Willingness and wantingess

[Guest guest]

Bill Cameron contacted me and suggested I put an oar in the water here. On September 9th he’d cited my ACT book for parents of anxious kids and the idea of “willingness” versus a word I just made up- “wantingness”. Willingness is a slippery concept. In fact, Steve always says that willingness is “no thing”; it’s not something one does apart from just doing what is there to be done. It’s just people going about their day-to-day lives- getting out of bed when they’d rather sleep in, plunging into their work or school tasks even though it’s boring or stressful, standing in the rain watching their child’s soccer game on Saturday morning (I’m in Seattle). It’s unlikely that people really WANT to do these things, at least not all the time. But they’re willing to in the service of some larger story they have to tell themselves- people are counting on me to be there, I need to keep this job or do well in school for various reasons, I’m a good parent and this is what good parents do.As a child psychologist I encounter kids who have a hard time with this. They think they have to want to do something in order to do it. They call it “motivation” and claim they lack it. Parents buy into this and bring them to me to somehow get them motivated. I get some variation of “I can’t do my homework because I don’t want to. When I obtain the motivation (God forbid) I’ll be able to do it”. The other kids must be doing their homework because they want to. Adults surely do all the stuff they do because they want to. As if. No, people often do things, not because they want to, but because they are reasonably sure that this action will get them something positive or perhaps help avoid something even more unpleasant (think flossing). Without a story that dignifies and gives meaning to our current struggle and pain, any of us will be dead in the water. The story (commitment) allows for the acceptance piece that allows appropriate action to just happen. We make room for, but not buy into or attempt to purge, the habitual, negative commentary; all those reasons we give ourselves to avoid, resist, and hesitate. Interestingly, it can happen that in the moment of action even the story fades into the background. For that moment, we are just doing. We go from verbiage to verb. The stark and hopeful fact is; for much of what life is asking of us we can’t wait for “wantingness”, we have to “just do it”. The late comedian Winters once commented on his career; “I couldn’t wait for success, so I went ahead without it”.