I’ve been thinking lately about the difference between wanting something and wanting to want something. There are things in my life that I have very little trouble believing in. I believe in taking care of my health. I believe in moving my body regularly. I believe in the book I’m writing right now, and even though sitting down to work on it sometimes requires a little push, I want to finish it. There’s something underneath the effort that already knows: This matters to me. Then there are other things I keep telling myself I want, yet somehow I keep struggling to actually do them. I’ve been saying for a while that I want to get up earlier. In my head, there’s a very appealing version of this. I wake up, feed the cats, go for a walk or a run, get all my morning things done, and start working earlier. It sounds great. The only problem is that I really like slow mornings. I like drinking my coffee without rushing. I like taking my time. I like not immediately launching myself into the productive part of my day. No matter how many times I decide I’m going to get moving earlier, I seem to drift back toward the same leisurely morning routine. For a while, I’ve treated that as something I need to fix. Maybe I need more discipline. Maybe I need to go to bed earlier. Maybe I need to stop being so slow in the morning. Lately, though, I’ve been wondering whether I’m asking myself the wrong question. Instead of How do I make myself get moving earlier?, maybe I need to ask: Do I actually want to? I’m not entirely sure that I do. I think I want what I imagine an earlier start would give me. I want to get my movement in, begin working a little earlier, and feel like I have plenty of time for everything I care about. None of that necessarily means I want to give up something else I genuinely value, which is having spacious mornings. That might sound like a small distinction, but I think we do this to ourselves all the time. We decide we should exercise five days a week, wake up earlier, cook every meal at home, meditate, journal, read more, scroll less, save more money, be more productive, maintain our friendships, and somehow still have time to stare peacefully out a window. Then we struggle to follow through and decide the problem is us. Maybe sometimes we need more discipline. Other times, I think it’s worth getting curious about why we’re having to fight ourselves so hard in the first place. What Your Behaviour Can Tell You I’ve been writing about conviction for my book recently, and one of the ideas I keep coming back to is that what we do can tell us something about what we believe. Not everything. Behaviour needs context. Someone who hasn’t exercised in months may care deeply about their health and also be exhausted, grieving, injured, overwhelmed, or caring for someone else. Someone who isn’t making progress on their business may desperately want it to succeed while dealing with circumstances that leave very little room for it. Our behaviour isn’t a perfect measure of what matters to us, but I do think it can give us information. If I repeatedly tell myself I want something and repeatedly struggle to follow through, I can criticize myself for that, or I can get curious. Maybe I want the outcome but don’t like the way I’m trying to get there. Maybe something else matters more right now. Maybe I’m afraid. Maybe I don’t believe the effort will pay off. Maybe I’m asking too much of myself. Or maybe I’m simply uncomfortable because I’m doing something new. Those situations can look almost identical from the outside, but they require completely different responses. That’s why I’m becoming less interested in automatically answering resistance with more force. I want to know what’s underneath it first. I Thought I Hated Exercise For years, I told myself I didn’t like exercise. I would start workout programs and eventually stop. I didn’t particularly enjoy gyms. I’d make myself exercise because I knew it was good for me, but it often felt like something I was supposed to do rather than something I actually wanted in my life. Eventually, instead of trying harder, I changed the way I was doing it. I started incredibly small. At the time, I lived in a condo building, and I began walking the stairs for about five minutes. It was private, simple and manageable. I stayed with it long enough to experience what movement actually did for me. I noticed the difference in my energy and mood. I felt stronger. I started trusting myself more because I was following through on something I said I wanted to do. Eventually, I didn’t need to convince myself that movement was worthwhile. I knew it was because I had experienced the evidence firsthand. It turns out I didn’t hate movement. I hated a lot of the ways I had tried to make myself move. That distinction changed everything. I think we sometimes imagine conviction as something we’re supposed to have before we begin, but my experience has often been the reverse. Sometimes you take a small action before you have much conviction at all. Then you experience something because of that action. The experience gives you evidence, and the evidence begins changing what you believe. Eventually, something that once required a lot of willpower starts requiring less. That doesn’t mean it becomes effortless. I don’t leap out of bed every day thrilled to exercise. I still have days when I need to push myself to start. The difference is that I’m no longer arguing with myself about whether movement matters. I already know it does. That’s conviction. Wanting Something Can Be Complicated There are still plenty of places in my life where I haven’t figured this out. I’ve been wanting to eat a little less at dinner because sometimes I eat past the point where I’m comfortably full and don’t feel very good afterward. This seems like a straightforward problem to solve, except I really love food. In the moment, I have two things competing with each other: I want to feel comfortable after dinner, and I also want to keep eating something delicious. Both are true. Telling myself I need more discipline doesn’t really help me understand that. Curiosity might. Maybe I need to pay more attention while I’m eating or notice what makes me want to continue once I’m already full. Maybe feeling comfortable afterward needs to become something I value through experience, the same way movement eventually did. My art presents a completely different version of the same question. I miss making art. I think about it often, and I genuinely want to be doing more of it. Yet lately, I haven’t been making much time for it because I’m putting a lot of energy into writing my book, working on my coaching curriculum, and doing the business work that needs my attention. Art has ended up taking a back seat. That doesn’t mean I secretly don’t want to make art. It means we can care deeply about several things and still only have so much time and energy to give them. Sometimes choosing one priority means allowing something else we love to receive less attention for a while. At the same time, the fact that I miss it tells me something too. Maybe art genuinely needs to take a back seat right now, or maybe I’m assuming I need a huge block of free time before art gets to count. Maybe twenty minutes with my paints would give me something I’m currently missing. I don’t know unless I try. Maybe You Don’t Need More Willpower I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of the idea that whenever we aren’t following through, we simply need to try harder. There will always be things worth doing that are uncomfortable, inconvenient, boring, or difficult. Sometimes you really do need to push through. Conviction doesn’t eliminate resistance. It just changes your relationship with it. There’s a difference between pushing through the temporary discomfort of doing something you deeply believe in, and repeatedly forcing yourself toward something that doesn’t actually fit you. There’s also a difference between not wanting an outcome and not wanting the particular method you’ve chosen to get there. Maybe you really do want to be healthier, but you hate running. Maybe you genuinely want a successful business, but the marketing strategy you’ve been told you need makes you miserable. Maybe you want more time in your day, but waking up at 5 a.m. isn’t the only way to create it. The answer isn’t to quit whenever something feels difficult. Sometimes difficulty is exactly where growth is happening. I just think there’s value in understanding what you’re pushing through and why before deciding that more force is the answer. There are things I do now that would have required enormous amounts of willpower from an earlier version of me. The behaviour changed partly because I changed. I accumulated evidence. I learned what certain choices gave me. I figured out what mattered to me and what didn’t. I stopped trying to make myself do some things in ways that never worked for me and found ways that did. Eventually, some of those choices became part of how I see myself. I’m someone who moves her body. I’m someone who takes care of her health. I’m a writer. I’m an artist. I’m someone who takes care of the beings I love. Those identities aren’t rules I’ve given myself. They’ve been built through years of living them. There are other areas where I’m still figuring it out, and I think there probably always will be. I’m less interested now in immediately fixing those parts of myself than I am in understanding them. So the next time you find yourself saying, Why can’t I just make myself do this?, maybe don’t reach immediately for more discipline. Get curious first. Do you actually want this, or do you want to want it? Do you want the outcome but hate the method you’ve chosen? Is something else more important right now? Are you genuinely depleted
