You Can't Tell Me What to Do

Nobody tells me what to do.

Especially me.

I'll spend five perfectly good minutes giving myself a list of completely reasonable instructions.

Start dinner.

Fold the laundry.

Answer that email.

Schedule the appointment.

Drink some water.

Then I'll immediately develop a passionate interest in literally anything else.

I used to assume this meant I lacked discipline.

Now I've decided I was just talking to myself like the world's worst boss.

There's an entire body of research around something called psychological reactance. Humans have a deep need for autonomy. The more our freedom feels threatened, the stronger our instinct becomes to protect it.

Usually we think about this happening when someone else tells us what to do.

But nobody warns us that one day we'll become the person barking orders at ourselves.

The manager.

The employee.

The rebellion.

All living under the same roof.

Our brains are remarkably good at solving problems.

They're considerably less enthusiastic about taking orders.

A command has one acceptable outcome.

A question has infinite possible answers.

Psychologist George Loewenstein proposed something called the Information Gap Theory. Curiosity appears when the brain notices a gap between what it knows and what it wants to know. Once that gap exists, the brain starts trying to close it.

It's why you'll jump to IMDb trying to remember where you've seen an actor before.

Why a song lyric leaches onto your brain and won't let go. 

Why you can walk into the kitchen, forget why you're there, walk back into the living room, sit down, and it pushes the reason from your butt back up to your brain. 

Your brain is always trying to close the loop.

Unanswered questions become unfinished puzzles.

And brains hate unfinished puzzles.

"Make dinner."

Resistance.

"What's the easiest dinner Future Me would actually be grateful for?"

Now your brain has a puzzle to solve.

Not because it's suddenly more disciplined.

Because solving puzzles is one of its favorite jobs.

Researchers studying self-persuasion have found something equally fascinating.

We're often more convinced by conclusions we arrive at ourselves than by advice someone else gives us.

Even when that someone else... is us.

We've spent years issuing ourselves commands.

When our brains may have been waiting for questions.

It made me wonder how many of us have been trying to motivate ourselves with the exact strategy our brains are least interested in.

Especially women.

Many of us grew up being evaluated long before we were ever invited to get curious.

Good enough?

Pretty enough?

Thin enough?

Helpful enough?

Productive enough?

Successful enough?

Those aren't really questions.

They're pass-or-fail exams wearing question marks.

Eventually we internalize the evaluator.

Without realizing it, our inner dialogue starts sounding less like a trusted friend and more like an annual performance review.

Why can't you ever get your act together?

Why are you always behind?

Why are you like this?

Those aren't open questions.

They're looking for evidence.

Evidence that we've already failed.

Curiosity sounds different.

What's making this harder than it needs to be?

What am I actually looking for right now?

How could I make this easier?

What's the next smallest step?

Questions don't demand compliance.

They invite discovery.

Curiosity quietly accomplishes what criticism has been failing at for years.

One is interrogation.

The other is investigation.

I absofreakin love it when I get to see clients stop treating themselves like a problem to solve and start treating themselves like someone worth understanding.

Maybe your brain wasn't resisting the task.

Maybe it was resisting being told what to do.

One assumes you need to be managed.

The other assumes you're human.