The Practice of Wanting

When you don't know what you want

I realized how out of touch I am with what I want last December in a couples retreat. My husband constantly tells me, “Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.” I get angry at my husband for not anticipating my unspoken needs. Somehow, he’s supposed to use sorcery to intuit what I want and deliver on it when I can’t articulate it.

I put on my poker face because I’m afraid to ask for what I want.

Asking is an act of vulnerability. It requires putting our desires on display and hoping that we don’t get judged or rejected.

Some of my best life experiences came from having the courage to ask...asking for a raise, asking to get married. I can logically advise myself to do more asking, but I struggle to know what I want. I’m super indecisive. 

When my mind is paralyzing me, I know I need to tap into the wisdom of my body to guide me.

I started a series of practices to get clear on wants. It’s like divination. At first, I would journal write, gazing into my crystal ball where all I could see was fog. Living up to other people’s expectations clogged my connection to my heart, the source of my deepest desires. Three months into consistently asking myself what I want, clearer pictures are emerging.

This year I set a goal of scaling my grad school advising business. That’s what I thought I should do. But as my want-barometer became more attuned, I realized that I don’t want more money, and I don’t want to scale.

What I want is more freedom in my business.

What I want is to serve my audience with less of my time. Once I excavated that desire, my entire business strategy changed.

Getting clear on my wants allows me to say yes or no based on my deep desires, not based on obligation or guilt.

The Practice of Wanting

“The want” is my motivator. My practices are how I keep my instrument tuned into sensing what I want and executing on my wants.

My journey of getting in touch with my wants started with this episode of Joe Hudson’s Art of Accomplishment Podcast. Joe talks about motivating ourselves by tapping into what we want instead of what we should do. Joe says “should” is a mechanism for shame, where we either rebel against ourselves or comply out of obligation. He also does an exercise to demonstrate what wanting feels like in the body.

I do my morning pages journal writing, and instead of making a to-do list, I ask myself, “What do you want today?” I read back through the last week of entries, and I’m shocked to see how many things I’ve accomplished without the normal pressure I put on myself.

I do a meditation for 10-minutes where my future wise-self tells me what I want. Every sentence my wise self speaks is a new want and often things I haven’t yet realized. My friend Chloe Good teaches a meditation of connecting with your wise self in her course Own Your Magic, and Tara Mohr has a similar visualization she calls Finding Your Inner Mentor.

I started reading Nonviolent Communication, which is about perceiving and communicating what we want in any given moment and listening for what others want. So much confusion, miscommunication, and hurt come from people dancing around stating what they actually want.

This year I didn’t set goals.

I’m not tracking habits and judging what I should and shouldn’t be doing.

I’m learning to connect with my wants, and I’ll see where that leads me.