I was having a conversation with another coach yesterday about what our biggest learning curve has been regarding our careers. She asked me a very specific question about the type of clientele I coach (writers) that brought this answer out of me, and it surprised me.
“I’ve learned that no matter how much someone dislikes the outcome they’re getting, there are people who don’t want the change bad enough.”
She coaches fitness clients, and she nodded. “They don’t want to be fat, but they don’t want to not eat in a way that produces fatness, more.”
“RIGHT?” I said. “I am the same way.”
I meant that I was the same way as her clients, not as a coach, but it made me realize something about my own weight loss journey that I think can also apply to us as writers.
I like food. I love unhealthy food.
More than not wanting to be fat, I don’t want to give up my comfort food.
This is what makes me stall in weight loss. Or makes me go back to my old habits. I really don’t want to give them up. I don’t want to stop eating the food I like.
The thing I want the most is to do what I want.
That is an awful thing for me to admit. But it’s true. It’s what makes me keep going back to the food that’s not healthy for my body. And I’m done not admitting that.
It’s one of the things I see happen in Write Better-Faster quite a bit. Writers want to write faster, but they don’t want the other things that come with faster writing. (Less thinking time, less editing time, word-vomit drafts, etc.) Writers want to write better, but they don’t want the other things that come with better writing. (Level-ing up with craft, listening to the people who review or edit their books, changing the vision they have for a book.)
And that’s okay. Sometimes, what we learn in WBF is that we don’t want what we think we want bad enough to have it. And, like I said, that’s okay. It’s where we are.
But knowing where we are is so important. Plotting ourselves on the graph of motivation or desire is important.
(Add to that, of course, places where we **can’t** change ourselves, no matter what we want. Because there’s never going to be a time when Intellection people don’t need to think, or Activators don’t need to act, or Self-Assurance doesn’t need to be their own compass, or Empathy doesn’t need to feel.)
How “much” or how “bad” do we want something… that’s the question we often get asked. How bad do you want it?
Well, sometimes, it’s important to look not at how bad you want something, but how much badder you want the thing that’s in opposition to it.
If you need to spend time with your family more than you need to write, that is not a bad thing. If you need to move fast more than you need to process or refine, that is not a bad thing. We can only be who we are.
But acknowledging that the reason we’re not changing because we want something else more… that’s pretty important to do.
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