IDK What I Want

IDK What I Want

This one has been coming up for a lot of people lately; I love it when that happens. How do I know what I want? What are my desires? What makes my goals clear?

We seem to be hardwired to only know what we don’t want.

Dang.

So maybe that means that learning what we do want is part of growing up.

I love the weirdness of how challenging it can be to figure out what we want when knowing what we want is so rewarding.

I love the image of sitting in a restaurant, with a huge menu, feeling really hungry, and the wait staff showing up every ten minutes or so, and the patron saying, “I won’t have the steak. I don’t want french fries or coleslaw or fruit. I don’t want the house salad or the soup.I also don’t want the chicken or the fish.” Well, you get the idea. Cracks me up.

How do I want my day to go? What do I like to do? What brings me joy? How do I have fun?

Now, for a good chunk of my early life, I didn’t think I would survive 5 years, so making a 5 year plan seemed absurd. What I did was spend time doing things I felt some passion for. So, I’ve had a varied and interesting life. And I have survived.

What do I want? What do I like to do best? What am I good at? How do I know what I want?

I can hit the big topics; family, career, health, wealth, spirit. I can start to drill down within those topics. I can think about my hobbies, or hobbies I might want to have, and where they would fit.

One weird way to come to know what we want is taking the time to make a list of what we don’t want. Every single thing we can think of. And once we’ve done that, we often have cleared the decks for looking at what we do want.

Another weird way to figure it out is to imagine yourself sometime in the future, thinking back about the best, funnest, coolest stuff you did, and noticing what that is. Messing around with that concept can also loosen up feeling stuck, or generate some motivation or inspiration.

A good way to stymie ourselves and nurture misery is to spend a lot of time thinking about what we can’t have. Things change, losses happen, opportunities are missed, dreams fail, but those things also have useful nuggets within them if we look for them.

Another way is to write out a BE-Do-Have list. I love these, and have been writing ‘em out for ages. You write a hundred things you wanna be, a hundred things you wanna do, and a hundred things you wanna have. Oh, my. This is a nice exercise because you really have to dig deep. And then you cross the stuff off your list as you either gain it, or unchoose it. And then you replace it with new stuff.

How have I changed from knowing only what I don’t want to having goals, ambitions, dreams and desires?

(c) Pam Guthrie 2014 all rights reserved 05082014

Would you tell me something you want? I want to slow down inside a bit more. It's easier to stay focused for me when I can do that, so I feel more productive. And a wind-proof compact umbrella. 

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