One of the ways that I misalign my life is when I’m fighting with two opposing forces about having to make a choice between the Want Tos and the Have Tos. While to some fearless, decisive warrior, this matter may be a no brainer to do. For someone like me who grew up trained to ask for permission first and get approval next, this causes quite a dilemma during one’s lifespan when you have to make a choice between fully living your best life versus living to survive. The answer seems simple and quite clear but when your mindset is conditioned to become more familiar and comfortable with incongruence, the closing of the gap between your desires and your reality can turn into an internal epic battle.
HOW DID I GET HERE?
Incongruence makes you ask the question, “How did I get here?” Beyond the initial training phase of ask first and then get approved, expectations eventually get tacked on. The expectations become a debate between doing what’s practical in life and doing what you naturally love. When you’re built to have courage, you tend to choose first to live a life that you love and also take risks. When you’re built to have fear or the need to live up to someone else’s expectations, you tend to choose to live practically and safely. I unfortunately chose the latter.
WANT TO THROTTLE AND HAVE TO WAR PATH
The beginnings of Want Tos and Have Tos start off pretty innocently during childhood. As small children, we don’t really yet have the full cognitive development to totally discern and comprehend the difference between the two. We tend to be mostly egocentric and magical thinking, putting our Want To tendencies in full throttle but also potentially on a war path with our Have To expectations imposed by our caretakers. Although all innocent, my battle scenes at times included getting me to brush my teeth consistently or getting me to take a bath before bedtime when I was so sleepy tired. You with me?
WHEN WE HAVE TO DO, WE ENTER SUFFERING AND WHEN WE WANT TO DO, WE LOSE OUR FREEDOM
Oh, the energy spent just creating my own contrived pain and suffering because I’m made to take a bath when I could barely keep my eyes open. We invent this idea that basic hygiene regimen are just so agonizing, annoying, a chore, a punishment, and for sure inconvenient during a heightened moment of existing fatigue. We go on to exaggerate, catastrophize, dramatize and make excuses for our woes. But now enter into our subconscious world a belief system that when we Have To do, we enter suffering and when we Want To do, we lose our freedom. We begin a building block for limiting our perspective towards our approach to life and how we behave around it.
INVENTION OF THE TELEPHONE
During my teens, I wanted to hang out with my friends more into the late hours (in my case, past sundown) versus having to come back home before it was dark. All normal for a teen. However, once again, the internal energy spent getting worked up about having to versus wanting to come home was inevitably draining. My parents were lucky because I was generally a highly compliant person but this didn’t devoid me either from longing to hang out with my friends. I just kept quiet but inside, I wanted to extend my time more with my friends. Thank goodness for the invention of the telephone but due to continued constraints, only spoke no more than half an hour during school nights. Imagine that kind of stipulation today with social media and texting capabilities!
BEING RESPONSIBLE
As a young adult, one of my profound dissonance was this internal pressure about having to be responsible. Of course, this entrenched idea of shouldering responsibility started off by what others expected of me since childhood but it mushroomed into indulging in the idea that this was my programming, therefore, who all I was. My believed responsibilities included making sure that I made the good grades, working to save money, aspiring to have a higher education than my parents, getting married, buying a house, being financially secure, and then retiring. Nothing wrong with this systematic, predictable, linear approach to life because it works for others but in my creative mind’s eye, pretty boring! Over time, it slowly percolated the question , “Is this all that there is?” The Want To and Have To divide produced more chasm and misalignment in my life.
THE COST TO CHOOSING THE SAFE ROUTE
The cost to me by choosing the safe route early in life was the absence of not fully living. I envied some of my high school or college friends who studied abroad or traveled parts of the world when they had the vitality and hunger for adventure. Hey, I did too. I wanted that too. But I chose the Have To path by staying back home at the college campus working at the medical school library or something “responsible” like that, or later buying a townhome at age 23 while some of my friends were simply living life. I, on the other hand, now had a mortgage so I best kept working.
IT’S ALL ABOUT PERCEPTION
Later in my years and into the present, I am still on occasion besieged with the dilemma that the Want To versus the Have To can create for me when I let it. It’s unrealistic of course to think that this dilemma will ever become extinct and lucky for us, we have free will to even make a choice not to let it control us. However, the truth of the matter is that it’s all perception in the end. One has to ask whose perception all of this is really stemming from. When we are raised by the projection of our family’s own fears, doubts, worries, and life experiences, it’s natural to fall into the trappings of the Have To mentality even when you really don’t even have to live that way anymore. Yes, years of conditioning can sometimes become such an obstacle in breaking old habitual mindsets that no longer work but we can also make different and healthier choices.
So, I’ve taken inventory in my own life over the years to break this old mindset and the way I took action steps began this way:
3 Steps to Breaking the Cycle of Want To versus Have To in the Pursuit of Your Life’s Calling
- Breathe. I always start my own self-assessment with breathing. I’m talking about slow, deep breathing from your diaphragm. Settling into a space for total relaxation even just for 30 seconds to center your mind, heart and spirit will take the journey of discovery more deeply. Additionally, being detached from the outcome of your decision-makings from a soulful level can bring more peace and freedom during the process. So just breathe.
- Clear the Cobwebs. This means de-cluttering all the mixed messages that your mind has collected over the years about what you want to do against what you have to do. Fold a piece of paper into two columns and write your WANT TOs on one side and your HAVE TOs on the other side. The exercise in having to force yourself to write it makes it more tangible, personal, and gets you to really face your dilemma. Which lists bring you joy and light, and which lists bring you to shrink back and say, “This is not for me.” Tack or tape the piece of paper where you can see it most often. Whose voice in your head spoke the Want Tos versus the Have Tos? Is your choice based on your desires or someone else’s? Is your head, heart and intuition all in alignment when you are clearing, de-cluttering and deciding?
- What matters. Now ask yourself what matters most to you. In order to be true to yourself, you must pay constant attention to your internal voice whenever you reach the Want To and Have To signage at the fork in the road. Your intuition will speak. Which path will allow you to live your best life? Which path will allow you to simply survive or perhaps enter onto another stepping stone? Which path is ultimately the most important to you at this time in your life?
Share your opposing Want Tos and Have Tos in the comment below. Let me know how they impacted the choices you’ve made in your life.
around age 10 that I wanted to be an artist. I loved to draw, paint, and take pictures. I also told her that I wanted to sing like my favorite idol back in the day, Marie Osmond. Woo, hoo! Whether or not I could truly sing was not what mattered to me but I believed at the time that I could so I boldly told. I remembered approaching my mom one early evening near the kitchen. My heart was practically skipping a beat because I was so nervous and anticipating to be knocked down for thinking these crazy thoughts. Why? Because she wanted me to be a doctor. Or a dentist. And, nothing less. My dad, on the other hand, didn’t have the same high expectation but strangely suggested that I be an accountant. Okay peeps, I’m 10. I wasn’t into math even though I was an excellent student all around. But accounting was far from being close to my creative vision. Nevertheless, I took courage, a leap of faith, and told my mom my heart’s true desires: to be an artist and to sing like Marie. My mom started to chuckle. Then she said something like, “Artists don’t make any money.” This was then followed by a long lecture about practicality. She lectured me about making sure that my future was secure — financially secure — and that the only way to make sure of accomplishing this goal was to be a medical doctor. At least that. Of course, at the instant that she expressed to me that artists didn’t make any money, my dream dimmed inside of me and I actually didn’t hear anything else that she said thereafter. At 10, I wasn’t even thinking about money. I was just thinking about doing what I loved, what gave me joy and what made me happy. Color made me happy. Drawing made me happy. Dreaming made me happy. I remembered just loving to draw and create stuff as early as age four. I was content. Time would pass me by and I didn’t even know it.
me toward a different direction. The gap between my Being and my Doing began to widen as time went on. And by the way, I still didn’t become a doctor or a dentist. I rebelled. I ended up going to grad school later to become a licensed psychotherapist. Who would have thought! And why not design school? Well, in the back of my mind, that would still not have been good enough. Fear still ruled me. A master’s degree had a little more clout in my perception. Besides, what better place on earth to get access to professionals to talk to about my incongruent life and get self-actualized but grad school of psychotherapy. So, lots of therapy time ensued. My journey continued. Now, I do want to add a disclaimer. I’m not here to bash my parents. They did for me what they believed was the right thing to say and do at the time. It happens to many of us. Life takes us on a meandering path sometimes but eventually brings us back home.
simple. Okay, no gasping. It was my time. It was a moment that had been years in the making. It needed to happen. And no, there was not another job waiting for me. What was waiting for me however was me. My precious life! All the Universal signs and truth had been building up to that moment. The Universe truly conspired against me to leave for the sake of saving myself. At that very Divine moment of unwavering faith, clarity, and confidence, I drove away in my car with no fear! It was the same fearless feeling that I’ve experienced before when I’ve taken other leap of faiths in my life that led me to something very empowering, meaningful and more worthwhile. I felt free! I felt relieved! Everything in my being was in full alignment.
easier said than done, the truth is still this: letting fear rule and prevent you from taking a stand and fighting for your well being is just not an option. Letting your dreams die or take a back seat even later in life is definitely not negotiable. However, letting faith take over means believing that your best days are still in front of you even when you don’t know how it will all come together. Because it always comes together. We’ve seen it happen before more than once in our lives but we forget. Left to our own devices or our own willful need to control our destiny, we’ve seen ourselves blow it all the time. Let’s declare to stop blowing it! Let’s take a chance on something we can’t see yet but ironically believe in right now. Take a leap of faith. What awaits is exceedingly better than what we tend to expect. That’s a promise!