Coaching #2 - What Do You Want?
This ‘simple’ question is one of the most difficult we face
as human beings. To help with this
article take a moment to write down what you want now in your life. Think about it and answer it in any way that
is meaningful for you. What do you want? I am now the supervisor in the examination
hall telling you not to turn the page until you are happy with your answer or
you want to give up trying.
There are several types of outcome when we are faced with
the question ‘what do you want?’. Take
what you have written and see if it fits with any one or a combination of these
outcomes.
1.
You want to win the lottery, obtain a surprise
inheritance, not to have the illness you have or some other very low chance
possible event to occur.
2.
You don’t want your current life but you know
there is nothing you can do to change it for all the reasons you can state.
3.
You find it much easier to say what you don’t
want than to state clearly what it is you do want to do.
4.
You state clearly what you want. You want to be a writer (or whatever your
clear want is) and you are going to do everything possible to make it happen.
I can tell you the first three outcomes are much more common
than the last one. The clarity in
outcome 4 is quite rare over the age of 20.
I am interested to know if your answer fits in to a different category
than those given here. We are all
interested in understanding why this question is so difficult to answer. As we discussed in BE WHO YOU WANT TO BE our
brain is there to worry and seek out the biggest threats to us. It’s job is to protect us. If you suggest to
it that you want to do something different to your current life it is going to
immediately seek out the risks of the unknown, magnify those risks and take
your hand to lead you back to your current life. There the risks are known, managed and
understood even if you are not doing what you want to do.
In every present
moment we rely on our past to shape our future.
We treat the past as our story of who we are and comfortably slip in to
the future that past proposes. By allowing
our past to shape our future we prefer the dissatisfaction that gives to the
risks we see in the many exciting possibilities available to us in the
present. One way to think about this is
that the army to protect our current way of life is three times the size of the
army that wants to take us where we want to go.
The problem we have with the question ‘what do you want?’ is
that we find it difficult to answer that question alone. The answer ‘I want to be a writer and am
going to do everything I can to make it
happen’ even has too much in it. The
answer to the question is ‘I want to be a writer.’ Do you see how clear that is as an answer to
the question?
Instead of answering the question we also think about the
problems associated with what we want, our own inability to change and downplay
the help we might get from others. So I
might say ‘I hate being an investment banker and would love to be a writer but
clearly I can’t because I have a mortgage and repayments on my Porsche. I know I would miss the great holidays I have
and inside myself know it is better to spend years earning lots of money so I
can enjoy myself on my holidays and when I am older. I also have no real idea how to go about
becoming a writer and don’t believe I would see it through.’ The important words in this speech are ‘would
love to be a writer.’ Look at what you
have written and see if you can see clearly your answer to the question. Strip away all the other stuff.
The human mind finds
it very difficult to give a simple answer to a question like ‘what do you
want?’ Instead it immediately looks at
the risks of any proposal you come up with ‘here are all the reasons that won’t
work’, it reminds you of all the efforts you have made in your life to change
that failed ‘I know I just wouldn’t see it through’ and it assumes you will not
get any help from others to do down the path you want to go down ‘I know dad
will immediately say you are mad to give up what you have got for a crazy
notion to write.’ You can see how
attractive writing down ‘I want to win the lottery’ is. It takes all the difficulties associated with
the question off your shoulders. The
only way through this is to break up our answer in to four component parts:
1. What do you want?
2. What is getting in the way?
3. What are you going to do about it?
4. What help do you need?
At this point I will illustrate the four steps by telling
you a story about a friend who told me he wanted to be a scratch golfer. At the time he was playing off a handicap of
10. The want is clear ‘I want a zero
handicap for my golf.’ So what is
getting in the way, what are you going to do about it and what help do you need
are the other components to be considered.
We worked through these questions and he said ‘I need to practice and play more. That is going to eat in to other things I do
like watching football, going to the theatre and time with my wife and
children. I probably need to play at
least one more time a week and maybe another 10 hours a week on the practice
ground. I need help from the pro with
more video sessions and I suppose I should watch more golf to see how others
incorporate their learnings.’ As I
probed with my questions I could see my friend was getting more and more
agitated and eventually he said ‘you know what….I don’t want to be a scratch
golfer.’ He didn’t but there are scratch
golfers out there who are married with children, have given up other interests
and do steps 2-4 to do what they want to do.
Take your answer to the question ‘what do you want?’ and decompose
it in to the four questions above. When
you have distilled out the clear answer forget about the other three components
and look at it to see if it is what you want.
Does it raise your spirits and make you feel your life would be so much
more complete if you were able to do it?
I want to be a writer. I want a
new relationship in my life. I want to
travel the world. I want to help the
less fortunate. I want to dance.
Doing this work is not as easy as carrying on with your
current life. The other army has three
times the soldiers, so you are going to have to be smart and determined. If you now have a clear statement of what you
want just hold that thought and let it take hold without constraints. In the next discussion we will consider ‘what
is getting in the way?’ as we try to understand if it is real, imagined or programmed.
Len Williamson
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