Willingness and willfulness belong to the distress tolerance skills of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), the treatment developed by psychologist Marsha M. Linehan. This worksheet follows Distress Tolerance Handout 13, Willingness, and Handout 14, Half-Smiling and Willing Hands, from the 2015 second edition of her DBT Skills Training Handouts and Worksheets. Linehan took the pair of words from the psychiatrist Gerald May, who set them against each other in his 1982 book Will and Spirit. The Willing Note is HabitatZero’s own tool, built independently; Linehan, Guilford Press and May’s publisher had no part in it and have not endorsed it.

Two answers to one moment

Something happens that you did not choose. A flight is canceled, a decision goes the other way, your knee says no to the long run. There are two ways to answer it. May wrote that willingness is saying yes to the mystery of being alive in each moment, and that willfulness is saying no, “or perhaps more commonly, ‘Yes, but…’”

Linehan’s handout turns that into practice. Willingness means doing just what a situation needs, wholeheartedly, without dragging your feet. Willfulness shows up as refusing to tolerate the moment, refusing a change it requires, giving up, trying to fix every situation, or insisting on being in control.

Wound tight or gone slack

Read that list twice and it splits in two. Fixing everything and holding on to control are too much; giving up and refusing a needed change are too little. Linehan made the same point in her 1993 treatment manual, noting that “willfulness can appear in the guise of passivity.”

So this page draws willfulness the way a musician hears a string that is out of tune: wound past its note, or gone slack below it. Neither one plays. Willingness is the string in tune, giving the moment no more effort and no less than it asks for. The tuner is this page’s picture, not Linehan’s; her handout is a list.

How the tuner works

Start with the moment. Tap what kind it was, from plans changed to a loss or an ending, and say what happened in a few words. Then pick the first sign you caught. Each sign has its own spoke on the dial, so the needle swings toward wound tight for fighting it in your head or a quick yes, but, and toward gone slack for sulking or sitting on your hands.

Then come four turns, one for each of Linehan’s steps: name the willfulness; let it be there, since you cannot fight willfulness with willfulness; turn toward willingness; and let your body lead with a half-smile or willing hands. Every turn brings the needle a quarter of the way home, and the fourth lights the lamp. Her fifth step, for willfulness that will not budge, is to ask what feels threatened, and it waits under the turns for the moments that stay stuck.

Last, write the willing note, meaning what the moment actually needed, and log it. The log keeps twelve moments, and each one leaves a dot on its spoke. From the third moment on, the tuner reads the log back: which way you usually go out of tune, the sign you tend to catch first, and the kinds of moments that pull you there. Linehan’s handout ends by asking where you notice your own willfulness. The log answers from what you wrote down rather than from memory.

What the evidence says

Willingness has not been tested as a skill on its own, so treat what follows as nearby evidence rather than proof. In an experiment with sixty people who had anxiety and mood disorders, those asked to accept their emotions during an upsetting film felt about as distressed as those asked to suppress them, but their heart rate fell rather than rose, and they had less negative feeling in the minutes afterward. That fits the bargain willingness offers: the moment still hurts, and you stop paying extra to fight it.

The half-smile leans on facial feedback, the idea that your face informs your mood. A preregistered test with nearly four thousand people in nineteen countries found that deliberately smiling could both strengthen and start feelings of happiness, while the subtler pen-in-mouth version of the test gave less conclusive results. Expect a nudge, not a switch.

When to use it

Use it in the moment, when you catch the set jaw or the curt “fine,” or the same evening while the details are fresh. If what you face is a crisis rather than a stubborn patch, Storm or Stone helps you choose between crisis skills and acceptance skills. For a fact you keep arguing with, The Open Hand practices radical acceptance. And when you cannot tell what the moment needs, Wise Mind is the place to look, since the handout ties willingness to acting from wise mind.

This page is practice, not treatment. DBT skills are best learned with a DBT therapist, and a few weeks of this log make a useful thing to bring to one. If giving up starts to feel like giving up on yourself, call or text 988 in the US, or your local emergency number, and let someone help you carry it.