves me with a problem - and, as I often say to Carrie, my running coach, I don’t want to rely on willpower, because I’ve been around the block enough times not to pretend to myself that that’s going to end happily. So, I sign up for races - which, by the way, can be quite expensive - in order to force myself to do the training for them. If you ever see me out running in the cold and the rain on a Sunday afternoon when sensible people are having a nap, it’s not because I’m having fun, or because I have impressive willpower. It’s because it’s in the training plan.
Now, if your spidey senses are tingling here and you’re thinking ‘There’s going to be a lesson here for my struggles as an anxious, self-loathing academic/writer/professional/whatever’, you’re correct. Congratulations, you know me and my fondness for analogies between running and life stuff so well. So, here we go. I’ve just been talking about signing up for races in order to ‘force’ myself to train for them, but actually, I’m not really forcing myself to do anything. I could just not turn up to the race - it’s not like the running police are going to be knocking on my door if they don’t see me at the start line. I could transfer my place to another runner, which people often do, without any financial loss. I could skip the bits of the training that I don’t feel like doing and have a go anyway, and if I end up not being able to finish the race I can stop. The possibilities are endless. There’s no gun being held to my head. And curiously, contrary to what I tend to tell myself, I’m not completely dispensing with the need to rely on willpower, either. It’s not as if signing up for a race makes the training happen by itself. I still need to get out of the door for a run on days when I don’t feel like doing it. Even so, having a race in the diary and a training plan to follow does help make it all happen. But, how, if not by forcing myself to do runs that I’d otherwise not feel like doing? And, what lessons are there in all this for the way we go about doing other things that we don’t feel like doing?
I think the main reason why signing up for a race so that I can follow a training plan helps get me off the sofa and out running is that it takes a very vague, difficult-to-grasp goal, and turns it into a SMART goal. Remember SMART goals? If you don’t, keep listening because there’s a recap on its way. Ultimately, the reason I run is to try to stay fit and healthy. Is ‘staying fit and healthy’ a goal? If it is, it’s a pretty vague one. What does it even mean? What does achieving it look like? How would I ever know I’d achieved it? Do I automatically fail if I lose any fitness at all, as we all do with age, even if we do all the right things and are otherwise lucky with our health? Perhaps it doesn’t even make sense to think of ‘staying fit and healthy’ as a goal at all. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say simply that ‘health’ and ‘fitness’ are things I care about - values rather than goals. Whatever we say about all this, it seems pretty clear that my attitude to running, as a means to help me stay fit and healthy, doesn’t entail anything specific about my day-to-day activity. I mean, it entails that I need to be doing a certain amount of running or other exercise reasonably frequently, I guess - but if I want to know what I need to do today, or this week, in order to stay on track with my goal - like, how long or how far do I need to run, at what intensity, and how often - there’s no answer, which means that on days when I don’t feel like running, I’m probably not going to do it. And although the result would undoubtedly be that I’d sit indoors beating myself up about not having any willpower, it’s actually not a matter of willpower. It’s a matter of simply not having a reason to do something at that moment that I’m not particularly inclined to do. Not going for a run is the rational thing to do in those circumstances.
By signing up for a race, however, my vague goal-that-might-not-even-be-a-goal gets replaced by a SMART goal - in other words, by a goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. ‘Stay fit and healthy’ gets replaced by ‘Run this exact distance on this exact date at this exact time and along this exact route’, which - as long as the race I’ve signed up for is within my capabilities and far enough in the future to allow time to train - ticks all those SMART boxes. Bringing it into sharp focus like this is also usually a prompt to consider other specific things I might want to work towards, too, like completing the race within a certain time. And unlike my overall ‘stay fit and healthy’ goal, my new SMART goal does entail specific things about what I need to be doing day to day. I need to follow a training plan, which tells me in detail what sort of workout to do on what days, and when I need not to do a workout.
If I’m following a training plan and I don’t feel like going out for a run, then - unlike in the case when I’m not following a plan - I do have a reason to do what I’m not feeling like doing. My reason for doing it is that it’s in the training plan, and the point of the training plan is to ensure I’m capable of doing the race I’ve committed to doing. That’s not to say I’ll be springing eagerly out of bed and out the door for my run, but having a very specific thing that I’m supposed to be doing today is helpful when it comes to motivation. Oddly, while I tend to think of signing up for races and following a training plan as a way to avoid having to rely on willpower, which I’d need to do if I left things vague, it turns out that doing the training plan involves drawing on willpower in a way that my very vague goal doesn’t. Without my training plan, not running on days I don’t feel like running isn’t a failure of willpower, because as I said a moment ago, there’s nothing in particular I’m trying and failing to use willpower to do. On the other hand, if that day’s workout in the plan is ‘run for 90 minutes at 75% max heart rate’ then it’s very clear what I need to do. I either need to get out and do it, or sit there indoors in the knowledge that I have very clearly and unambiguously not done the thing I need to do, and the prospect of that really takes the shine off the idea of lazing around. It turns out that when I say to Carrie, ‘I don’t want to rely on willpower’, what I actually mean is, ‘I need a goal that has clear implications for what I need to be doing on any particular day’.
One thing I notice in coaching sessions is that many people - and this applies to me too - have professional and other goals that are much more like ‘stay fit and healthy’ than ‘run this particular race on this date’. A lot of the people who come to me for coaching want help with leading a more satisfying life, but when I ask them (as I invariably do at some point in the first session) what success here will look like, they’re not very clear about it. They need to give it some thought. At the same time, they’re often down on themselves for not making the sort of progress they think they should be making - although exactly what satisfactory progress looks like is also something they’re not clear about. They just have a very vague sense of ‘My life isn’t going the way I want it to be going’, and they think the reason is that they’re flawed in some morally-relevant way: they’re weak willed, lazy, stupid, and so on. But they’re wrong. They’re not any of those things. The problem is that they’re not clear about what they want and why, and as a result there’s nothing specific that they need to be doing today in order to achieve what they want. They’re acting rationally, just as I act rationally when I don’t go for a run because my only goal is to stay fit and healthy.
Now, this isn’t just a matter of terminology. Understanding what’s going on and what motivates us is really important. Coaching sessions with the sort of clients I’ve just described tend to end up focusing on articulating specific goals to work towards, and making plans for how to get there. And something really weird happens here. People are scared of being specific. They don’t want to make SMART goals and think about the specifics of how to achieve them. For a long time I found that quite puzzling, despite sharing their attitude. But, in fact, this makes absolute sense for people who think of themselves as lacking willpower. Why make very clear goals when you’re sure you don’t have what it takes to achieve them? That’s just a recipe for feeling even worse about yourself. At least, when your goals are really vague, it’s pretty easy to convince yourself that you’re on track. Since it’s not clear what exactly the goal is, it’s also not clear what would constitute failing to achieve it. But, once the goal comes into focus - once it’s no longer ‘Get a nice job’ and instead becomes ‘Get this specific type of job by this particular date’ - there’s no hiding from failure. It’s very clear what you need to achieve, which means it’s also going to be very clear when you fail to achieve it.
However. Since your unsatisfying progress is not due to a lack of willpower, but to the lack of a clearly defined goal to work towards, getting really specific about what you want is going to make it easier for you to get there, not harder. Thinking of this as a willpower problem keeps you trapped in this frustrating goal purgatory: unable to live the life you want, but too afraid to think clearly about what you want and how to get there because that comes with the risk of the plan not working out, and then you really will have to accept that you’re a big fat failure.
Let’s think a little more about this ‘what if the plan doesn’t work out?’ worry, and why that’s so scary. Sometimes - very often - our plans don’t work out. But the point of plans is not to work out. I talked about this in episode #21: Let’s talk about lists, plans, and goals. You make plans because they seem, at the time you make them, like a good enough means to achieve the goal you want to work towards. It’s achieving the goal that’s important, not achieving it via the particular plan you make. As you progress, you’ll need to tweak the plan. Accept that and expect it. Plans don’t need to go to plan, so to speak. Life happens. Sometimes we’re thrown off course for annoying reasons - you fall ill, someone lets you down, you incur some unexpected financial expense. And sometimes good things happen: an exciting opportunity comes our way, we get help from an unexpected source, we end up not needing to do something we thought we’d need to do. That’s not failure, that’s part of the process. Making a plan for how to get to your goal is like using Google Maps to work out a route for somewhere you need to be. You know it’s giving you what looks like the best route at the time, but you also know the route it gives you might change as you go along - that’s part of the deal, and being able to update the route on the fly is exactly why it’s so much easier to get somewhere using Google Maps rather than something fixed and insensitive to changing conditions, like writing out your route before you head off and not having a backup plan. So, the answer to the question ‘what if the plan doesn’t work out?’ is: it’s not supposed to. The plan is not static. It’s supposed to change in response to what’s going on. That’s the point. That’s a strength, not a weakness.
So. Have a think about some of the things that you wish you’d just bloody get on with if only you had the willpower. Have a think about whether it’s really a matter of willpower. Do you actually know what it is that you want, in SMART goal terms? Does what you want entail specific things about what you need to be doing right now - today, this week, this month - in order to achieve it? If not, then shut up about willpower. Willpower requires there to be a specific thing that you think you should be doing but which you’re not doing. What you need is clarity, and then a plan. Go get it.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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