Do it Anyway!

There’s a strange saying going around my house. Perhaps you may have heard it too? It sounds a bit whiny and even nasal at times. Often it’s followed by a gasp, annoyed intonation or a rolling of the eyes. Yes, you guessed it, it sounds like this: “But I don’t feel like it!”

This exacerbated adolescent response to just about anything from picking up socks, feeding the dog, taking out the garbage or doing homework seems to be a staple for today’s teenager. Similar to the “terrible two’s” when every request is followed by an accentuated “No!” yet strangely unattractive coming from an over-sized child. Not sure how this happened, but very sure that “not feeling like it” is an epidemic amongst kids this age who, for one reason or another, want “to feel” rather than “do!”

My friend, whose ancestors come from Ghana and who was raised in England, is quite baffled by the typical American teenager. This high emotional intelligence seems to trump all other things, especially anything requiring the least bit of effort. Why these same kids who are quick to diagnose fellow students with “anger issues” or “ADD/ADHD” or “depression” but can’t get a simple task done without “feeling like it” first, is a mystery!

Don’t get me wrong, emotional intelligence is important, and has certainly come a long way since I was a teenager, but then again, I had a job in high school! In fact, my friend and I had a monopoly on babysitting jobs in our neighborhood and were busy every Saturday night from the age of 12 whether we liked it or not!

I wonder if the pendulum swing has swung a bit too far and allowed emotions to override that which quite simply, just needs to be done. Maybe I’m giving my kids too much room to emote and not enough room to just do? Or maybe, I just need to continue saying that which comes naturally these days: “You don’t always need to feel like it, sometimes you just need to do it!”

I use this quite a bit with my high school students and now that we are coming to the end of the year, I’m actually seeing the fruits of my labor. One of my students just couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that he had to fill out a “stupid form” for me in order to get a grade. For some reason, he thought that if he “didn’t feel like it,” he didn’t have to do it. After eight months of repeating the same message that he didn’t actually have to feel like doing it order to get it done, I made a connection!

Somehow, someway, the message got through that filling out a form wasn’t rocket science but simply an activity that allowed me to grade his work and in reality had very little to do with feelings. Now, this extremely bright student is getting the “A” he deserves and I’m getting the satisfaction of seeing him master something other than his knowledge of how he might be “feeling” about something at any given time.

Now, whether picking up his socks at home is still determined by his feelings, I don’t know, but at least he knows he can master that too whether he’s feeling like it or not!
How about you? Do you ever keep yourself from doing something that needs to be done because you don’t feel inspired? Maybe just do it and reward yourself later? Maybe inspiration will follow?