My wife Kendra is now within six months of retiring from a job she has done for 34 and a half years.  Work hasn’t ever been a passion for her.  She has epitomized the expression “you take your skills to work and save your life’s passions for home”.  She is much more driven by creating beauty in her environment than administering construction projects.   As she gets closer to retirement, a familiar refrain of “I don’t want to go to work” has arisen much more frequently in our morning “sink-side chats”.

In contrast to this is her feeling that she has to go to work.  One morning this week she got out of bed obviously under the weather from a cold, and I encouraged her to stay home.  “I can’t,” she said.  “I just have to go … I have way too much on my plate.”  In summary, she feels she has to do something she really doesn’t want to do.

This discussion brought to mind a philosophy a colleague of mine (AB) employs. AB is one of the most thoughtful, thought provoking and spiritual people I know.  He insists that he will not do anything he doesn’t want to do.

At first blush, this approach can seem to be extremely self-limiting.  As we think about it, there are lots of things we don’t want to do.  Some I have heard lately:

I don’t want to do the paperwork.

I don’t want to go to the doctor.

I don’t want to hold someone accountable.

I don’t want to speak in public.

I don’t want to do the dishes.

I don’t want to eat my brussel sprouts.

I don’t want to go to work…

When I delve deeper with AB what I find is that the list that he doesn’t want to do isn’t that long.  But if he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t do them.

What’s AB’s secret?  He listens to his inner board of directors.  He hears the voices chattering at him saying “you don’t want to do this”.  When he hears them, he inquires as to whether that is really true or not.  He works to understand the inherent value (or lack thereof) associated with the thing he doesn’t want to do, and then re-evaluates if he actually wants to do the thing he originally didn’t want to do.

Sometimes AB decides he wants to do the thing as it has good value.  Sometimes he decides that the thing needs to be done, but perhaps there is another way to get it done like outsourcing or delegation, and sometimes he just chooses that he doesn’t want to do the work because it doesn’t have enough inherent value to expend limited resources on.  It allows him to be his best on those things he chooses to take on.

It occurs to me that there may also be an opportunity for re-framing here.  I have not
chatted with my colleague about this, but I sense that part of the magic is hearing ourselves say “I don’t want” and then asking the mirror question of “what do I want?”

We encounter the thing we don’t want to do, we acknowledge that feeling as real, we ask ourselves what we do want and we revisit the thing we don’t want to do to see how it fits in.

Let’s look at a few of the examples I listed above using this approach:

So thanks to both my wife and my colleague for raising my awareness in this realm.  I now know that I should not do anything I don’t want to do.  What will work better is to focus on what I do want to make happen, and see the things I don’t want to do merely as steps on the path to achieving what I want.

How does this resonate?  Do you have any experiences that align with this type of approach?