Do You Know What You Want?

I had always felt sooner or later everything would come together. I thought one day, one night, success would come in one clear moment. In one clear moment I would know I had arrived and in an instant all I ever wanted in life would come to me.

So, I planned and worked, planned and work harder waiting for the one clear moment which would guarantee my success forever yet never knowing what it would be. There is just one problem. It never happened that way. It never does.

I lived this way for a long time, hop scotching through life from one idea to the next, one project to the next, one career to the next expecting the one clear moment to reveal itself. I felt like I was chasing something elusive. It felt elusive because I lacked clarity and focus on exactly what I was after.

I remember concentrating a good bit on how I felt going through a good many years and a hodgepodge of efforts. Do you know what concentrating on my feelings got me? Nothing and no where. At least that is how I felt. There it is again – feelings.

It took a personal tragedy to startle me out of my old plan, the one which wasn’t working, the one without well defined goals. It took a cold bracer of reality to slap some sense into me. I was in my late fifties, successful by many measures, but feeling totally lost. Not only lost but directionless and lacking a sense of purpose and passion.

I began to ask myself the hard questions. Who am I? Where was I headed? What do I really want? Something shifted. Something awakened. A fire reignited and began to burn deep inside. I began to search for the answers to the hard questions, something I had never done before.

Mel Robbins famously said – “I don’t care how you feel. I care about what you want. If you listen to how you feel, when it comes to what you want you will not get it because you will never feel like it.”

My feelings often told me things like, “I’m too tired. I can’t do that. It’s too late for me. I’m not good enough. I don’t know how. I don’t have the right degree. It will take too long. It will cost too much. No one will like it.”

I never felt like doing what I needed to do, to take the time and put in the effort to figure out exactly what I wanted and how to get it. I let my feelings get in the way. Have you ever felt this way?

If so, allow me to share with you the benefit of some hard learned lessons. Set aside the self-indulgent minute-to-minute, hour-to-hour, day-to-day analysis of how you feel. I believe answering this basic question – “What precisely is that I want? – will make the biggest difference in your life. Knowing exactly what you want will help you to drop the excuses. That is, if you don’t allow your feelings to hold you back.

It can be the difference between a life of purpose driven passion and fulfillment versus a life of seemingly endless wandering and searching for “I don’t know what”. Everyone would like their own measure of success. If you don’t know what you want, how will you ever know when you get it?