Wants

What do you want?

If your answer is that you do not know, I want you to take that seriously. Finding out is your job.

I am not only talking about the big things. I am talking about what you want in your day, your relationships, and your lifetime.

I believe our desires are the maps to our destiny. Paying attention to our truest desires gives us the opportunity to grow and evolve.

That does not mean pursuing them will always be easy or enjoyable. It means our wants deserve our attention.

Your wants can change when your life changes

When I recorded this episode, I was spending a lot of time figuring out what I wanted next.

So many things I had dreamed about had come true beyond my expectations. I still wanted to have them, but I did not need to keep working toward things I already had.

I also had more options.

My children were living independently. I had a team running the business and more freedom in how I spent my time. Having more money opened up more choices.

That made the question more challenging, not less important.

I wanted to understand what I wanted now. When someone suggested I should just enjoy the moment and not worry about it, I disagreed.

What we want is serious business.

Do not dismiss your own desires

Through coaching and the School, I have seen too many people accept not knowing what they want. I have also seen people deny what they want in favor of what someone else thinks is best for them.

I do not think we can live the fullest expression of ourselves that way.

Opening up the possibilities can make choosing more complicated. It can feel overwhelming.

It also makes life more expansive. There are so many things we could create and experience in one lifetime.

Your life is a contribution through the way you live it. You do not have to impact thousands or millions of people for that to be true.

Knowing your wants matters in relationships

One concept I teach is the Want Match.

It means understanding what you want in a relationship, understanding what the other person wants, and seeing whether there are enough matches for compatibility.

If neither of you knows what you want, you can build a relationship in which neither of you is living the full expression of who you could be.

Resentment can grow when you do not understand your wants and cannot honor them.

Knowing what you want gives you a way to make decisions about your partners, relationships, and the people you spend time with.

Separate immediate urges from your truest desires

Honoring your wants does not mean following every urge you have right now.

I distinguish between artificial desire and true desire.

Your brain can generate a strong desire for immediate satisfaction. That desire can come at the expense of what you want for your life over time.

You might want to eat ten cookies, hit snooze, quit working, or spend the day watching Netflix. The strength of that immediate urge does not necessarily mean it reflects your deepest desire.

What you want tomorrow may be to feel healthy, have completed your work, and know you made a contribution.

Understanding that difference is essential to the way I teach honoring your wants.

Use time to understand what you want

Time is one way to make the distinction clearer.

Ask yourself whether this is what you want right now. Then ask whether you will want it tomorrow.

Will you want to have done it in a year? In three years?

Your answer may change when you consider your future instead of only immediate relief or satisfaction.

In my opinion, making decisions ahead of time and honoring them in the moment creates the highest quality of life.

You can use your ability to think into the future to decide what you want to guide you.

People pleasing does not honor who you are

I do not believe denying your deepest desires automatically makes someone else's life better.

If you deny who you are, the world misses out on you.

People pleasing means honoring someone else's desire over your own because you think what you really want is their approval.

You end up being dishonest about what is true for you, with yourself and with the other person.

For decades, I did things other people wanted at the expense of my own long-term desires. I gave up what was true for me because of what I thought someone else wanted.

Someone may want you to behave a certain way so they feel better in the moment. But when you ask someone who cares about you whether they want you to honor your long-term desires, I think most will say yes.

Respecting your own desires can go together with respecting theirs.

Be willing to face the challenge

Following your truest desires can make your life more challenging.

That is one reason it can be tempting to avoid knowing them.

You may call them unrealistic. You may worry about other people's opinions or the disruption a change could cause.

I want to invite you to explore them anyway.

The people who created remarkable things were not always seeking comfort or choosing the least challenging path. They were willing to understand what they wanted and pursue it even when others disagreed.

I have had to move through temporary disruption to honor long-term desires many times in my own life.

Consider ten or twenty years from now, when the dust has settled. Are you willing to create some temporary discomfort for what you truly want?

If you feel blank, start with what you do not want

The Future Store exercise is a way to explore possibilities and make a list of your deepest, perhaps most secret, desires.

But if nothing comes to mind, start somewhere else.

Write down everything you know you do not want.

Include things in your life now, things you have experienced before, and things you do not want in your future.

Then go through the list and identify the opposite of each item.

That can help you begin identifying what you do want.

If you have not been paying attention to yourself and your desires, I want to encourage you to change that. Your wants deserve more attention than an automatic answer of not knowing.

The pursuit matters, not just the achievement

You are allowed to try out desires.

You do not have to know in advance that every want is the right one or that you will still want it once you get it.

Too many people hold back from exploring because they are afraid of choosing the wrong direction.

But it is in pursuing your wants that you become more of who you are. It is not only in achieving them or accumulating what you wanted.

That growth can happen whether you get the thing or not.

Find out what you truly want. Take it seriously. Go after it.

The process of pursuing it is part of becoming the person you are meant to be.