This activity is drawn from Marshall Rosenberg’s book Nonviolent Communication.
- List every activity that you dread, that you feel you must do, are forced to do, and have no choice about it.
- Try this on, as a stance: For each item in the list, acknowledge that you’re doing this because you choose to do it, not because you have to. Add “I choose to…” in front of each one.
(If you’re feeling resistance, that makes sense!) - Get in touch with your deeper sense of purpose. For each activity, ask yourself, “Why am I doing this? What does it get me, that’s even deeper or more important? What need does it serve, or what value does it enact?”
- Now, revisit each activity. If you’ve gotten in touch with a sense of what matters, write, “I choose to ____ because I want or value _____”. Or you might find that the underlying need or value, the fundamental reason you’re doing this thing, would be much better met in some other way! If so, cross the thing you hate doing off the list, and focus on finding alternatives.
Here’s what Marshall Rosenberg wrote about his experience:
The first item on my list was “write clinical reports.” I hated doing these reports, yet I was spending at least an hour of agony over them every day. My second item was “drive the children’s carpool to school.” [..]
I recall my own resistance to this step. “Writing clinical reports,” I insisted to myself, “is not something I choose to do! I have to do it. I’m a clinical psychologist. I have to write these reports.” […]
At first I fumbled to identify what I wanted from writing clinical reports. Several months earlier, I had already determined that the reports did not serve my clients enough to justify the time they were taking, so why was I continuing to invest so much energy in their preparation? Finally I realized that I was choosing to write the reports solely because I wanted the income they provided. As soon as I recognized this, I never wrote another clinical report. I can’t tell you how joyful I feel just thinking of how many clinical reports I haven’t written since that moment 35 years ago! When I realized that money was my primary motivation, I immediately saw that I could find other ways to take care of myself financially, and that in fact, I’d rather scavenge in garbage cans for food than to write another clinical report.
The next item on my list of unjoyful tasks was driving the children to school. When I examined the reason behind that chore, however, I felt appreciation for the benefits my children received from attending their current school. They could easily walk to the neighborhood school, but their own school was far more in harmony with my educational values. I continued to drive, but with a different energy; instead of “Oh, darn, I have to drive carpool today,” I was conscious of my purpose, which was for my children to have a quality of education that was very dear to me. Of course I sometimes needed to remind myself two or three times during the drive to refocus my mind on what purpose my action was serving.
Acknowledging the weight of constraints
Finding clarity through this activity can feel exciting, joyful, and light. However, in some cases, you may come up against a sense of stark clarity instead. For example, someone might really hate their experience of being on dialysis, but if they don’t do it they’ll die of kidney failure.
In situations like that, you can still get really specific about the aspects you find particularly unpleasant, and see if there are ways to make it suck less. You can reach out to other people who are going through similar things.
You can acknowledge how hard it is to do the thing and grieve the current constraints. And you can reconnect with what matters to you about life overall, from the smallest moments like appreciating the way sunlight shines through tree leaves, to your biggest sense of purpose, and find your stance of choice from there.
Further reading: The CFAR techniques “Goal Factoring” and “Aversion Factoring” can help you explore the specifics of what you want and don’t want out of an activity in a more fine-grained way, so that you can find more effective and enjoyable alternatives