"What If I Don't Know What Really Matters?"
"It is good to dream, but it is better to dream and work.
Faith is mighty, but action with faith is mightier.
Desiring is helpful, but work and desire are invincible."
– Thomas Gaines
Blue sky bluebird days here on Vancouver Island. A few sunshowers around, but mostly clear. And warming up. After a damp, chilly winter. Happy Spring to my northern friends. Happy Fall to those of you in the south!
In the last issue, I talked about the place of vision in creating, and provided tips for making your vision clear and compelling.
When vision is clear and compelling, it generates more motivational power. It makes it easier to assess current reality and set up a solid foundation for action. It makes it easier to establish creative tension as both an organizing framework and a more constant source of energy for action than just motivation.
Motivation is kind of like the spring sunshine. It's great when it's around but it often ducks behind the shifting clouds of our moods. So, crafting a vision that generates both motivation and creative tension is a critical part of creating what matters.
But, a number of people wrote in to ask, "What if I don't really know what matters?
Good question!
HOW TO GET CLEAR ABOUT WHAT TRULY MATTERS TO YOU
Someone, perhaps the philosopher Michael Polyani, once said that most of us go through life doing what is second, third… or tenth most important to us — because we're afraid to fail at what is most important.
Some of us are so afraid of failing, or looking foolish, or being laughed at, or all of the above that we won't even admit to ourselves that there is a number one, a "most important".
Then we cover up our self-deceit by becoming fuzzy about our deep desires.
Instead of following our heart's desires, many of my personal coaching clients "should' on themselves. They try to live up to goals and visions that, deep down, they don't really care about.
Or we hide behind the energy-sapping "YEAH, BUT…" way of organizing our desires and current reality. In a "Yeah, but…" approach, the "Yeah" is about something we want. It generates motivational energy.
"Yeah, I'd love to start a home based business," for example. Or, "I'd love to be fit and lean energetic enough to dance the tango late into the night."
But, then, that energy is negated by the "BUT," and what follows it.
"BUT I don't have enough time, energy, talent, money, etc…. And even if I did, I don't know where to start or what to do and I'm afraid I wouldn't get it right and…."
As a result, we fail to act on what we truly want to create. We get along or get by, but don't move toward what most deeply matters to us.
Vision Expresses Your True Desire
True vision arises out of deep, heartfelt desire. It is born of authentic passions unique to you.
“The word desire comes from de-sidere, or "away from your star." It means pulled away from the source. A desire, properly held, can set up powerful pull to get back to that source.
Sometimes, though, you have to dig down through layers of empty ideals and the dust of old desires to get at those sources – to find what you truly want.
Take Murray for example. He'd recently moved to our island but continued to work via the Internet for a high tech firm in a city 750 miles away. But he wasn't happy with his situation.
He signed up for one of my 6-week group life coaching workshops hoping to get some help creating a new career for himself. Little did he know, but Murray was to become on of my most enjoyable success stories.
Dig Deep to Uncover Authentic Desires
On the first night, I asked my personal coaching participants to draw up a list of ten things they wanted to create over the next six weeks to ten years. From that list, I asked them to pick one result that they wanted to create during the six weeks of the workshop as a practice project.
When Murray came to the second session, a week later, he was frustrated. During the week, he'd discovered he did not want any of the things on his list, or the practice creation he'd chosen. They were all, he told us, things that he thought would make his wife or his parents happy. They weren't things that'd lead to meangingful career success for him
I asked him to draw up a new list. Although it was difficult for him, he did as I asked.
When he returned for the third session, Murray again reported that, after working with the things on his new list, he had discovered that they, too, were not things that he truly wanted.
This time he'd made a list of ideals or "shoulds", things he thought a man his age with a family was “supposed” to want, if he was to appear mature, responsible, and successful.
Murray was frustrated and anxious about his failure to clarify what he wanted.
I asked him to do a short guided visualization, in which he imagined that anything he wanted was possible, and that money, skills, education, outside approval and success could all be assumed. I asked him to imagine what he would want to create under such optimum circumstances.
“I'd make up games,” he said, with a sheepish look on his face. “Board games.”
“Great,” I said. “Is that something you'd truly like to do?”
“Yes,” he said, “but…”
“But, what?” I asked.
He looked around the room at the other class members. He seemed nervous, tentative, like a frightened child.
“Is it okay to want something like that?” he asked. “I mean, it's kind of a kid's thing, isn't it? What would people think?”
“What people? Okay with who?” I said. “If it's what you want, it's what you want. It's important to acknowledge that. Just because you want something doesn't mean that you have to act on it; you always have a choice. It is, however, important to know what you do want.”
Murray nodded his head.
“Besides,” I added, “do you think the inventors of Monopoly or Trivial Pursuits care about what people think?” He grinned.
From Small Successes to Career Success and His Life's Work
During the rest of the workshop, Murray practiced his creating skills by inventing a prototype board game, which we all played on the last night.
He also got in touch with other, more deeply held desires.
One of them, the desire to brew high quality beer from scratch using organic ingredients, led him to envision and start a U-Brew business, which, over the next few years, he built into a success then sold.
Then he started a microbrewery, which he envisioned as a “zero-emissions” operation; all wastes re-cycled or turned into marketable organic products like exotic mushrooms and pond-raised catfish.
Although starting these businesses was stressful, Murray is much happier now that he is focused on what matters to him, now that his path has heart. And more fulfilled!
“It isn't always easy,” he told me, “but it is what I want to do. And that's a lot better than trying to live up to other people's expectations or “shoulding” on my myself.” I agreed.
Recently, one of Murray's "Saltspring Island Ales" won two Gold Medals at the Canadian Brewery Awards. See: http://www.gulfislandsbrewery.com/folks.html
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QUOTABLE QUOTES:
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"The presence of excuses in your life is evidence that you are focusing on what you can't do or don't have, rather than what you desire."
– Wayne Dyer
"It is for us to pray not for tasks equal to our powers, but for powers equal to our tasks, to go forward with a great desire forever beating at the door of our hearts as we travel toward our distant goal."
– Helen Keller
"We are told that talent creates its own opportunities. But it sometimes seems that intense desire creates not only its own opportunities, but its own talents."
– Eric Hoffer
"Burning desire to be or do something gives us staying power -- a reason to get up every morning or to pick ourselves up and start in again after a disappointment."
– Marsha Sinetar
"The key that unlocks energy is desire. It's also the key to a long and interesting life. If we expect to create any drive, any real force within ourselves, we have to get excited."
– Earl Nightingale
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If you're interested in personal life coaching, email me with " personal coaching info" in the subject line.
I'll send you my fr.ee 7-page life coaching info package. No obligation!
If not now, when?
Bruce@BruceElkin.com
Also, please check out my book Simplicity and Success and my ebooks Emotional Mastery and Creating Sustainable Success at:
http://www.bruceelkin.com/simplicity.html
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