Want vs. need

When it comes to tough decisions, prioritising our needs can look like a trump card—but it's actually a trap

One of the few instances in which leaving your job is actually a need.

I was coaching someone a while back who was in the process of leaving his corporate job. Let's call him Jack. Jack framed leaving this job as something he needed to do for his sanity and his health. It was simply not possible for him to keep going to this office and doing this work. He had to get out.

Jack had come to coaching in part to be able to leave this job, so the urgency was not a surprise. But I always prick up my coaching-ears when I hear a decision couched in the language of need like this. That's because relying on the idea of need installs a kind of trap in the decision that I know will wind up ensnaring the client in the long run. Basically, the more Jack presented this as something he needed to do, the more he was going to end up ensuring the decision backfired.

To see why, we can start with what the word 'need' implies. When we say we need to do something, we present the action as being prompted by the external world, rather than by our own desires. If you ask me to go for drinks after work and I say that I need to get home, I'm relying on the word 'need' to suggest I don't really have the option to accept. It's not that I don't want to hang out, it's that the dog needs to be walked, the kids need to be picked up, etc.

In essence, I'm saying I can't make any other decision even if I wanted to. It's out of my hands. Which preserves the polite fiction that I wanted to go for drinks instead of going home. (Spoiler alert: I always want to go home.)

The same thing is happening when a client presents a big decision like leaving a job as something they need to do. This framing tells me they are disavowing their own act of choice-making. They prefer to see themselves as conceding to an inevitable feature of circumstance, rather than making a deliberate, agential decision.

So what's wrong with that? Two things, which feed into one another.

First, there's clearly something about making this choice out of want that feels somehow unjustifiable. But rather than interrogating and addressing those feelings, the language of need covers them over by insisting there isn't a choice there at all.

In Jack's case, for example, wanting to leave his corporate job was complicated by his family history. As we came to learn in our work together, turning down good money was not something that was justified in his world growing up. The idea of jettisoning his corporate salary out of desire felt like the most self-indulgent thing possible. It felt like a betrayal of his parents' struggles to survive financially. But when the decision was presented in the language of need, all that self-judgment could be held at bay. He could protect himself with the thought that he didn't really have a choice.

But this approach didn't actually stop the feelings from coming up, which brings us to the second issue. Whenever Jack thought of abandoning his corporate the salary, his brain would pipe up protesting how that was a selfish, unacceptable plan. To defend himself, he'd review all the reasons that he had no other choice, since he needed to do it for his own mental health. But because those feelings about his parents and money hadn't actually been addressed, the defence could never rest. The feelings kept coming up, and which meant he had to keep explaining to himself and others why he had no real choice.

To be crystal clear, I'm not denying that people encounter horrific bosses and bullying and worse. It is true that awful, unbelievable shit can and does happen at work. But we don't need to say we can't put up with that shit to say we won't. When we present these kind of work environments as exceeding our endurance, we turn an argument about justice into an argument about capacity. We're in essence accepting that anything up to the demonstrably unsustainable should be born, rather than saying what's bearable is beside the point—because it is not OK.

As you may have noticed reading that last paragraph, there is a huge difference in emotional charge between the sentences I won't put up with this and I can't put up with this. For most people, I won't usually brings feelings of defiance, certainty and resolve, whereas the feelings that come with I can't are more like despair, helplessness and sadness. One feels generally more powerful, and the other. more defeated.

There's also a difference in the finality of the statements which is crucial when it comes to decision making. If I say I'm not willing to do something, how is someone to argue with me? I'm the only one who knows if I'm willing or not. But if I say I can't do something, the reasons involve more than my mental landscape. They require assessment of the circumstances themselves.

That outside-of-my-remit quality is exactly the reason we wind up opting for need over want in the first place—and also why the language of need becomes such a trap. Each time Jack's inner defence team has to respond to guilt about his family, it will have to prove that there's an actual need on the table. How bad is the effect on his mental health really? Does he absolutely require a different work environment, and what is the evidence? If the evidence isn’t conclusive, then why is he giving up his big pay check?

The only way to protect his decision is to keep finding as much proof as possible of his own incapacity and suffering. He has to make the I can't pile so big that it blots out every option except leaving. And, as we’ve seen, piling up this evidence means piling up a sense of helplessness instead of resolve. At the very moment of taking significant, forceful action on his own behalf, he will experience himself as compelled and imperilled.

What’s more, the I can't pile isn’t just going to evaporate once Jack quits the job. When you train your brain to look for evidence of your incapacity and suffering, it stays trained (unless or until you untrain it on purpose). It will keep piling up that evidence, along with all those emotions of despair and helplessness and sadness. Over time, the things that Jack wanted from his job change—things like more access to and room to use his creative talents—get less and less available as the I can't pile grows. Rather than entering his new, chosen future with a sense of excitement and momentum, his brain will arrive looking for evidence of I can’t. The need-based justification for the decision winds up making a real, positive experience of the decision impossible.

This is why my coach-ears are so tuned to catch need-language when I hear it. I want people to get the actual benefit of the decisions that they make, especially the toughest ones.

There is so much power in saying, I don't want to do this anymore or I'm choosing something else. In making a sacrifice of something you previously wanted for something you now want more. In shouldering a risk because you think the potential benefit is worth the cost. In facing down complicated feelings like Jack's, because that's what it takes to act in integrity with yourself.

When you can own your decisions as a reflection of what you want to do, you get to harness all that power like a slingshot to propel you into your chosen future. Instead of evidence of what you seemingly can't endure, you have the receipts that come with facing hard things for your highest good. You can look at a decision you made and say, Yes, that was a difficult path, and I chose it myself, on purpose. And that means when you get to the end of the path, you won't find another I can't pile. Instead, you'll find those things that you wanted and chose in the first place.