How Do You Determine What You Want in Life?
Identifying what you want is a cultivated skill.
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
I’ve long been fabulous at knowing what I didn’t want.
My childhood provided a lot of experiences I didn’t want to have. From places I didn’t want to go to behaviors I didn’t want to do, I did them even as an embodied sense of nope baked itself into my bones.
In my 20s and 30s, I imposed many of those experiences on myself. Either I was unwilling to deal with the consequences of opting out, or I didn’t have anything else I wanted to do more.
As I’ve walked my growth path, that not knowing what I wanted became a reoccurring pothole.
I stopped considering what I wanted during my childhood because it never seemed to matter. My focus on creating my safety through compliance cost me years of practice that comes from connecting internal sensations with desired next steps. I lost out on that golden time when the long-term cost of figuring out what you wanted became a rounding error.
The first part of finding my way forward as an adult required me to start figuring out what I wanted from myself as I walked through life.
Why is determining what you want so critical?
Knowing what you want provides direction.
It seems simplistic. In a world that pushes us always to be moving, it’s not simple. When we’re always on the go, rushing to do this or fix that, we may act intentionally in the short term and find ourselves on the eastbound train to California.
Knowing our desired direction creates the possibility for recognizing we got on the wrong train before we hit the Mississippi River.
Don’t get me wrong, side quests and tangents can enrich our lives, provided they don’t derail them.
Having guide posts set by our wants keeps those side quests and tangents from becoming sinkholes and riptides. When we stand firm about how we want to show up in the world, those side quests and tangents become opportunities for practicing all of our skills while adding color to our lives.
How do we verify our wants belong to us?
This feels like an odd question.
As adults, we find ourselves carrying all kinds of ideas about how we’re supposed to do this thing called life. Some of those views came from our family of origin, our friend groups, and others from the broader cultural milieu.
Even those things we do to rebel are in conversation with our lived experiences. I’m looking at the fried chicken I had for dinner and see it as a reaction to the rigid confines of my parent’s dietary choices.
As we transverse our life path, we can find ourselves shedding long-held wants as they become less important to us over time.
For example, eight years into my engineering career, I acknowledged that the ambition folks around me spoke of, and I repeated, wasn’t something I wanted. By finally recognizing the internal nope that reared up each time I considered taking a supervisory role, I could release the want for a management position as something I’d adopted because the culture told me it was something I should want.
When it comes to identifying the wants in our storytelling systems that don’t originate from us, we can go looking in three places:
The Shoulds - Looking at the things we define as necessary to discover their roots and verify their alignment with our values can yield some stubborn stories. These stories feel essential to maintain even as they scrape at us. That scraping signals the behavior we’re saying has to happen may have been a gift from family, friends, or culture.
The Balks - Where do you keep trying to do something only to come up short before you finish the task or even get started? These balks indicate your system’s resistance to even doing the task. Some part of you considers what you’re trying to do to be unsafe. The repeated recoil suggests that what you’re trying to do is out of alignment with at least part of your system.
The Hangovers - What activities are you doing that leave you with multiday feelings of exhaustion and malaise? These energetic hangovers signal that you might have been doing something that doesn’t align with what you wanted to be doing. Hangovers often have hidden shoulds. They can also reflect something you want to keep doing, but you need to try a new way of doing it that leaves you less drained.
What’s a Process for identifying your life wants?
Alignment is easier to obtain if we work from the inside outward.
Values for Approaching Life
Modern Western life has us running around like headless chickens.
Knowing our values allows us to reflect on the options before us and choose based on what’s most important to us. Identifying your value words begins the process. Being specific about what the words you’ve landed on mean to you and what it looks like in practice promotes your ability to intercede at a given moment.
If you can’t list three or four of your values off of the top of your head, now would be an excellent time to identify what those values are. (To get a 153-word exercise to help you Identify Your Values subscribe to the Shepherdess Dispatch
I work with ten core values when doing long-term dreaming and planning. For my day-to-day interactions, I lean on the three most important values.
Areas of Life
The complex nature of our lived experience creates multiple channels of how we show up. Who we want to be with our friends is different than who we want to be at work, with our partners, or with our kids.
Whether you categorize these different areas by roles, functions, or locations, identify the types of places in your life where a specific kind or flavor of want may be more prevalent. Because what we want out of a romantic partner can have a vastly different flavor than what we want out of an employer.
Combine and Ask Questions
Finally, we answer the headline’s question.
Now that we’ve identified our values and the areas of our lives, we can start identifying what we want. I’ve found questions helpful to float the wants to the surface where they can be identified.
This works by choosing an area of life to focus on, reviewing my values, and asking a question (or four) of myself.
Common questions include:
What do my values mean for how I show up in this area?
What version of this would work for me while reducing potential harm?
If I don’t want X, what would I prefer?
What do I want for this area? (Sometimes, the prep work helps us answer the question in a way that doesn’t happen when we’re asked in the wild.)
With these starting points and curious follow-up questions, we can cultivate a knowing of how we want to be in each area of our lives.
As I’ve become embodied, I know when I’ve hit on a gold star answer when it lands in my body, and I breathe more easily. I don’t get that response often. In lieu of an embodied click, I evaluate the possibilities of what I might want with an eye toward identifying shoulds, sensing balks, and anticipating hangovers.
How do we use our life wants every day?
Filtrating our big life wants into our everyday life takes intentionality and practice.
Like many things along the personal development path, implementing the big picture daily is easier to say than it is to do.
What this looks like in practice is taking an extra couple of moments when we’re making intentional choices to reflect on what we’ve already determined about our values and our life wants. With these in mind, we evaluate the options before us and then choose.
Often, the options before us are not clear-cut, and there’s no obvious right or wrong answer. This is where having identified your three most important values can be helpful. They can support you as you consider which option best fits your defined walking in the world values.
By knowing what we want in life, we’re better able to make choices in alignment with our souls.
