how to know what you want
on feeling stuck
The last few years of my twenties were defined by frustration. I didn’t know what to do with my life, and the more I tried to figure it out, the more I felt completely stuck. I knew I wanted to do something big, to have a tangible impact on others, but I had no idea what that “something” was.
This frustration came with a spiral of recurring thoughts. What do I want? Why can’t I figure it out? I need to figure it out. I’m running out of time. I’m falling behind. I’m wasting my life. I need to get started. I need to know what I want.
Today, I have a pretty clear vision of the life I want to build. That vision is still constantly growing and shifting, and there’s still some uncertainty about how exactly I’ll achieve it. But my relationship to that uncertainty has changed. It feels less like a burden and more like a creative opportunity. I’m excited to bring my vision to life, and I feel I have momentum on my side: finally, there’s a sense of movement, of forward progress.
It wasn’t my fault that I was stuck. I just didn’t have the tools to connect with my intuition, to understand my desires, and to turn my impulses into action. Now, I have a process for doing so. That’s what I want to share with you today.
energizing vs depleting goals
What’s hard about understanding what you want is the inevitable presence of “should”. When we think about our future, “should” looms its head in thoughts like “I should find a stable career” or “I need to be married by 25” or “I have to finish this project.”
“Should” statements aren’t always wrong, but they often point to a desire rooted in fear. They represent a defensive position: “I need to do X or else Y will happen.”
You can understand the root fear by asking “what happens then?” e.g. “I should find a higher paying job” → “What happens if I don’t?” → “Then people won’t respect me as much” → “What happens then?” → “I won’t have any friends.” We can then rephrase the original statement as “I need to make more money or else I won’t have any any friends.”
Maybe that’s true! But maybe not. The main thing to understand about “should” desires is that they feel draining. They compel us to do things we don’t really want to do in order to satisfy a fear that may or may not be true. They also generate internal resistance by putting our more joyful parts in conflict with our fearful parts. “I need to make more money” usually contains the hidden subtext of “but I’d rather do work that’s meaningful to me.” Should is trying to force away that “rather”.
Inner conflict is inherently depleting, and “should” desires cause inner conflict by focusing on what’s expected of us, pitting it against what we actually want.
But the conflict is an illusion. In the above example, if you look closely, you can see our two distinct desires: “I want friendship” and “I want meaningful work". Fear convinces us that these goals are opposed, but they’re not. With a bit of distance, we can see how friendship and meaningful work could easily go hand-in-hand. We don’t have to choose between them.
Good friends could support us in finding meaningful work, and meaningful work could help us connect with likeminded folks. And both can happen without the inner conflict, allowing us to be energized and present in both pursuits.
Figuring out what you want is all about sorting through the “should” statements to uncover what you actually want, and then taking bold action to bring it to life.
understanding your wants
“I don’t know what I want” is a state of confusion, created by conflicting desires. We end up analyzing our various wants to find the “right” one. Since there’s no clear criteria about what makes a desire “right”, we end up thinking ourselves in circles.
Asking “is this the right thing to want?” is an analytical process, but desire itself is an intuitive process. When we put the pressure on ourselves to find the most “acceptable” desire, we end up repressing anything that doesn’t seem safe. Thus we end up circling around the same set of safe desires, that don’t actually speak to our soul.
Knowing what we want, in contrast, starts with making space for our intuition to speak.
The judgement of whether a desire is “acceptable” often comes from a place of fear. If I genuinely want a certain career, but I’m afraid of uncertainty or financial instability, I’ll be quick to judge that I “shouldn’t” want that career.
To make matters worse, that judgement often happens at a subconscious level, leading us to discard desires before they even make it to our conscious awareness. If you’ve ever felt “I don’t seem to want anything”, that’s likely a case of subconscious interception.
Our first task, then, is to stop judging our desires. Stop judging any desire. That doesn’t mean we act on every desire; it just means we welcome them all with a smile. That desire to become a famous reality TV star? Nice, let’s make space for that. Wanting to tell your boss to fuck off? Yeah, I feel that. That urge to get revenge on your ex in the messiest way possible? That’s cool, I get it.
What we’re doing here is creating a space of non-judgement, which allows your subconscious to feel safe to open up. If you have a desire that is buried under a fear of criticism (including self-criticism), we want to increase the odds that it will surface.
This approach takes practice. It’s about noticing when a desire emerges, and noticing your tendency to judge it, and gently making space to hold it in your attention.
Over time, you’ll find that more and more desires come to mind, from all over the spectrum of acceptability. Again, we don’t need to act them all out. But we do want to take the time to consider what they’re saying. Once we have created that space of non-judgement, once we have access to our true wants, then it’s time to get analytical.
understanding your true desires
Now we have a sense of all the different things we want. But if your desires are anything like mine, they’re probably a confusing, conflicting mess. How can “I want to make a big impact on the world” and “I want to get revenge on my ex” sit side-by-side? How can we reconcile the tension there?
Simple: we get clear on what the root desire is. And the root desire is always a feeling.
We are embodied beings. All of our experiences get translated and interpreted at the level of the body. Everything we do is a strategy to get access to a certain felt experience. That felt experience might be calm, or joy, or love, or something else. Whatever it is, that’s what we’re really after.
Every desire you have can be unpacked down to a certain felt experience. All we have to do is ask the question “what happens then?”
“I want to make a big impact on the world” → “What happens then?” → “I’ll go to bed at night knowing that my life was worth something” → “What happens then?” → “I’ll feel like I’m a good person” → “What happens then?” → “I’ll feel relaxed and confident.”
“Making a big impact on the world” is actually about feeling relaxation and confidence. That doesn’t diminish the nobility of that idea; it just means that it springs from wanting to feel a certain way about yourself and your place in the world.
We can repeat the process with a negative desire. “I want my ex to be heartbroken over what they did to me” → “What happens then?” → “Then I’ll know I’m not easily discarded” → “What happens then?” → “I won’t be treated like that again” → “What happens then?” → “In my next relationship, I can feel relaxed and confident”.
Ah, it’s the same root desire: to feel relaxation and confidence. “I want to make a meaningful impact on the world” and “I want to get revenge on my ex” are two strategies to achieve the same thing. From that understanding springs a greater sense of empowerment, a greater ability to choose which desire to follow.
But before we make that choice, we need to take the time to understand what we’re seeking. Your task is to meet every desire with loving curiosity, and, for each one, figure out what you’re seeking. Keep asking “what happens then?” until you get to a feeling, something that you can imagine experiencing in your body: confidence, relaxation, joy, warmth, love, excitement, ease, etc.
As you do so, notice the patterns. Which feelings show up over and over? What feelings are you spending your whole life chasing?
Once we know what we’re after, we get to decide how we go about it.
choosing a strategy
Let’s say you’re paying attention to your desires, and working to understand the root feelings, and you notice that “joy” and “love” kept coming up. Those are feelings you seem to particularly crave and want access to.
The next step is simple: pick the best strategy for accessing joy and love.
That means choosing the desires which seem to have the best odds of giving you access to those feelings. You might have a desire to “become really popular” and another desire to “spend more time with your oldest friends”. On the surface, those desires seem to conflict, but they’re both about joy and love. Yet which is the better strategy? Which seems more likely to give us the most joy and love?
In this lens, the answers become pretty clear. Getting revenge on your ex is not a very effective strategy for relaxation and confidence, but pursuing meaningful work is. There’s no need to shame or judge any of these strategies: they’re just different ways to access certain feelings. We want to bring a stance of non-judgement and acceptance, but also think critically about what will work best.
In my experience, the most effective strategies also just seem to be the most beautiful and loving ones. But that’s for you to uncover. Think about your biggest desires, the ones that most easily come to mind. What’s the root feeling? Which desires are practical and easy to act out? Which ones could you start today, and start experiencing the feelings you want?
experimenting & creating
From here, it’s just about trying different strategies. I want access to relaxation, and a good strategy for that seems to be morning yoga. So I’ll try that out, and see if it works to make me more relaxed.
If it doesn’t work—if waking up early for yoga actually makes me more stressed and cranky—then no problem. That’s great feedback. What’s another strategy I can use to feel relaxation? Maybe it’s calling my best friend in the morning. Maybe it’s going for a walk.
Here I can get creative. I can use a sense of artistry, of working to create the life I want through access to the feelings I most want. At each stage, I’m noticing the results, turning my day into a series of experiments.
Now we have a way forward. We have a way of accessing what we want, a way to figure out what feeling we’re actually seeking, a method for choosing what to do next, and a feedback loop to tell us what’s working.
It’s also a recursive process. Maybe going for a walk in the morning does give me a sense of relaxation, and in turns sparks a new desire: to go for a swim in the ocean. I can ask myself: what feeling do I think that will give me? Ah, joy. Does it seem like a good strategy for accessing joy? Yes? Okay, time to test it out.
The more you see desires as potential experiments, the easier it is to access that frame of non-judgement and acceptance. No desire is bad; it’s just a potential experiment. If it feels like it would be an ineffective or harmful experiment, we can choose not to try it. Having the desire doesn’t make us bad or wrong; it’s just another creative option.
By bringing this process into your day-to-day life, you’ll take the pressure off “figuring out what you want” as this big imposing task, and turn it into a fun game of experimentation and creativity. What feelings do you want? How can you access them? What happens next?
putting it into practice
If you’re keen to start this process, you can try this journaling exercise:
Make a list of everything you want or feel you should want. Try to write down every big or little desire, whim, or craving, without judgement, with pure acceptance and curiosity.
For each desire, keeping asking “what happens then?” until you get down to the root feeling. How would having this make you feel? As you do so, start to notice the patterns, the feelings that show up again and again.
Pick the 2-3 feelings that appear the most, and pick which desires seem most likely to give you access to those feelings. These are your best strategies for getting the experience you desire.
Take small but bold steps towards those desires, and see if the results match the intention. Does taking those actions give you the feelings you want? Tweak and experiment from there.
Thanks for reading. I invite you to comment below with what comes up for you; what feelings do you crave the most? What are your best strategies for getting access to those feelings?
With love & appreciation,
Scott
The journal exercise was really useful. I was struck by how the desire for a few feeling states (joy, safety, connection, play) seem to be at the root of most of my wants. Remembering those feelings when I'm experiencing resistance to creating feels like it could be a way forward. I'm really enjoying your posts, Scott. Thank you!
Stumbled upon this letter, and felt it in my bones— absolutely love what you have written. Reminds me of the philosophy written about in The Inner Game of Tennis- how important it is to not criticize or praise but to simply observe our thoughts, actions, habits, etc. When you limit excessive and mostly unnecessary feedback from your own self, there’s so much less noise to wade through to get to what you actually want. Thank you for writing!