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The Secret to Converting Recalcitrance to Self-Empowerment
I once had a website devoted to helping people do what they didn’t want to do. I thought of myself as being in the ‘capacitation business’: whatever people wanted, whether more sales, less weight, or better self-understanding, I was there to help overcome the inevitable obstacles achieve those goals.
In each achievement domain, reluctance was manifest and had to be dealt with if progress was to come about.
The Akrasia Problem
During this time, I fell under Garth Wood’s influence and his book The Myth of Neurosis. Wood claims that humanity’s fundamental
problem is an inability or unwillingness to do what they feel they should do. What Aristotle called “that condition of character where one knows what should be done but is unable to do it.” ( Mele, Alfred R., 1951. Irrationality: An Essay on Akrasia, Self Deception and Self Control, Oxford University Press, New York.)
As a coach, I encouraged the virtues of persistence, tireless effort, unrelenting striving to do more of what was required to get to a goal.
But for these capacities to become real and manifest, people need goals that they were committed to achieving regardless of the cost in personal discomfort, fear, or the stress of single-minded striving.