What If You Got What You Want?

The single most important question you can ask in your self improvement is “What do I want?” You can’t decide who you need to be, what you’re going to do, or how you’re going to get there until you answer it. Clarity precedes progress. The more you know where you’re headed, the faster you can navigate your way toward it.

But… It’s a really loaded question, and in some cases a trap. Not only is it hard to figure out what you want but it’s even harder to actually mean it. What you want doesn’t exist in isolation. There are embedded tradeoffs and consequences to everything. For example you could say you want to run a 7 figure business, but the reality of it might make you miserable. Perhaps it requires a lot of travel away from your family and the stress of supporting families financially could be overbearing. The true experience of achieving what you think you want might not actually be what you want.

To further complicate things, oftentimes the things that we want are achievement and outcome-oriented. They're not a state of being but accomplishments that we expect would make us feel a certain way about ourselves. They’re proxies to a state of being. It’s wanting a big business because it will make you feel successful. Or wanting to run a marathon because it will make you feel better about your body.

The state of being is the real payoff. That’s what your effort is really in service of. And the tricky part is, creating a shift to your state of being is more the byproduct of your belief system than it is your accomplishments. 

There’s a quote popularized by Jon Kabat-Zinn that reads “Wherever you go, there you are.” This doesn’t just apply for the places you physically travel to but also the belief system you bring to any life moment. You perceive your accomplishments through a certain lens. This is how more financial success can never feel like enough or physical feats don’t change your relationship with your body. It’s just the same old belief system painting another accomplishment the same color it always has. 

All that to say… If you actually get what you want, it might not feel like it. The wrong goals could set you up for disappointment, especially if your relationship with your results doesn’t change when your results themselves start to change. There’s a lot more that goes into changing that, but if you’re looking for a place to start - commit to 30 days writing down 3 things you’re grateful for every day. It will literally change the way you see life.

As Wayne Dyer says “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at, change."

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