How to Find Out What You Want
Do you know what you want? If yes, congratulations! You can skip this article and get directly to doing what you want to do. If not, don’t be sad. We’ll get you there in a minute or two.
Many people find it hard to know what they want.
I believe that these are the main reasons:
1) Lack of experience
You won’t find out what you want by sitting around and doing nothing. In order to find out what you want, you will have to discover the world and discover yourself.
Write. Paint. Travel. Work. Help. Run. Sweat. Swim. Watch. Talk. … .
Every experience you make can teach you about your desires. If you don’t know what you want to do, do something and find out.
2) Lack of awareness
You probably already know a lot of things you want. But you might not be fully aware of this knowledge. I regularly write down lists with things that I want and activities that I want to do. This helps me immensely to keep going on the right path.
I suggest you try it, too.
Brainstorm:
- What things do I want to have? (books/gadgets/clothes/…)
- What do I want to do? (all the time/in general/some day…)
- What kind of experiences do I want to have (falling in love/travelling/abundance/…)?
- How do I want a regular day in my life to look like? (getting up at 6am/good work-life balance/exercise daily/…)
- Who/how do I want to become? (healthy/courageous/world’s best soccer player/loving/motivated…)
3) Lack of imagination
If you find it hard to answer these questions, you might suffer from a lack of imagination. In order to find out what you want, you’ll have to be able to imagine to be somebody else, to do something else and to have different things.
Set aside some time for yourself and give yourself the luxury of day-dreaming. Create your own inner movie about how your life could be. Test out different scenarios and try to figure out what feels the best. You can literally imagine anything. Every dream experience will give you hints about what you’d like or don’t like to have in your life.
If you find it extremely hard to create a movie in front of your inner eye, there are a lot of things you can do:
- Get a bunch of (lifestyle) magazines (you don’t have to buy them – maybe you have already some at home or you find some at the public library) and flip through them. Read stories, look at the pictures.
- Watch movies, look at the people’s characters, their apartments, their lifestyles.
- Meet new people, talk to them, find out what they’re doing, watch how they dress, visit their apartments.
…
–> What/who inspires you? What do you find motivating? What do you find beautiful? Who would you like to be like? Everything will help you to find out what you want to become, do and have. Write down everything you discover about your wants.
4) Lack of specificity
So you thought a while about what you want and now you say: “Well, I probably want to have more money and more spare time.” That’s a start. But it’s not enough. You have to be more specific:
What do you want to do with the money? What do you want to do with your time?
“I want to relax and enjoy life.”
But in which way? Do you want to meditate? That’s pretty relaxing. Or do you want to read a book? Or get a massage? How do you enjoy life? What do you need for that?
Always try to be as specific as possible. That will make it much easier to get what you want.
In order to be more specific, I divide my life into life areas. Then I look into each life area and find out what I want to experience there.
What do you want to experience in the following life areas?
- health & fitness
- sex & romance
- relationships
- work & career
- finances
- spirituality
- purpose & contribution
- physical surroundings
- skills & education
- fun & adventure
- family
- creativity
…
5) Lack of intuitive abilities
The simplest way to do find out who you are and what you want is often to just listen to your intuition. You know, the little voice from your gut.
Oh, you don’t know?
A lot of people are detached from their intuitive abilities. The good news is that using your intuition is a skill that you can learn.
How about you ask your true self/higher self what s/he wants to do right now? What does s/he answer? Are you getting some kind of information? Trust yourself and go for it.
For a lot of people it’s easier to get in touch with their intuition when they get in a meditative state.
There is countless information about getting in touch with your intuition on the web and I can also recommend this book of one of my favorite authors.
Patience
If you’d like to find out what you want, you can start literally anywhere. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t create a complete movie of your desires in one sitting. Finding out what you want works gradually. Also, your desires will change over time. What’s important for you today, won’t necessarily be important to you in a month.
If you can find out a general direction where you want to go in your life and maybe a few specifics that you want there, that’s already a great start. All you have to do now is follow this path.
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Good stuff, Alice! I like to get away to really cyrstalize what I want. Sometimes I’ll go to a park and sit quietly or I’ll wake up at 3am and visualize for a few hours. I think that goes along with the imagination point that you made. Great post!
Hey Ralph! Thanks for sharing!
I often use some nighttime hours to walk around in a lonely neighborhood and visualize. “Getting away” seems to make it easier to reconnect to ourselves.
I printed this out