What’s more likely to bring change: Expressing your willingness to change or asserting your determination to change? Most of us would probably say that firmly asserting “I will!” is the best route.
According to the findings of a psychologist in Illinois, most of us would be wrong.
Wray Herbert for Scientific American reported on a study by psychologist Ibrahim Senay of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign:
In this study, he recruited volunteers on the pretense that they were needed for a handwriting study. Some wrote the words “I will” over and over; others wrote “Will I?”
After priming the volunteers with this fake handwriting task, Senay…measured the volunteers’ intentions to start and stick to a fitness regimen….Those primed with the interrogative phrase “Will I?” expressed a much greater commitment to exercise regularly than did those primed with the declarative phrase “I will.”
What’s more, when the volunteers were questioned about why they felt they would be newly motivated to get to the gym more often, those primed with the question said things like: “Because I want to take more responsibility for my own health.” Those primed with “I will” offered strikingly different explanations, such as: “Because I would feel guilty or ashamed of myself if I did not.”
This last finding is crucial. It indicates that those with questioning minds were more intrinsically motivated to change. They were looking for a positive inspiration from within, rather than attempting to hold themselves to a rigid standard. Those asserting will lacked this internal inspiration, which explains in part their weak commitment to future change. Put in terms of addiction recovery and self-improvement in general, those who were asserting their willpower were in effect closing their minds and narrowing their view of their future. Those who were questioning and wondering were open-minded—and therefore willing to see new possibilities for the days ahead.
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