What do you really want?
Not such an easy question to answer!
This is a question that comes up a lot in coaching. Clients come to coaching for help figuring out what they want.
Some approaches suggest they already know but don’t want to say it for fear of not being able to make it happen. Which may be true.
But I think there is a deeper reason that it is hard for people to answer this — that we have blocked off our awareness of our wantings.
We are raised to people please - it is hard wired into our survival. We know that we need to please others to have a chance at getting our needs met.
Then, we internalise society’s ideas about our roles and about serving others, particularly of course if you are a woman. We spend so long working the muscle of serving others and trying to anticipate their needs (parents, partner, children, boss…) that we lose touch with what we actually like or want.
I remember, ahem, watching the film The Runaway Bride! Spoiler alert. She keeps ditching men at the altar and moving on to the next (well, the clue was in the title). The thing that stayed with me is that in every relationship she has her eggs cooked the way that her boyfriend at that time does them - whether boiled, scrambled, fried…she never asks for them a different way. At some point, she breaks this pattern of ditching men (cue Richard Gere) and she has this realisation that she doesn’t actually know how she likes her eggs. It is a small moment in the movie but for me it spoke to something quite profound - how we can lose ourselves in others’ expectations of us.
[side note - do you know how you prefer YOUR eggs?!]
So how might we begin to connect to what we really want?
Well much like Julia Roberts’ character, we have to start trying things out and notice - does this feel good? Do I even like this? What do I actually want? Start small and build up from there.
Exercise to try:
For the next 30 days start checking in and asking yourself : what do I want in this moment? Or if someone asks you what you might like to do or eat, take a moment to go inward and really connect with your desire. What food do you really like? I am not suggesting that you start demanding for every desire and need to be met by others! But to really be able to claim that within yourself and share it.
This in turn, starts to attune us to our inner wisdom, and then when it comes to bigger questions - where do I want to live? What career would suit me? What is my purpose? Do I even want children? - we start to have an inner compass to guide us. We start to notice and know our wants and desires and can begin to honour them.
I would love to know what you notice.
Elle xo
