Three Reasons…

In which Mike learns the three reasons that stop us knowing what we want

The rain hammered against Mike’s windscreen as he made his way in. ‘What a morning to try a new route’ he thought to himself. ‘Maybe I took John’s advice to be a driver a little too literally’. Still, he’d driven the same route for so long, his car could probably take itself in. Taking a new route every day was part of his attempt to pay fresh attention to things and it was working – although he was going to be terribly late. ‘That John is a crafty so and so. I don’t know how, but he’s got me totally hooked and trying new things. How in the world did he do that?’

It was their third meeting.

“Before we go any further” said Mike, “I want to know something, why is it so hard to figure out what we want? It should be easy, shouldn’t it? So why don’t we know what we really want? And it’s not just me, most of the people I know seem to be stuck in this limbo of doing OK but thinking there might be something else, although they haven’t really any idea what. What’s going on?”

“Whoa there” said John. “It’s no good beating yourself up over it. Remember, I think there are three major reasons why we don’t know what we want” he said, ticking them off on his fingers. “First we lack practice, secondly I think we’ve trained ourselves to focus in the wrong direction. And the third reason is a combination of fear and overwhelm.”

“I remember,” said Mike “and I’m still curious, what do you mean by lack of practice?”

“OK. Let’s summarise. The first big decision is that we are going to figure this out. Right?” Mike nodded. “And we know that this will be a whole lot easier IF we act like drivers, act as if we created all the results in our lives.” Mike nodded again. “But if that’s all it would take, then we wouldn’t be having this conversation, so there are still some things stopping us. Let’s go through them one by one.”