What do you want?

I longed to go to Santa Fe, so I did. Not pictured: the most incredible food you can imagine. (April 2018)

I am grateful to my longtime mentor, Neil Bainton, for his perpetual nudges toward clarity.

We’d meet for a meal where I’d talk about my plans for my business or whatever, sharing the various options and possibilities I was considering.

Neil would never get mired in the details. He always brought the conversation back to one simple question: “What do you want?”

It’s an important question that can be surprisingly easy to dismiss. We might find ourselves focused on what other people want. We might get confused by what we think we’re supposed to want. We might be so overwhelmed with what we feel like we have to do that there’s no space for what we want. Or, we might be distracted by what we believe will give us what we want without questioning our assumptions in that regard.

However, when we bring things back to what we want, sticking with that question until we arrive at an answer, we might discover shortcuts that can help us break through the noise in our heads and in our lives and lead us to what is most important to us. From there, we can aim straight toward our desired outcome without the clutter and confusion, even if the path looks a lot different from what we expected.

For example, perhaps I say that I want to start a business. Digging into the “why” behind the question, I acknowledge that I want to start a business because I want to make more money. Asking “why” again to go deeper, I realize that what I want most is to travel. And maybe there are deeper “whys” behind that, but that one really lands.

And then I can get more specific. Where do I want to travel? How long do I want to be gone? I can begin making a plan. I might not have to spend six months or three years building a business. I might discover that I can talk to my boss, cash in some airline miles, and book a trip today (let’s pretend that I’m writing this in a world where there’s no such thing as Covid, okay? I can dream).

The point is that by uncovering what I really want, I might be able to skip a bunch of steps that I thought I had to go through. And even if I can’t skip the steps, I have a better context for why I’m taking the steps I’m taking. Maybe, by keeping my eyes on the prize, I can show up to my mediocre job every day without getting burned out, knowing that I’m saving up for my trip. Or I can, indeed, start a business, but I can focus on making sure it will facilitate the outcome I’m looking for (for example, I might choose to become a copywriter instead of a caterer so that I can even travel while working).

When I coach people on their careers, businesses, and even hobbies, they’re often not clear on what they want. Sometimes, that’s totally fine — they’re exploring or just having fun. The problem comes when they have a vague but nagging sense of dissatisfaction. The things they are doing are out of alignment with what they want. They either don’t know what they want or they can’t see how the path they are on connects to it.

The misalignment between our desires and our circumstances can be corrected with some honest self-reflection (not easy) and the questioning of previous assumptions (even harder). But the work is worth it. Once those tangles are smoothed out, the next steps tend to be pretty obvious.

Whenever Neil asked me that question — “What do you want?” — I used to squirm. I was going through the motions, just trying to survive and pay the bills. But eventually, I learned to ask myself this important question earnestly and frequently. I’m getting better at being able to answer it — and I’m getting braver about taking action accordingly. Things are changing for the better as a result.

How about you? What do you want? And what might you do differently to get it?