First, Know What You Want

Mood or Desire?

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between letting my moods decide what I do (or eat) next or reminding myself of my true desire. Here’s an extract from the book that explains more…

If I Only Did What I Wanted, My Life Would Fall Apart

A question I often get at this point goes something like this:

If I did what I wanted all the time I’d never work or get anything done or achieve anything that needed some effort. And what about all those boring but necessary things that I don’t really want to do but have to do like emptying the washing machine or doing my budget report, which I hate. If I carried on just doing what I wanted, I’m worried that I’d stay in bed all day.

It’s a good question, one that comes up a lot, and it brings us to the difference between navigating by mood or navigating by desire.

Your Moods And Your Desires

When we navigate by our moods we are primarily concerned with how we feel so we ask internal questions like What do I feel like doing? or when faced with a choice Which one feels right? or when facing some regular chore we might avoid it if we do not feel like doing it. Can you see a problem with this approach?

I don’t know about you but my moods change so much, even what I’ve just eaten changes how I feel. That makes me a bit wary of using them as a guide and that’s why you might be worried about how your life could possibly work if you just did what you felt like all the time.

It could be said that the opposite to mood is desire. Desire is about things that you want rather than things you feel like doing. A lot of the time your mood and your desire are aligned. You feel like a coffee and you want a coffee so you act to get one. With experiences like this it’s easy to confuse mood and desire. But what if there is a real difference? You feel like a coffee but you want a good night’s sleep. Now you have a clear choice – follow your moods and risk losing sleep, or choose what you really desire instead. Here’s a more personal example:

Choosing Desire On A Cold, Wet Morning

Imagine for a moment. It’s Saturday morning. 6am. Cold, dark, wet outside and my alarm rings. I surface with a groan in my warm, snuggly bed and realise that, yet again, it’s time to get up for my daughter’s 6.30am swimming practice. I really do not feel like getting up, I feel like staying in bed. My mood says don’t do it, it’s not right for you, it doesn’t feel right.

So I’m lying there and I ask myself What do you want?’and I know that even though I do not feel like it, I really do want to get up. In fact I like the quiet time while she is swimming – it’s like a little oasis in my week and I’ve enjoyed it before and I picture myself enjoying it again. I also want to get up because she loves swimming and I want to support her. I still don’t feel like it, although, as I begin to think about what I want, my mood is actually changing, coming round to supporting my desire. Eventually I get up.

Learn To Follow Your True Desire

If you can identify your true desire, your mood will fall into line behind it or in plain English: if there is something you don’t feel like doing then maybe you’re asking the wrong question.

Our feelings change so much, affected by the weather, what we eat, the amount of sleep we’ve had, what we read or watch, the fun or argument we are having. All these affect our mood from moment to moment. This makes your feelings an unreliable guide to what to do next. Your desires, on the other hand, tend to be deeper and less susceptible to moment by moment changes.

Any time you find yourself in conflict about a simple choice – perhaps you think you should be doing something but don’t feel up to it then have a think about what questions you are asking yourself.

If you are navigating primarily by mood you’ll be asking  What do I feel like doing?

If you are navigating by desire you’ll be asking What do I really want?

Anxiety is a sign that you are not focusing on what you want.

As you choose to follow your desires rather than your moods, a couple of things will happen…

Your desires and what you want will become much clearer to you.

Your moods will fall into line behind your desires so that your feelings quickly come to support what you want. And when you feel like doing what you want, it becomes much much easier to start getting what you want.

This Week, Choose Desire

Before you read on, put this book down and take the next week or so to practice navigating by desire. The question is not What do I feel like but what do I want? Focus on that regardless of whether you feel like doing it or not and notice what happens to your mood. You should find that your feelings eventually start supporting your desires. And remember to keep it small for now so you give those decision making muscles a good workout.

And this brings us right back to the question we started with If I only did what I wanted, nothing in my life would get done.

That’s not true though is it? Even if you don’t feel like emptying the washing machine, you do want to wear clean clothes. Although you hate doing budget reports you do want to show how well your team has done. In fact, once you stop focusing on how horrible it feels and start thinking about what you desire, you often find that other ideas spring to mind about how to get it done.

If you shift your focus away from how you feel towards what you want, it allows you to be more creative. You can worry less about applying this approach to bigger things because even if you don’t feel like doing them in the moment, if they are real desires of yours, you can still go with them.

While at first these two ways of making decisions seem similar, they take people in two completely different directions.  Since our moods are often tied up in old habits and patterns of thinking, following them tends to just create more of the ‘same old, same old’ in our lives.  Somehow, we just don’t get around to making those changes we know we’d love to make, and things that seem like they’ll take too much effort are put off until the last minute or don’t get done at all.

Your wanting, however, is a living, breathing, fluid process. Each time you do what you want (or don’t do what you don’t want to do), your actions seem effortless and inspired ideas become almost commonplace.  Over time, it becomes easier and easier to read and follow your inner compass. Life gets a lot simpler, and the pursuit of success becomes a lot more fun.

Michael Neill, Writer and Coach

Key Points: Desire, Not Mood

• When you navigate by mood you’ll find yourself asking How do I feel about this?
• This leaves you open to the vagaries of your changing mind.
• When you navigate by desire you’ll find yourself asking What do I really want?
• If you practice following your desire sometimes in spite of your mood then you will begin to recognise your inner compass more easily.

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All tangled up in fear and overwhelm

The third major reason that we do not know what we want is our fear of what might happen if we did. Along with this comes the sheer overwhelm of making choices when there are so many things we could want.

Struggling to know what you want is a unique problem for recent generations in the richer parts of the world. Our ancestors had no problem working out what to do. Why? Because the answer was right in front of them – they wanted food, shelter, warmth and a mate; getting these was enough to fill their time. We, on the other hand, have money, freedom, time, comfort and more food than we could ever eat. In a way, all the more obvious and easier decisions have been taken care of. So we are free to think about what our lives mean and what they could mean and, perhaps, what they should mean. That’s not a simple thing to work out or nor is there a single easy answer.

The other problem is the sheer number of options open to us. Even buying toothpaste these days means coping with six or seven brands providing nearly 50 different choices. It’s no wonder that many people just shut down in the face of all this choice and default to what they bought yesterday or grab the first one they recognise.

Unfortunately, doing more of what you did yesterday or grabbing at the first choice you recognise, fails to satisfy that hollow feeling or quiet that voice whispering that there has to be more for you, somewhere and somehow.

A Blank Page Is Scary

Hand me a blank page, tell me I can draw anything I want and I freeze. My mind goes blank. Panic starts. What if I do it wrong? What if they laugh? Where do I start?

I’m not alone.

What about you?

If I gave the same page to a child, they would start creating something. They are completely unselfconscious but pick a teenager or an adult and you get a similar reaction to mine.

A blank future is just as challenging and scary for most of us.What if we do it wrong? What if they laugh? Where do we start?

Other Ways You Scare Yourself

We devise lots of interesting and exciting ways to frighten ourselves out of knowing what we want. Maybe we shy away from exploring other options because we frighten ourselves by thinking about the consequences: If I did what I wanted I’d have to leave this job, town, relationship.

We run catastrophic disaster scenarios in which we would have to turn our whole life upside down if we figured out what we wanted. So we don’t.

If you’ve been scaring yourself, it’s probably because you are denying to yourself some sort of change that you know you want to make. Remember that being clear about what you feel does not mean that you have to act on those feelings. For example, many people are unhappy in their job and long for more freedom and control over their day. They shy away from facing this because they frighten themselves with the prospect of having to run their own business. Silly, isn’t it? There are lots of ways to create more freedom and get more control over your daily life and few of them involve the risk of running your own business. If you never face up to how you feel though, you never get to make these changes.

In reality, most of the changes you are likely to make are actually incremental. It’s much more likely to involve small, deliberate steps towards your desires rather than the kind of life-changing, revolutionary fantasies you frighten yourself with.

And the good news is, if you are the kind of person who runs dramatic disaster scenarios in your head, you may just have uncovered a creative side of yourself. An imaginative ‘you’ who could probably do with coming out to play more often. Maybe the drama is a plea for more creative play?

We Frighten Ourselves With Stereotypes

Another way we frighten ourselves out of understanding our real desires is by the fear of what we might have to become, if we understood what we wanted. The argument goes like this:

If I gave way to what I wanted I would be an actor and since all actors are [poor, crazy, etc.] I don’t want to think about what I want.

I think I might want to be a stand up comedian but since presentations make me nervous I’m not going to think about it.

This is just another version of a dramatic disaster scenario. Again, the cure is to realise that running away from a stereotype prevents you considering the smaller, incremental changes that would bring your life much closer to living the way you truly want.

You Can Manage Fear

If some kind of fear, of an imagined possible future, of an imagined possible you, is getting in the way of you knowing what you want, then how do you deal with this? Having practised it for so long, it’s unlikely to disappear just because you wish it.

Remember that courageous and brave people are not people who have no fear. A brave person is someone who knows they are afraid but keeps going anyway.

Fear Is Not A Signal

Many of us assume that fear is an intuitive signal to keep away from something but it isn’t. It’s just your unconscious early warning system flagging up something for attention. Fear is not a red light that tells you something is broken and needs fixing; it is a red light that says: By the way, did you know this?

If you see the process of getting clear on what you want as a threat to your stability and wellbeing then your early warning system (fear) will start flashing whenever you go near it.

Being brave says: Yes I know this frightens me but I’m going to look anyway or I’ve never liked the sound of this but I’m going to ignore the alarm bells and explore it or whenever I think about this I feel nervous but I’m going to push through it anyway.

Fear is just data. Treat is as such. Your unconscious has alerted you for which you are grateful but you intend to go ahead anyway because you want to/you are curious. This puts you in charge and reminds your fear that it is not the boss here.

When You Face Overwhelming Choices

There are so many things you could do and some of them contradict each other. Some of them cost money you don’t have. Faced with this, it’s easier to ignore them all. You may have a sense that looking at what you want too closely would open a can of worms. For peace of mind it’s easier not to look.

Trouble is, as you know, you haven’t got peace of mind otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this. What you need is a system. A way of figuring out what you want and managing your choices so they are less overwhelming.

Yep, You’ll Contradict Yourself

Absolute clarity about what you want is rare. It’s unlikely that you will find one desire that trumps all the others and makes clear to you what you should do. You are much more likely to have a handful of wants which all seem pretty important and some of which contradict each other.

We are complex beings. Ignore those who tell you to set a single big goal because we rarely, if ever, have the luxury of paying attention to just one big goal. I never understand how business people will pay to listen to the ‘lessons’ from famous sports stars. High achieving sports people operate in such a cosseted, artificial environment that they have little to say to the rest of us about achievement in the real world.

At some point you have to arrange your wants into a hierarchy. To know which one/s you want the most and the key to that, as we’ll see later, is to use your personal values to help you.

Key Points: Why Is It So Hard To Know What We Want?

• We lack practice – our decision making muscles are flabby and we coast along with decisions rather than deciding for ourselves.
• We’ve trained ourselves to look the wrong way – it’s become a habit and we are very good at knowing what we don’t want.
• When we think about it we get scared and over- whelmed – we know too much, we have too many choices and we let our fear stop us from standing out.

To learn more about how to overcome these reasons along with a step by step guide to finding your inner compass, please order the book:

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Are you looking the wrong way?

Imagine this. An eight year old boy is playing in the garden one day when he takes a fresh look at the garden wall. It might be fun to walk along the top.
Imagine what I could see, It would be like flying.

He notices a way up to the top of the wall that he never saw before. It’s an effort but there he is walking along the top of the wall enjoying the view with this arms spread, pretending to fly. It’s wonderful.

His mother, glancing out the window, shrieks in horror and rushes out into the garden yelling at the top of her voice. Don’t move. Stay where you are. Get down from there. How did you get up there? You’ll fall off and kill yourself. Don’t ever do that again.

Faced with this wail of contradictory advice and admonishment, the full emotional force of a mother in distress, he begins to realise, perhaps for the first time, that he could indeed be killed, it is dangerous and he will fall off. Suddenly he is no longer stable, he feels unsteady and vulnerable. He gets down. He sees clearly what he does not want to happen and it stays with him.

“Weren’t you scared?” Mum asks. He realises that he should have been scared, that it would please her if he was scared. So he gets scared.

From now on, whenever he looks at the wall a strong, negative image of the consequences comes to him. A bit of him still wants to be up on the wall but now it feels nasty. He’s confused. He learns to ignore what he wants. He knows clearly what he does not want and he is afraid of it.

How Your Parents Trained You To Look The Wrong Way

Throughout our childhood our parents, motivated by love and care for our safety, reinforce over and over again the negative consequences of taking action.
‘Don’t run across the road without looking, you’ll be killed.’

We get good at focusing on the negative, the downside, the consequences. So now when we cross the road we are not thinking How can I get to the other side safely? instead we are thinking I’ve got to watch out in case I get killed and get this done as quickly as possible. In their love, our parents continually reinforce the negative, what you don’t want, what is wrong.

‘Don’t cross the road’, ‘don’t make a risky decision’, ‘don’t skip your homework’.

The reinforcement is strong, emotional and repeated. Is it any wonder that we learn to pay attention only to what we don’t want or are afraid of?

In this way our ability to understand our enjoyable desires is squashed by years of practice at knowing, clearly, what we do not want. The odd inkling of something we actually do want is feeble and soon drifts away.

Looking The Wrong Way

Simply put, we look the wrong way. I meet few people who can tell me clearly what they want but almost everyone I meet knows, clearly, what they do not want. For some people, talking about what they don’t like, don’t want and didn’t enjoy makes up a large part of their conversation.

‘How was your holiday?’

‘OK but the flight was late, we got locked out of the hotel and I got food poisoning. They didn’t have any English papers.’

Can you hear it? A complete focus on the downside, the negative, what went wrong or what could go wrong.

The Second Most Powerful Question In The World

There is no point asking these people what they want. This is why most goal setting schemes and initiatives fail or only appeal to people who are already motivated. How can you understand what you want when most of your focus is somewhere else?

It’s like getting in the car in the morning and working out your route to work by a process of elimination: ‘I don’t want to got to Scotland, not France today, not to the cinema etc.’

Eventually you will end up at work but the process is long, slow and boring.

This is how millions run their lives. They have a clear and definite focus on what they don’t want but little idea of what they do want. They have their attention firmly on the rear view mirror and live by moving away from things that they don’t like. ‘Nope, I don’t like this job;’ ‘Nope, this relationship hasn’t worked’.

What they need to do is obvious isn’t it? They need to focus on what they want. The problem is that just because it is obvious doesn’t make it easy to do, does it? Otherwise we would all know what we wanted and be moving towards it.

The easiest way to get to work is to sit in your car and say to yourself: ‘I want to go to….’ Engage the gears and go. But if you’ve spent your whole life steering by the rear view mirror and working out things by trying them, deciding you don’t like or don’t want them and then having a go at something else, this switch of focus is too much of a stretch.

There is an easier way.

If you know what you don’t want then you need to ask yourself the second most powerful question in the world.

What is it? More on that later. For the moment, though, let’s look at the third reason that we find it hard to know what we want…

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