‘When I come back,” Malcolm would announce before leaving for lunch, “I don’t want that rack of coats there and I don’t want those dresses here and I don’t want to see those boxes in that yard.”
Malcolm was the manager of a small clothing warehouse in London where I worked for a brief period a long time ago. He taught me the value of negative motivation.
He navigated his way through his day according to what he didn’t want rather than what he wanted. But of course he ended up getting what he wanted: the coats and dresses on to the van and the newly arrived boxes of garments in their proper places in the warehouse.
Decades later, when I studied counselling, I could have done with Malcolm. I trained in Reality Therapy which is based on the principle that we are motivated at all times to get what we want, which is true enough.
Reality Therapy at the time was built on four questions: What do you want? What are you doing? Is it working? If not, what’s your plan?
Armed with these four questions, I began to see clients.
What do you want? I would ask. They sat there looking at me. I discovered quickly that most of us don’t actually know what we want, except when it comes to goods and services.
So I might know I want a job, or I want one of those cars that parks itself, or one standing ticket for Taylor Swift on June 29th, or a holiday in Lanzarote, but people don’t usually go to counselling to get these things.
The sort of questions we so often can’t answer are the ones about what we want for our lives this year, or in five years’ time, or in the rest of our lifetime.
And the answers we come up with are not all that convincing or workable with. I want to be happy, I want to be healthy, I want to be surrounded by a loving family. Yuk. Too abstract. Who can work with that?
This is where you need Malcolm’s approach. What do you really, really not want? I don’t want to be this weight this time next year, I don’t want to be in this job, I don’t want to have/lose this partner, I don’t want to max out the credit card again, I don’t want to be living in Ireland, I don’t want to be living abroad.
There’s something more concrete, more do-able about what we don’t want than what we say we want. On my 29th birthday I sat on a bench in St Stephen’s Green and said, “I don’t want to be in this job this time next year.”
I had been promoted above my level of competence, so I felt a real sense of urgency in my gut about getting out of there. A year later I launched myself on the world of freelance journalism with little money to sustain me. Would I have fulfilled my ambition to be a journalist without that negative motivation? I suspect not.
Just over three decades later, when the newspaper that employed me had an early severance scheme I said to myself suddenly, one day, “I’m not going to stay here until I’m 65.” I signed up and got out.
The desire, which had been growing, to move into the sort of psychological work I do now just wouldn’t have been enough on its own to propel me through the door: it was that negative motivation that did it.
So if you are looking at the coming year, as we do around this time, and wondering what changes to make in 2015, try reversing the usual approach of asking what you want. Take a leaf out of Malcolm’s book and ask yourself what you really don’t want to be doing this time next year.
The answers might provide a more powerful motivation than the standard resolutions.
By the way, I haven’t used Malcolm’s real name. He wouldn’t have wanted that.
Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His latest book is Mindfulness on the Go. His mindfulness newsletter is free by email. pomorain@yahoo.com
